Category: Uncategorized

GOP pursues strategic suicide

Any party that is dumb enough to bank on that elusive conservative Hispanic vote deserves what it will get:

Republican opposition to legalizing the status of millions of illegal immigrants is crumbling in the nation’s capital as leading lawmakers in the party scramble to halt eroding support among Hispanic voters — a shift that is providing strong momentum for an overhaul of immigration laws.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Tea Party Republican, on Tuesday became the latest to embrace a more welcoming approach, declaring to the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants that if they want to work in America, “then we will find a place for you.”

While he never uttered the word “citizenship” and said a secure border must come first, Mr. Paul strongly implied that citizenship would eventually be available to them.

It’s disappointing, but hardly surprising, that Mr. Paul’s conventional, (and in this case, erroneous), libertarian instincts would get the better of his economic and nationalist sensibilities.  America doesn’t need 11 million illegal immigrants working.  It doesn’t need 30 million legal immigrants working, for that matter.  Those who think they do clearly don’t understand supply, demand, and the consequences of increasing supply with regards to price.

One would think that Republicans would learn to rethink their actions any time the New York Times lines up behind them, but apparently one of the key aspects of being a Republican is never remembering what happened last time.

“His new message follows the publication
on Monday of a blistering report from the Republican National Committee
that urged the party’s members to champion an immigration overhaul that
Hispanics can embrace or risk seeing the party shrinking “to its core
constituencies only.””

Ronald Reagan once noted that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him.  The Republican Party is now in the process of abandoning its core constituencies in favor of an imaginary and alien one.

Get the f— off Facebook

Seriously, do it now. Otherwise, you may as well be running your every family activity by the local, state, and Federal police and asking them for permission:

New Jersey police and Dept. of Children and Families officials raided the home of a firearms instructor and demanded to see his guns after he posted a Facebook photo of his 11-year-old son holding a rifle.

“Someone called family services about the photo,” said Evan Nappen, an attorney representing Shawn Moore. “It led to an incredible, heavy-handed raid on his house. They wanted to see his gun safe, his guns and search his house. They even threatened to take his kids.”

If you’re still posting pictures of your family and your children on Facebook, you are a complete and unmitigated idiot.  It was one thing to do it before it became clear how Facebook would be utilized, it’s another thing to continue doing it now.  These days, the only thing you should be posting on Facebook is disinformation.

It’s not your money

One of the many unintended consequences of the Cyprus situation is that many people are finally beginning to understand that money they deposit into a bank is no longer their money.  It’s one thing to have some vague notion of what a fractional reserve system is, it’s another to realize that with every deposit, you are making what amounts to an interest-free loan to some of the shadiest and shakiest entities on the planet:

“The district court determined that under Utah law the relationship
between a bank and a depositor is generally that of a debtor to a
creditor, citing Walker Bank & Trust Co. v. First Security Corp., 9
Utah 2d 215, 341 P.2d 944, 946 (1959). United States v. Intermountain
Region Concrete Co., 636 F.Supp. at 284.”

So, when you’re considering the question of whether you should “leave your money in the bank or not”, you are committing a category error.  What you are actually deciding is “do I want to lend my money to this particular corporation or not”?

These days, loaning one’s money to banks strikes me as about as wise as loaning it to the homeless guy living under the bridge.  Sure, there is a chance he’s not going to spend it all on alcohol and default, but you have to assume that is the most probable outcome.

Not even close

The Cyprus parliament must have gotten some very clear messages from someone over the last two days:

CYPRUS BANK LEVY BILL DEFEATED WITH 36 VOTES AGAINST. CYPRUS BANK LEVY BILL DEFEATED WITH 19 ABSTENTIONS

Given that there are only 56 members of the parliament, this would appear to indicate that only one member voted for it.

First Sale doctrine lives

Capitalism and private property aren’t entirely dead in the West, not yet, anyway:

The Supreme Court has sided with a Thai graduate student in the U.S. who sold cheap foreign versions of textbooks on eBay without the publisher’s permission, a decision with important implications for goods sold online and in discount stores.

The justices, in a 6-3 vote Tuesday, threw out a copyright infringement award to publisher John Wiley & Sons. Thai graduate student Supap Kirtsaeng used eBay to resell copies of the publisher’s copyrighted books that his relatives first bought abroad at cut-rate prices.

Justice Stephen Breyer said in his opinion for the court that the publisher lost any ability to control what happens to its books after their first sale abroad.

