Category: Uncategorized

Calling a spade a spade

The Fed’s Hoenig calls for the recognition of reality:

Big banks like Bank of America Corp and Citigroup Inc should be reclassified as government-sponsored entities and have their activities restricted, a senior Fed official said on Tuesday. The 2008 bank bailouts at the height of the financial crisis and other implicit guarantees effectively make the largest U.S. banks government-guaranteed enterprises, like mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, said Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig.

“That’s what they are,” Hoenig said at the National Association of Attorneys General 2011 conference. He said these lenders should be restricted to commercial banking activities, advocating a policy that existed for decades barring banks from engaging in investment banking activities.

“You’re a public utility, for crying out loud,” he said.

While I would prefer to see the big banks broken up, their assets marked to market, and their bankrupt elements closed down, Hoenig’s plan is a reasonable compromise. Of course, there is little chance of it happening, since limiting the government-guaranteed banks to commercial banking activities would eliminate their ability to continue their financial rapine.

As for BOA CEO Moynihan’s claim that customers want the big banks to continue combining commercial and investment activities, I think he has badly misread the public mood. Most Americans would just as soon see the bastard bankster’s head on a stake.

Now this is amusing

It will be interesting to see how the rabid neocons, who have never heard of a military intervention they didn’t see as an urgent matter of U.S. national security, react to this call for a no-fly zone:

Arab League chief Amr Mussa said on Sunday the organisation will ask the UN Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over Gaza, which Israel has pounded with air strikes in response to rocket fire. Mussa told an emergency meeting of Arab League ambassadors that “the Arab bloc in the United Nations has been directed to ask for the convention of the Security Council to stop the Israeli aggression on Gaza and impose a no-fly zone.”

I somehow suspect that those who have so vehemently demanded no-fly zones over Serbia, Iraq, and Libya will be a little less enthusiastic about shooting down Israeli planes. But given the way they used the United Nations to justify the military interventions they supported in the past, they’ll have little grounds for arguing against this one now that the UN has declared that the Palestinian institutions are ready for statehood.

The wealthy are not exempt

Overstuffed bank accounts and a broad panoply of investments are of little protection from those who have been screwed over and have nothing left to lose. The banksters believe they are immune from the Great Depression 2.0 by virtue of their ability to pay off their losses with taxpayer money, but justice has a way of being served one way or another:

A wealthy businessman was shot and killed on the doorstep of his country house by a gunman who was later found dead in a village churchyard. Ray Masters, 58, bled to death in front of his horrified family after being shot in the chest at point blank range.

The gunman, Michael Harper – who was last night described as a disgruntled business associate – then fled before turning his weapon on himself. Sources claimed that Mr Harper, 46, had lost his wife and home as a result of a financial dispute with Mr Masters. The private contractor had apparently done work for which he was owed a six-figure sum….

A builder who claims to have done work for Mr Masters said he is owed close to £100,000 and is taking legal action to recover the debt. He said: ‘There’s a list of people as long as your arm of people who have had dealings with him and come out badly.’ Another man said: ‘I’m not surprised by this. He has conned a lot of people. I went into business with him and he duped me too. And there’s dozens more like me.’

Wealthy individuals and corporations often think they can use the expense of the legal system to rip people off. However, the reality is that when legal means of recourse are denied, it is assured that at least some of those being screwed over will quite understandably resort to illegal means. How long will it be before a victim of the student loan scam seeks vengeance against a university president or a former homeowner was foreclosed by a bank that didn’t own the home metes out extra-legal justice to the CEO of a mortgage bank?

Unless I am wrong and the Federal Reserve can somehow pull an economic rabbit out of its hat, I suspect these sorts of vengeful acts will become alarmingly common in the near future. This and other unusual criminal actions are socionomic indicators that the so-called recovery is, in fact, nothing more than a statistical illusion.

The sinful triangle

In which Susan Walsh takes a weird little personality test. I took the same test and got the following result:

Thoughtful to the extreme, you are often obsessed with perfection and the rules governing your own personal interests. Your world is black and white. You love to work within a logical system, such as language, computer programming, or mathematics. Manipulating a system that can be completely understood is a distinct pleasure to you, because of your confidence in the underlying veracity of your belief system. Because of your appreciation for logic and order, those who speak or think in a sloppy manner are apt to generate more than their share of wrath. Although very amiable, you are not drawn to friendships out of a sense of personal need. You are just as happy by yourself with a good book or puzzle. Because you are so involved with thought, you will on occasion have difficulty dealing with the day-to-day problems of a normal life. Taking out the trash, doing the dishes, these are often left until the last possible moment, if at all.

Translation: INTJ. I expect this result will not be uncommon among the Dread Ilk.

