Author: VD

Obama’s bag boy gets off

Corzine is officially deemed above the law:

A criminal investigation into the collapse of the brokerage firm MF Global and the disappearance of about $1 billion in customer money is now heading into its final stage without charges expected against any top executives.

After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.

Remember that excuse the next time you’re facing an audit. Just tell them it was the result of “chaos and porous risk controls” and that will eliminate any possibility of legal wrongdoing.

The vibrant conundrum

A Cincinnati man violates the Derbyshire Principle and pays the price:

Pat Mahaney was walking home Saturday with a six-pack of beer, looking forward to a quiet evening watching sports, when something hit him in the back of the head.

“The next thing I knew I woke up on my neighbor’s front step and the life squad was there,” the 45-year-old North College Hill resident said Wednesday.

Six teenagers “were just bored and were looking for something to do,” a police report said, when they ambushed Mahaney as he turned off Simpson Avenue onto Dallas Avenue. He was immediately knocked unconscious.

The report says “The first five arrestees were: twin brothers Tyree and Terrell Mizzell, Lamont Champion and Daquan Cain, all 13-year-olds; and Michael E. James, 14.” Remarkably, it is even noted deep within the text that “the suspects are black”.

The problem is that there is simply no easy and politically acceptable solution to the challenge presented by these bored young savages. They are still not civilized after more than 150 years of full immersion in quasi-European civilization and the historical pattern suggests they cannot be for at least another six to eight centuries. It increasingly appears they never will be, given the demographic and economics patterns that indicate European civilization in the Americas is much more likely to collapse than survive in its present form. Partition and segregation is probably the optimal post-collapse outcome at this point.

In the USA, and to a lesser extent in England, European civilization has been noticeably degraded in the last thirty years by African culture. This process can only continue, given the birth demograpics, and a melange of African, Hispanic, and European culture is the most probable outcome if the expected collapse does not occur. Such melanges can be positive, after all, the mix of Celtic, Saxon, Danish, and Norman cultures produced America in its original form. But something on the order of Brazil is probably a best case scenario, which anyone familiar with the South American nation would probably agree is at least a step or two downward, its soccer, supermodels, and samba notwithstanding.

Now, European culture will likely win out again in the North American continent, but after retreating to a post-collapse rump and going through a long revitalization process. We’ve seen both the Germans and the Russians go through the first part of this after WWII and the collapse of the Soviet Union, respectively, and now it appears the American turn is approaching.

Women ruin everything: DEFCON edition

From atheist conferences to hacker conferences, women are complaining about them:

[E]veryone at DEFCON benefits from more women attending. Women “hackers” – in the creative technologist sense – are everywhere, and many of them are brilliant, interesting, and just plain good company (think Limor Fried, Jeri Ellsworth, and Angela Byron). Companies recruiting for talent get access to the full range of qualified applicants, not just the ones who can put up with a brogrammer atmosphere. We get more and better talks on a wider range of subjects. Conversations are more fun. Conferences and everyone at them loses when amazing women don’t attend.

When you say, “Women shouldn’t go to DEFCON if they don’t like it,” you are saying that women shouldn’t have all of the opportunities that come with attending DEFCON: jobs, education, networking, book contracts, speaking opportunities – or else should be willing to undergo sexual harassment and assault to get access to them. Is that really what you believe?

Yes. Absolutely. The conference should do everything it legally can to dissuade “amazing women” from attending. Because what this foolish woman, in her obvious ignorance of cause-and-effect, is asserting that the absolute highest priority of the conference should be that women feel comfortable. The problem is that once that principle is established, the seeds of the conference’s destruction will have been planted, because women will always find a reason to claim they are uncomfortable. No one at DEFCON would benefit in the long term from more women attending, at least not under that principle, because it only creates more opportunities for women to feel uncomfortable. Therefore, more female attendees would eventually eviscerate DEFCON as the small core of male attendees who actually make the conference valuable would stop attending as their activities increasingly infringed upon female comfort. History is very clear on the way women degrade every male institution they successfully invade that they do not succeed in destroying entirely.

Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the policy statement recommended by one of her commenters: “This conference is for everybody and everybody visiting this conference should feel comfortable, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion.” That’s not a hacker conference policy, that’s one establishing a comfort conference. The priority defines the purpose.

And lest you think I exaggerate concerning what might be erroneously dismissed as a slippery slope argument: “These guys can rationalize until they’re blue in the face but IT IS NEVER OKAY TO GIVE A LADY THE HEEBIE JEEBIES!”

