Category: Uncategorized

Gordon Brown is caught lying again:

The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal. Gordon Brown’s government made the decision after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had hit difficulties. These were resolved soon afterwards.

Has there ever been a worse Prime Minister than the One-Eyed Liar? The amazing thing is that as bad as Blair was, Brown has proven to be even worse. One would be tempted to call him a traitor destroying his country, but then, perhaps he’s just a patriot wreaking Scottish vengeance on England.

How can one call him worse than Neville Chamberlain? Because at least Chamberlain only gave away Czechoslovakia to a group of continental fascists. Brown, on the other hand, is giving away Britain to a group of continental fascists.

The 25-question final will be next Saturday and will encompass the book in its entirety.

JB followed the logic:

At first I felt your argument was intuitively incorrect. Then it occurred to me that the use of force would still be prosecutable. A contract to sell your furniture does not give the other party authority to break down your door, beat and bind you, and take your sofa. While you haven’t mentioned this, I think it would mollify most.

I didn’t mention it because it was always completely obvious. The mere possession of consent to sex doesn’t grant the holder a license to kill, commit assault, or rob a bank. Nor was that ever a relevant issue, for as I pointed out in the comments to the previous post, the greater part of the nebulous “rape” arguments begin with a knife-wielding stranger breaking in and binding the victim and end with the “victim” saying that she felt she was coerced because the “rapist” looked at her with puppy dog eyes.

The quiz on the Afterword will be posted tomorrow.

This is the result of the Fed and the FDIC continually playing double-or-nothing with the banking system:

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street’s most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

It shouldn’t be too terribly long before it all collapses. I think it’s inevitable at this point. My guess is that the monetary authorities will attempt to substitute a new currency and financial system that nevertheless leaves the same institutions in control. Given their inept performance over the last 20 years, I find it hard to believe they’ll be successful.

The big question, the only real question, is if the Fed can genuinely create money or not. The problem they face is that while they can print all the paper they want, they can’t get it into the system without someone borrowing it. The fractional-reserve system begins to break down as soon as people stop taking out loans, which appears to be the point we’ve finally reached.

So, the FDIC Quarterly reported a 20 percent decline in the Deposit Insurance Fund during second quarter, from $13 billion to $10.4 billion, which is considerably more than the $4 billion than the estimated losses indicated, much less the -$4.4 billion that I calculated based on the 1.94 balance reduction/estimated losses ratio that applied to the previous five quarters.

The answer is due to the Special Assessment which brought in an additional $8 billion or so from the insured banks, as otherwise the balance would have been reduced to $2.4 billion. The FDIC also announced another Special Assessment would be collected during the third quarter; since estimated losses in the third quarter have already surpassed those of the second quarter, $10.2 billion to $9 billion, it will have to be even bigger than the previous one.

The problem is that there is no explanation for why the FDIC has suddenly gotten so much better at estimating its losses. Whereas the ratio reliably averaged around 1.9x the previous five quarters, in the second quarter it miraculously improved to 1.2x. This seems… questionable at best, especially given the way that the situation is clearly worsening for the banks in general.

There are now about 102 banks in the state operating in the red, up from 76 in the first quarter and 74 a year ago, according to quarterly financial results the federal government released Thursday. Nationally, 28 percent of banks were unprofitable.

Less fit by the standards of natural selection, anyhow:

The following table shows the average number of children women have birthed by the number of male sexual partners they have had since the age of 18*. Like men, women who have had only one partner are the most fecund.

Whereas monogamous women who have only had one lifetime partner averages 2.29 children, the average US woman with nine partners averages 1.46 children. The big dropoff appears to be between six and seven partners, which I find somewhat interesting because I recall an old numerical definition of promiscuity from one of my school health textbooks as being six or more partners.

Religion would appear to account for most, but not all, of this effect, as regular church attendance is correlated with an increasae of about .7 kids/woman.

Email me if you’re on this list. The draft is Sunday, September 6th at 3:30 PM Central. I’ll assign teams and send you the end of year roster this afternoon; please send me your keepers (max 3) by Saturday evening.

Clay
Cynical
Mattos
Gadspeed
InklingStar
PeterAnthony
SoonMoon

Ian – if the WB isn’t playing this year.
Vox
Nate

RC wonders about the potential use of force to prevent abortion:

For years, I thought criminalizing abortion was consistent with libertarian principle. I can no longer see how. Libertarianism is not against all aggression. For an act of aggression to be criminal under a libertarian legal code, it would have to violate rights. Acts of aggression against cats and dogs wouldn’t be illegal under such a code. Why would unborn children have rights? Do you support the criminalization of abortion on theonomistic grounds? I don’t see how any degree of theonomy is consistent with libertarian principle. You seem like someone who would be familiar with these issues; maybe you’d discuss this on your blog.

The reason unborn children have human rights is that they are human. They exist, they are human, ergo they have the same right to life, liberty and property that their mothers and fathers do. As Ron Paul, a fine and upstanding libertarian, has pointed out, there are few acts of aggression more violent and unprovoked than those involved in murderously vivisecting an unborn child.

There is not a single pro-abortion argument that stands up to science and reason. Every single one is not only spurious, but easily demonstrated to be spurious. It is not necessary to bring religious arguments into the debate to conclusively settle the matter in favor of the pro-life position, in fact, the Bible-based arguments against abortion are, in my opinion, weaker than the rational and scientific arguments.

Criminalizing abortion is no more questionable from a libertarian position than criminalizing murder. It is an act of lethal, unprovoked aggression, often state-supported and sometimes state-dictated, of the sort that every libertarian, religious or secular, should vehemently oppose.

The Market Ticker explains the fraudulent nature of the market rally:

So let me see if I get this right. 2.126 billion shares traded in four stocks [Citigroup, Fannie, Freddie, and Bank of America -VD]… These four stocks represented thirty seven percent of all shares traded today. Today 3,162 different stocks traded on the NYSE. These four represent 0.13% of the total, yet they comprised 37% of the volume.

And to top it all off, two of those corporations are confirmed to be insolvent. But, on the plus side, at least we know where that money the Federal Reserve doesn’t want audited is going….

UPDATE – And here’s a contrarian indicator: Investors Intelligence, which tracks the market views of about 130 independent investment newsletter editors, said 19.8% of the letters now are bearish on stocks, down from 23.1% the previous week and the fewest since the 19.6% reading of October 2007.