The sacrificial frontrunner

The RINOs have cast Mitt Romney to play the conventional Dole/McCain role:

Mr Romney, a former Governor of Massachusetts, declared “it is time we put America back on a course of greatness”, as he launched an exploratory committee for a presidential run. The 64-year-old Mormon father of five was defeated by John McCain in the party’s primary in 2008. But he has emerged as the favourite in a thin Republican field for 2012.

Setting aside the problem of whether Captain Underoos is capable of commanding the loyalty of a party largely comprised of people who view Mormonism as an aberrant cult, Romney’s more serious weakness is that his single biggest political triumph is the passage of Obamacare before it was called Obamacare in Massachusetts. Romney’s nomination simply cannot be logically squared with the Tea Party-fueled electoral victory of 2010, which is why I conclude that he won’t be playing the Dole/McCain role for which he has been selected, he’ll be playing the Giuliani role instead.

Furthermore, in a nation increasingly riven by ethnic and religious differences, it is less and less acceptable to attempt representing people from one geographic place and religion with an individual from a different geographic place and religion. A party with its roots in the South and Midwest will have little interest in being represented by a former governor of Massachusetts, no matter how good his hair happens to be.

Frankly, even the corpse of Ron Paul would make for a far better president than Mitt Romney.

Amazon and some publishing decisions

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve arranged to set up as an Amazon Associate, so if you order books from them in the future, doing it through here will contribute to the Publishing Fund. This is intended to be a means of funding more self-publishing through Kindle and eventually other forms of ebooks and perhaps hardcovers as well. So, if you’re thinking of ordering something through Amazon, consider doing it from here.

I’m still working on Summa Elvetica II, which will not be done for quite some time because I am attempting to make it a stronger and deeper book than its predecessor, which involves a good deal of research and world-building. That isn’t really relevant to the self-publishing project, however, since Marcher Lord will likely publish it. So, I’ve also been working on the non-fiction title Alpha Game, which I expect to finish and publish this summer; I’d proposed it to WND Books, but they found the subject to be out of their comfort zone and passed on it.

However, I’ve had a number of requests for publishing column collections, which never really struck me as being a proper book per se, but is apparently de rigueur among columnnists. I noticed that three of my George Will “books” are actually just column collections accompanied by some introductory commentary. So, I have two questions. First, is there any interest in a book or three of column collections? Second, would there be more interest in books that collect the columns by subject or by publication date? Just to be clear, I’d probably do the columns in annotated format in order to update them with regards to the mistakes I’d made or to note how subsequent events rendered them relevant or irrelevant. The ebooks would be sold for $2.99, as per Amazon’s new program.

I’m also going to be putting out Kindle versions of the three Eternal Warriors novels at the $2.99 price in case anyone is interested in them.

Krugman the historian

Thomas DiLorenzo demonstrates that Krugman knows even less about American history than he does about Austrian economics:

Krugman said he has always been infatuated by the “symbolism” of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, with “Lee the patrician in his dress uniform,” compared to General Grant, who was “still muddy and disheveled from hard riding.” Krugman is apparently unaware that by the late 1850s, on the eve of the war, Robert E. Lee was in his thirtieth year as an officer in the United States Army, performing mostly as a military engineer. He was hardly a “patrician” or member of a ruling class. Grant, by contrast, was the overseer of an 850-acre slave plantation owned by his wealthy father-in-law. The plantation, located near St. Louis, was known as “White Haven” (which sounds like it could have been named by the KKK) and is today a national park. (On the “White Haven” Web site the National Park Service euphemistically calls Grant the “manager” of the slave plantation rather than the more historically-accurate word “overseer”).

In 1862 Lee freed the slaves that his wife had inherited, in compliance with his father-in-law’s will. Grant’s White Haven slaves were not freed until an 1865 Missouri emancipation law forced Grant and his father-in-law to do so. The fact that Lee changed clothes before formally surrendering did not instantly turn the 36-year army veteran into a “patrician,” contrary to the “all-knowing” Krugman’s assertion.

Krugman goes on to assert that the North’s victory in the war was a victory in “manners” by a region that “excelled at the arts of peace.” Well, not really. What the North “excelled” in was the waging of total war on the civilian population of the South. The Lincoln administration instituted the first federal military conscription law, and then ordered thousands of Northern men to their death in the savage and bloody Napoleonic charges that characterized the war. When tens of thousands of Northern men deserted, the Lincoln administration commenced the public execution of deserters on a daily basis. When New Yorkers rioted in protest of military conscription, Lincoln ordered 15,000 soldiers to the city where they murdered hundreds, and perhaps thousands of draft protesters (See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots). It also recruited thousands of European mercenaries, many of whom did not even speak English, to arm themselves and march South to supposedly teach the descendants of James Madison, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson what it really meant to be an American. Lee Kennett, biographer of General William Tecumseh Sherman, wrote of how many of Lincoln’s recruits were specially suited for pillaging, plundering and raping: “the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World” (Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, p. 279).