We’re not even 100 years into the great equalitarian experiment and Western civilization is already on the verge of economic and demographic collapse. This is not a coincidence. Consider that it only took 79 years for the United Kingdom to go from granting all women over the age of 21 the franchise to voluntarily surrendering its national sovereignty in the Lisbon Treaty. When the Sports Guy said “the lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything”, he spoke nothing but the bitter truth.

The IMF on no-reserve banking

Karl Denninger digs up the document:

In a financial system with little or no reserve backing for deposits, and with government-issued cash having a very small role relative to bank deposits, the creation of a nation’s broad monetary aggregates depends almost entirely on banks’ willingness to supply deposits. Because additional bank deposits can only be created through additional bank loans, sudden changes in the willingness of banks to extend credit must therefore not only lead to credit booms or busts, but also to an instant excess or shortage of money, and therefore of nominal aggregate demand. By contrast, under the Chicago Plan the quantity of money and the quantity of credit would become completely independent of each other. This would enable policy to control these two aggregates independently and therefore more effectively. Money growth could be controlled directly via a money growth rule. The control of credit growth would become much more straightforward because banks would no longer be able, as they are today, to generate their own funding, deposits, in the act of lending, an extraordinary privilege that is not enjoyed by any other type of business. Rather, banks would become what many erroneously believe them to be today, pure intermediaries that depend on obtaining outside funding before being able to lend. Having to obtain outside funding rather than being able to create it themselves would much reduce the ability of banks to cause business cycles due to potentially capricious changes in their attitude towards credit risk.

Read that however many times you need to until it sinks in folks, because this is what I and a few others have been saying now for a long time — and our ideas are not only not really new, they’re also factually correct.

The “extraordinarily privilege” referenced above, were you or I to engage in it, would be called what it is — counterfeiting. “Generating their own funding, deposits”, is exactly that — creating money out of “thin air” though the unbacked emissions of credit. It is exactly identical in form and effect to you running off $100 bills on your office copier. And for every other entity other than a bank, it is a felony.

But it is Congress that has this power according to our Constitution. A commercial institution that operates for profit should never have the right to literally steal from you at its whim, but that is exactly what unbacked credit creation empowers a bank with — the ability to take everything you have by debasing your purchasing power to the point that you are forced to hock, or even sell and abandon, any asset you possess.

This is important if you want to understand the financial crisis and the inflation/deflation issue. Contra what you’ve been taught, loans don’t come from deposits. The loans come first. This is the “credit money” of which Mises wrote and is the reason that the mainstream economists are so confused by their continual focus on M1/M2, which are just a small fraction of the real money supply, which is Z1+M1/M2.

So, the inflationistas are correct in one sense. Inflation has been worse than is reported by the CPI-U. Vastly worse. However, this also shows why the central bank has been talking about the need to fight off deflation via “quantitative easing” despite the fact that M1/M2 have continued to increase; Z1 has been flat for four years despite the heroic efforts on the part of Washington to prop up spending by taking on a larger share of it.

As I showed in RGD, the USA is closer to a no-reserve banking system than the textbook ten percent fractional-reserve one. The credit money is pure digital counterfeiting, but it spends as readily as legal tender.

Mailvox: oh noes!

Sarah Palin isn’t invited to speak at the Republican convention? This outrage must not stand! We must do something! John Hawkins sends an email:

As you may have heard, Sarah Palin isn’t being given a speaking slot at the Republican National convention. Not only is Sarah Palin the single most prominent woman in the Republican party, a strong advocate of the Tea Party, and an electrifying speaker, she was the also VP candidate in 2008 and was one of the biggest impact players for the Republican Party during the 2010 elections. Not only does Sarah Palin deserve an opportunity to speak, she would be a tremendous asset at the convention.

Towards that end, I’m going to try to collect 10,000 signatures from conservatives who think Sarah Palin should be given a speaking slot. If you’re one of those conservatives, your signature, your link, and any help you can give on Facebook and Twitter would be much appreciated.

Won’t you please help? Think of the children!

Blitheringly stupid

Rush Limbaugh needs to untie the other half of his brain. The half he’s using now is clearly dysfunctional:

Radio giant Rush Limbaugh says he’s “jazzed” about Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate, and he expects an instant economic recovery if the Republican ticket wins in November.

“I guarantee you, if Ryan and Romney win this election, you’re gonna see the stock market go through the roof,” Limbaugh said this afternoon. “You’re gonna see small businesses start to hire. It’s gonna happen so fast, you’re not gonna believe it, the moment it’s known that Obama’s out of office.”