This will be interesting because the battle over used electronic items, such as ebooks, is only just beginning.  But at least those who are trying to expand copyright to subsume private property rights will have to change the law first.  Of course, the current life+70 Disneyright tends to indicate that there is a reasonable chance they’ll be able to do it.

“Men have gone berserk”

Who could have possibly seen the likelihood of young men going berserk in a society where sex ratios are increasingly out of whack?

Ranjana Kumari of the Centre for Social Research think tank said there had been 127 rape cases registered in Delhi alone since the fatal December assault on the student.

“It is absolutely shocking and speaks volumes on how Indian society is treating women. The men have gone totally berserk. We’re feeling frustrated and in despair. What must we do to change their mentality? Women are becoming more vulnerable,” she said.

Women were being attacked even when they were with their husbands or male friends – and foreigners, previously regarded as less at risk, are also being targeted…. This latest gang rape is one of dozens reported in the Indian press since the December rape and murder shocked the nation and plunged it into a period of national soul searching.

It came just days after the Indian cabinet supported a new law to impose tougher sentences for rape and sexual assault, including the death penalty for cases where the victim dies or is left in a persistent vegetative state. 

Note that the problem in India is actually getting considerably worse despite the advance of sexual equality in Indian society that the feminists believe will solve everything.  As we’ve learned to expect, feminism wreaks societal devastation even in the process of supposedly offering a means of improvement.  In this case, it is the pro-abortion position that is leading to more rapes in India.

“According to the decennial Indian census, the sex ratio in the 0-6 age group in India went from 104.0 males per 100 females in 1981, to 105.8 in 1991, to 107.8 in 2001, to 109.4 in 2011. The ratio is significantly higher in certain states such as Punjab and Haryana (126.1 and 122.0, as of 2001).”

Anyone with more than half a brain has been expecting serious problems out of China and India since Western technology gave them abortion and the means of prenatal sex identification.  The world is quite fortunate that India’s excess male population appears to be inclined to occupy itself in pursuit of gang rape, considering that the more customary outlet is foreign invasion.

Of course, John Scalzi doesn’t rape due to sex ratios, John Scalzi rapes women, because, as he explains: “I will tell you one of the details about why I do it: I like to control women and, also and independently, I like to remind them how little control they have.”

Cyprus: the test case

An insider’s explanation of how the insane Cypriot situation came to pass and who was chiefly to blame for it:

As well as the full EU summit on Thursday and Friday, Anastasiades, a
London-educated 66-year-old, was to attend the first full eurozone
summit for 14 months late on Thursday. A senior EU policymaker said: “There will be a little discussion of Cyprus, but no decisions.”

A senior EU diplomat predicted: “Nothing much will happen. It’s the new president’s first summit.”

As
it turned out, the centre-right Cypriot leader was given a 12-hour stay
of execution until the early hours of Saturday on what, highly
conveniently, was a Cyprus bank holiday weekend. He went home with a
€10bn euro bailout and a eurozone taboo-busting obligation to
expropriate every saver in every bank in Cyprus….

The IMF has long insisted on keeping the cost of the bailout well below the €17bn needed because of its fixation on ensuring medium-term debt sustainability. Lending Cyprus what it needed would have tipped the scales of sustainability.  The German government, months away from a crucial general election, was also very reluctant to see its taxpayers’ money lent to secure the savings of wealthy Russians whose deposits are estimated to represent almost a third of Cypriot accounts.

The panic about banks closing down on Tuesday came from Asmussen, who warned the Cypriots that no deal meant no emergency liquidity help from the ECB, meaning the two biggest banks on the island could collapse.

“I was present,” said Sklavos. Asked who pushed the hardest for the levy to be slapped on depositors, he said: “Wolfgang Schaeuble.”

“It was a fait accompli. They had made their decision before the meeting had even begun. They don’t care. They want Cyprus to be the guinea pig. They want to see if this thing works. If it does, then perhaps Spain or Italy will be next. If it doesn’t, then who cares about Cyprus?”

And who is Wolfgang Schaeuble? He is the German Minister of Finance, Helmut Kohl’s heir presumptive, and the most ardent EUnik in the CDU.  He was pushing the bank heist because he knows that Germans are going to be increasingly supporting anti-EU parties in the upcoming elections and feared the bad press of forcing the German taxpayer to bail out Russian savings accounts.