The North waged war on Southern civilians for four long years, murdering at least 50,000 of them according to historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. It bombed cities like Atlanta for days at a time when they were occupied by no one but civilians, and U.S. Army soldiers looted, ransacked, and raped their way all throughout the South. The “arts of peace” indeed.

As for the war being a victory of “manners,” as Krugman says, consider this: When the women of New Orleans refused to genuflect to U.S. Army troops who were occupying their city and killing their husbands, sons and brothers, General Benjamin “Beast” Butler issued an order that all the women of that city were to henceforth be treated as prostitutes. “As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women . . . of New Orleans,” Butler wrote in his General Order Number 28 on May 15, 1862, “it is ordered that thereafter when any female shall, by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” Butler’s order was widely construed as a license for rape, and he was condemned by the whole world.

It is remarkable that so many Americans still believe that their Civil War was about anything but the continuation of the Yankee empire. It is perhaps worth noting that were the USA of today to be confronted with the American Civil War, there can be little doubt that it would be bombing the Union in support of the Southern separatists.

However, it appears that Hispanic separatists may ultimately succeed where the Southern ones failed. The South may not rise again, but the Southwest almost certainly will.

WND column

A Disastrous Victory

Imagine that you are in the back seat of a car being driven 70 miles per hour towards a cliff edge. Driving the car off the cliff will be fatal, but instead of stopping the car, turning it around, or even stepping on the brakes, the two people in the front of the car are arguing about who is responsible for how close to the cliff it is. Then imagine that after one of the passengers in the back seat begins shouting at the driver to stop the car, the two in the front argue some more, then finally agree to slow down to 68 miles per hour.

Do you feel any safer? Do you feel any more confident about the ability of the driver and his navigator to keep the car from crashing?

Overly fantastic military history

Being a fan of Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files and Roman history, I didn’t hesitate to read through his Codex Alera series as each book came out. They are good, entertaining books, if not necessarily as absorbing as his demi-noire urban fantasy series. But it is not my purpose to discuss the Alera books as to note a common error that is made in them as well as in many other fantasy novels. By my admittedly inattentive count, the indomitable Aleran military lost no less than six complete legions in the span of 25 years. And by complete, I mean absolutely complete, in one battle, the number of survivors can be counted on a single hand. Contrast this with Roman history, in which only four Imperial legions were recorded to have lost their aquila, three of them in the same battle in the Teutoberg Forest under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus. Since Butcher’s Vord exterminate literally everything they encounter, there is perhaps sufficient room for literary license to permit this exaggeration for effect. There is, however, little room to excuse similar exaggerations of martial lethality committed by other fantasy authors.

Read the rest of the article at the Black Gate.

First the euro, then the EU

Simon Heffer sees the end of both in sight:

The failure of the euro will signify the failure of the European ideal, and that is why eurocrats fight so hard for it. What should have been a club of free-trading nations over-reached itself, and sought to unite people with little or no common culture, politics, language or economic history into one coherent federation. It could never work. The generation that thought it could is either dead, senile or (in Chris Patten’s case) governing the BBC. The dream is over: it only remains to be seen how much more German money will be squandered before everyone finally admits it.

Countries who have bail-outs must survive for years afterwards on austerity measures. They will never have the industrial power of a Britain or France, let alone a Germany, so to stay in such a strong currency means permanent privation. Portugal will soon have an election, but so what? Ireland just had one, and it was irrelevant who won. The most important thing a country has – the right to set its own economic policy – was forfeited by the Irish, and the Portuguese, when they joined the euro. All aggrieved people in those countries can do if they want a different policy is write to Frankfurt and ask politely – or riot. And I fear there will much more of the latter before this charade comes to its inevitable end.

Some of us in Britain have resisted the EU in all its manifestations because what is politely called “loss of sovereignty” actually means “loss of democratic rights”. Our votes as electors become pointless. As the eurocrats become more desperate to hold things together, more and more unreasonable demands will be made upon us – whether we are in the euro or not. That is the nature of dictatorships such as the EU. We do not vote for the commissioners who initiate, on the advice of their unelected advisers, the policies they inflict upon us. Napoleon and Hitler tried to unite Europe, but neither did so with the pretence of democracy. As Europe’s currency fails, and a last desperate attempt is made to save it, the price will be our freedom.

The comparison of the EU to Napoleon and Hitler is astute, because the only significant difference is that the EU has used banks to subvert national sovereignty rather than ranks and tanks. And like Napoleon and Hitler, their efforts will ultimately go for naught after a brief period wherein it looked as if they had been successful.