Limbaugh, the top-rated voice of the political right in America, says a true conservative is finally on the presidential ticket.

So, if Romney and Ryan are elected, the machines that make up the bulk of the stock market trading are going to kick it up another notch? And who is this “true conservative”? It certainly isn’t the guy with the voting record that belongs to Ryan (WI). Limbaugh is putting the Stupid in Stupid Party with this inane commentary. I’d be very interested to know precisely how Limbaugh thinks Romney and Ryan are going to make a 350 percent debt/GDP ratio disappear overnight.

Atheists abandon “religion causes war” argument

Scott Atran is the first atheist to publicly come out and admit the historical nonexistence of the oft-claimed connection between religion and war in Foreign Policy:

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion — that it is history’s prime instigator of intergroup conflict — does not withstand scrutiny. Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored “God and War” audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history’s most lethal century of international bloodshed.

Not only does Atran accept the argument I originally presented in a WND article before refining it in The Irrational Atheist, but his article is actually much less of a Fighting Withdrawal than the misleading subtitle – What we don’t understand about religion just might kill us – would lead the casual reader to believe.

Atran doesn’t mention either me or TIA, but TIA is clearly the source as not only is the argument the same as the one I first presented in 2004, but the war count of 123 also happens to be uniquely mine. The actual count from The Encylopedia of Wars index is not 123, but 121 – they made some errors, in my opinion, counting some non-religious wars such as the Fourth Crusade as religious and vice-versa – but the authors of the encylopedia actually failed to fully recognize the implications of their historical catalog concerning the historical irrelevance of religion to war. This can be seen in their Introduction:

“Wars have always arisen, and arise today, from territorial disputes, military rivalries, conflicts of ethnicity, and strivings for commercial and economic advantage, and they have always depended on, and depend on today, pride, prejudice, coercion, envy, cupidity, competitiveness, and a sense of injustice. But for much of the world before the 17 century, these “reasons” for war were explained and justified, at least for the participants, by religion. Then around the middle of the 17th century, Europeans began to conceive of war as a legitimate means of furthering the interests of individual sovereigns….

The [French] revolution increased the size of the armed forces for European states from small professional outfits to huge conscript armies, whose citizen-soldiers needed more than reasons of state to risk their lives and fortunes for their rulers. The objectives of warfare were broadened from the conquest of this or that sliver of a kingdom to the spread of revolutionary ideals, and through this ideological backdoor something like the fervor of religion slipped back into war along with the mass of conscripts. Once again wars needed to be in some sense “holy” or, in the more secular lexicon of the times, “just”.”

Now, it doesn’t bother me terribly when people actively seek to avoid giving me credit for my more original ideas. I’ve learned to expect it, which is why you’ll never find this argument on Wikipedia even when everyone eventually comes to accept it as the historical fact that it truly is. I only find it genuinely irksome when others subsequently try to take credit for them or to claim they were always part of the status quo. The important thing is that the ideas are getting out there and the memes are spreading, and removing that specific arrow from the atheist’s rhetorical arsenal was always my main polemical object in presenting the argument.

That being said, I do find it amusing that The Irrational Atheist appears to be one of the more influential books that no one of substance will publicly admit to reading. In addition to the Atran admission – to say nothing of the informatively abrupt silence of Dawkins and Harris on the subject of religion and war – let’s not forget the Boston University study that offers initial confirmation of my hypothesis of a link between atheism and Asperger’s Syndrome.

WND column

Ryan is a RINO

Many Republicans are understandably pleased by Mitt Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as a running mate. Unlike Marco Rubio, Ryan is a natural-born American citizen and actually eligible for the office. Unlike Tim Pawlenty, he is not a spineless coward with all the charisma of fat-free vanilla yogurt. And unlike Robert Portman, he is not a member of the extended Bush family. He is intelligent. And unlike the current presidential administration, he’s capable of actually putting a budget together, which is a talent that should not go unremarked considering that the country has been operating without one for more than three years now.

Thanks to Slurtebrautfust for the list of Ryan votes. And there was one more well worth noting: YES to Budget Control Act of 2011 that raised the debt ceiling.

Not that it matters

First, let me point out that I reserve the right to give away or sell my books at any price, reasonable or unreasonable, and to change my policy at any time.

Second, because one or two people have been whining about how I only provide a few millions of words for free here but no longer give away the eight PDF and PDB files I previously made available for free download, I will point out that due to Amazon’s policy, it is not possible to give away a free ebook and also sell it through Amazon. Nor can one give away free ebooks on Amazon, except for a five-day free program that they run for paid books. As I pointed out when I first took down the free links, because Amazon is now the center of the book world, one will find more readers if one sells books on Amazon than if one gives them away on one’s own site, even a site as well-trafficked as this one.