Standoff in Cyprus

The IMF/EU bank heist is being put on hold because the president can’t get the votes to approve the theft.  Zerohedge reports:

Moments ago the state-run CYBC media reported perhaps the most material news ahead of tomorrow’s Cyprus parliamentary vote, which at this point will likely be rescheduled once more, for the simple reason that yet another key Cypriot party, DIKO, has come out and decided to vote against the depositor-loss law on the Parliament’s docket tomorrow. This is notable because while yesterday JPM, in its “bazooka” assessment speculated that DIKO would vote for the law which made sense previously as DIKO had supported president Anastasiades in his election bid, which gave a pro-bailout vote a one vote margin. As a result of today’s flip, the party’s 9 votes will now be aligned with the “anti” votes of AKEL  and EDEK, whose combined 33 votes mean the proposed bailout law has no chance of passing as they have the needed 29 votes to block any bail-in out proposal!

That’s 33 against and 20 for.  It should be interesting to learn to what extent the EU and the Cypriot president were bluffing when they claimed a financial armageddon would result from a failure of the bailout plan.  I suspect it’s going to look at lot more like the consequences of the US sequester, which absolutely no one in the USA appears to have even noticed.

Jim Sinclair notes: “The government leaders in Cyprus are trying to back-pedal right now in
order to save their lives. Let me say it again, they are trying to save
their own lives. Remember, ‘revenge is best served cold.’ This means
the revenge never comes at the moment of the miscreant act. But it will
come in time.  To take money from the leading economic
entities in Russia, is to take money from the former KGB officers, and
taking money from them is extremely dangerous. I think the reality has
quickly set in for the leaders of Cyprus that they have aided in the
confiscation of the most serious and dangerous money you could possibly
touch. It has these leaders more afraid for their lives than their bank
accounts.”

UPDATE: “the Eurogroup will give Cyprus more flexibility on bank levy, and that Cyprus should safeguard depositors under €100,000, even as the full €5.8 billion deposit goal must still be hit.”

Perhaps my math skills are insufficient to grok the sense, but I don’t see how increasing the hit Russian depositors are going to take from 10% to 15.6% is going to make frightened parliamentarians any more sanguine about voting for the $75 billion bank heist.

“enormous possibilities for the Administration”

Granted, he is often a little excitable with regards to the imminence of the sky falling, but in this case, Karl provides mathematical support for his prediction concerning when something similar to the Cypriot action will take place in the USA:

In two years federal medical spending along with Social Security and interest will, on current paths, reach the total of all tax receipts. At the outside the market will realize that Congress will never address the underlying issue with medical care because they have steadfastly refused to do so.  At that point we will have become Greece and Cyprus.

For those who say that our banking system is “strong” and “not corrupt unlike Cyprus” may I ask what the record is on money laundering and intentional obfuscation of the truth with regard to firms such as HSBC and Wachovia (both of which were caught laundering enormous amounts of money) and JP Morgan (which was just grilled, along with the regulators, regarding the “London Whale”) and not one person or institution has been indicted and prosecuted?

There is about $20 trillion in US Retirement “assets.”  A “small” 10% “one time” tax levy on those assets would fund the US Deficit a couple of years from now, and I will go out on a limb now and predict that exactly that will be done.

It first crossed my mind that this could eventually happen back in 1998, although I can’t remember why, but we were discussing it for one reason or another.  I never thought it was necessary, not even in 2008, because I simply didn’t imagine that the financial rulers of the US were crazy enough to continue with their credit expansion even after that clear and present wake-up call.

Two years seems rather on the abrupt side to me, but as I have often observed, these things always take longer to develop than one imagines, and then, when they finally arrive, unfold faster than one can believe.

It never stops being funny



The ominous thing is that we’re rapidly approaching the point where the Mussolinis and Hitlers of the world are starting to look downright attractive in comparison with the bankers and politicians who are presently ruling through deceit and financial predation.  When I was young, I couldn’t understand why people didn’t merely support, but practically worshipped such obviously flawed and terrible men.

Now, I think I’d be downright happy to vote for the first politician to run on a policy of sending killer drones after every single banker who has received a post-2007 bonus from a bank that received bailout money.  And I’m a freaking libertarian; imagine how those who support bombing Iraqi children because they hate us for our freedoms are going to react once they finally begin to grasp how badly they’ve been screwed over by the bankers.  The irony is that a banker-assassination policy would be entirely constitutional according to the current administration; it is very easy to prove that the bankers are much more serious enemies of the state than al Qaeda.  They’ve certainly done considerably more damage.

UPDATE: “Banks in Cyprus will
be shut on Tuesday and Wednesday pending a decision by parliament to
approve a levy on bank depositors, a government source told Reuters.”

UPDATE II: Zerohedge says the worst case scenario is 15.26 percent on deposits over 100k.  Assuming it passes at all now.