Third, as it happens, because those books were available on Amazon first, I should never have made them available for free download here, with the sole exception of the collection of short stories called The Altar of Hate. Fortunately, Amazon did not hold that against me, as they understood it was done in ignorance due to the fact that the Amazon contracts were originally with the publishers and I had no reason to ever review them.

Amazon is doing a great job of bringing down ebook prices and most people recognize this. However, fewer realize that in doing so, they have also essentially eliminated the free ebook, Project Gutenberg notwithstanding.

The end of the US banking system

Ann Barnhardt explains why it is time to not only get one’s assets out of the US financial markets, but the US banks as well.

What this [Sentinel ruling] means is that even if Jon Corzine is somehow dragged into court by private citizens, because you know damn good and well that the Justice Department will never, ever touch him, Corzine now has a legal precedent, likely from a bribed or otherwise coerced Federal Appeals Court, explicitly stating that an FCM can use customer deposits to pay its debts, and that the customers themselves are subjugated and have basically no legal right to their own monies, no matter what the law says, or what legal assurances, claims or guarantees are made to that customer about their funds held with an FCM or any other brokerage or depository institution. The “secured” party at the front of the line will always be the mega-bank who made the fraudulent loan using the stolen customer funds as collateral.

In other words, all customer funds in the United States are now the legal property of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BNYM, or whichever megabank is the counterparty on the loans the FCM or depository institution takes out in order to fund its mega-levered proprietary in-house trading desks.

For the love of God, I don’t know what more there could possibly be to say to snap you people out of your normalcy bias trance. You have GOT to get ALL MONIES out of the financial system NOW. This ruling sets precedence for every depository institution, not just futures brokerages. It is now legal in the United States for any financial institution to steal customer funds, borrow money against those funds for the uber-levered proprietary trading use of the financial institution, and the customers have ZERO CLAIM TO THEIR OWN FUNDS once they are in the custody of the financial institution.

The court has ruled that once your money passes out of your PHYSICAL POSSESSION, and I mean PHYSICAL possession, it is no longer yours, and you have no legal claim or legal recourse to it when it is stolen. This includes BANK ACCOUNTS. Money in a bank is in the possession of the BANK, not you. Do you comprehend this? The entire system is utterly devoid of any integrity or genuine security and is breaking down catastophically before our very eyes. You HAVE to comprehend that your money sitting in an account is no longer legally yours. You have to force your brain to process and comprehend this, no matter how incomprehensible it may seem. IT IS OVER. This is Marxist hell. We have arrived.

This ruling and precedent will be used by every brokerage, every bank, every insurance company and every pension fund to deny you your money when the financial system finally collapses, be it on Monday, or be it two years from now.

This is the Reuters article to which she is referring. The reason the ruling is so disastrous is that it grants all depository institutions ownership of the funds on deposit with it. While this is a logical continuation of the Bankers First and Foremost policy we’ve been seeing from the federal government since 2008, it is burning down the village and salting the earth upon which it stood in order to save it, because there is now absolutely no sound reason to keep your money in a US bank.

Now, obviously, no banks are going to be dumb enough to take this ruling and run with it… unless it is a matter of their own survival. But the fact remains that a bank deposit is now legally considered no different than a gift from you to the bank, and depositors are now entirely dependent upon the bank’s good will to spend its money on their behalf.

I tend to suspect this ruling will be reversed upon appeal once the Powers That Be realize that saving the personal fortunes of Corzine and other failed bankers isn’t worth the price of destroying the US banking system. But if not, it should cause the largest banking run the world has ever known. I say “should” rather than “will”, because as we know, most people are idiots and will probably continue blithely assuming that it doesn’t matter what the fine print and the court rulings say, they’ve got a receipt showing they put their money in the bank, and money in the bank is safe, by definition.

On the other hand, I find this ruling particularly intriguing because I have observed that one can anticipate events, to a certain degree, by seeing through which hoops the elite institutions force the federal government to jump. While they wouldn’t have any reason to take such risks for Corzine and company, it would make a great deal of sense to do so if they are anticipating a U.S. financial collapse in the near-to-middle term.

For example, we can safely assume Romney will win the election November on the basis of the Goldman Sachs contributions. “Four years ago, employees of New York-based Goldman gave three-fourths of their campaign donations to Democratic candidates and committees, including presidential nominee Barack Obama. This time, they’re showering 70 percent of their contributions on Republicans.”