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And with very good reason. Even Paul Krugman is beginning to see the downside with “saving the financial system”:

The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. If you’re a banker, and you generate big short-term profits, you get lavishly rewarded — and you don’t have to give the money back if and when those profits turn out to have been a mirage. You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand. And the events of the past year have skewed those incentives even more, by putting taxpayers as well as investors on the hook if things go wrong…. What’s clear is that Wall Street in general, Goldman very much included, benefited hugely from the government’s provision of a financial backstop — an assurance that it will rescue major financial players whenever things go wrong.

You can argue that such rescues are necessary if we’re to avoid a replay of the Great Depression. In fact, I agree. But the result is that the financial system’s liabilities are now backed by an implicit government guarantee.

No, the rescues were not necessary and Goldman Sachs should have been allowed to fail with all the other bankrupt banks. Max Kreiser’s perspective is both more forthright and more accurate that Krugman’s: “Goldman Sachs are scum. That’s the bottom line. They basically have coopted the U.S. government, they have coopted the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve functionality. They’ve coopted the Obama administration, Barack Obama dances to Goldman Sachs’s tune.”

What does Chairman Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve have to say about all this?

““The public in many countries is understandably concerned by the commitment of substantial government resources to aid the financial industry when other industries receive little or no assistance. This disparate treatment, unappealing as it is, appears unavoidable. Our economic system is critically dependent on the free flow of credit, and the consequences for the broader economy of financial instability are thus powerful and quickly felt.”

It’s time for the American public to tell both Bernanke and Goldman Sachs to go to Hell. The idea that the economic system somehow depends upon Goldman Sachs employees receiving millions in bonuses has got to be one of the biggest lies ever told in the history of economics. This is actually the last frantic looting of the pirates before the ship they attacked and boarded finally sinks beneath the waves. And the way out is absolutely not to build a new global system, because all that amounts to is allowing the financial pirates to board a new and bigger ship.

It would appear that bankruptcy looms:

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said. “Well, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, I’m telling you.”

Actually, the USA is going to go bankrupt no matter what it does now. It’s just a matter of time; although it’s impossible to say how much time, one can safely predict that it will be sudden and shocking whenever it does happen. It’s interesting that both Obama/Soetoro and Biden have come right out and told the country that the USA is out of money, but no one except Goldman Sachs appears to be taking them seriously.

Hollywood is filth. Its fanatically greedy denizens make Goldman Sachs look like relative paragons of financial honesty:

J.R.R. Tolkien sold movie rights to his “Lord of the Rings” novels 40 years ago for 7.5 percent of future receipts. Three films and $6 billion later, his heirs say they haven’t seen a dime from Time Warner Inc.

This is why I have so little interest in the film industry. It’s full of talentless, unimaginative thieves. I’ve been contacted at least four times that I can recall about the possibility of turning one or more of my novels into movies, and each time I tell them the same thing. I have absolutely no interest in the industry whatsoever, so thanks for your interest and have a nice day.

This thievery, combined with the brutal vivisection of one of my favorite Susan Cooper novels, only confirms my contempt for the industry. The lesson every creator should take from this is to refuse to accept any “cost” deductions from their royalties. If they can’t make money on their 93 percent of the take or whatever, then that’s really just their problem. I don’t go to movies or buy movie DVDs, but if I was interested in watching them, I’d feel an absolute moral duty to pirate them.

I note, with no small amusement, a certain synchronicity between Joseph Farah’s column about Obama and Saul Alinsky and an obscure novel.

One of his [Obama’s] inspirations was Saul Alinsky, author of the infamous “Rules of Radicals,” a book he actually dedicated in its original manuscript form to Lucifer.

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins – or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.”

“Although the poet attempts to make Satan appear to be the villain, he is actually the hero. He is willing to stand up and fight for his beliefs, and for the freedom of both himself and others, even those who fight against him. He cannot hope to win against the totalitarian might of God, but he is still willing to make the ultimate sacrifice solely for the sake of his conscience. Since we admire this spirit in great heroes like Nathan Hale, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, it seems both unfair and wrong to deny the same regard to their true intellectual and philosophical antecedent, Satan.

God, on the other hand, is an unfair dictator. He is uncaring, because he arbitrarily puts his Son in authority over all the other angels without regard for their feelings. He is undemocratic, because even though most of the angels agree with Satan’s position, he is unwilling to compromise. He is repressive and uncivilized, because he is willing to chain Satan to the Lake of Fire just because Satan disagrees with him. Unfair, uncaring, undemocratic, and uncivilized- it is impossible to reach any other conclusion than the correct one: that the God of Milton’s Paradise Lost is totally contrary to the spirit of the modern age.

Gods are supposed to represent the perfection of a society’s values. A god should strive to reflect the ideals of the people worshipping it, just as the people must strive to live up to those ideals. But the world of the seventeenth century is not the world of today. Although it is still a great epic poem, the twin lessons of Paradise Lost for the modern world are as follows: One, that only uncaring, undemocratic and intolerant people can worship the biblical god of the Old and New Testaments. And two, that anyone who values fairness, tolerance, democracy, and freedom, when presented with the choice between God and the Devil, would logically prefer to worship Satan.”
– Christopher Lewis, The War in Heaven

I know you’ll be shocked to discover that the AGW/CC models are not only useless predictors of future climate, they don’t even backtest properly:

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

As I have previously written on several occasions, there is conclusive evidence that even a model which backtests flawlessly is not necessarily a functional predictive model. But the AGW/CC models don’t even function at that level! There was a time when I thought economics and finance were softer sciences than biology and climatology, but the more I’ve learned about the latter two disciplines, the more it’s become clear that they are far less rigorous than even the great financial whorehouses would find acceptable. Both biology and climatology presently contain significant aspects that are inherently unscientific by every definition of science except for Polanyi’s explanation of it as a social construction of a specific professional guild.

Despite the usual scientific consensus, Dark Matter increasingly appears to be on its way out. (Dark Vapor, on the other hand, rests on the same secure foundation it always has. I await my Nobel with placid confidence.) And there’s no point whining that it’s scientists who are doing the demolition job; it’s scientists who will eventually demolish TENS and AGW/CC too once they manage to overcome the intellectual inertia imposed by the great scientific unwashed.

More precisely, all classical satellites of the Milky Way – the eleven brightest dwarf galaxies – lie more or less in the same plane, they are forming some sort of a disc in the sky. The research team has also been able to show that most of these satellite galaxies rotate in the same direction around the Milky Way – like the planets revolve around the Sun.

The physicists do belief that this phenomenon can only be explained if the satellites were created a long time ago through collisions between younger galaxies. “The fragments produced by such an event can form rotating dwarf galaxies,” explains Dr. Metz. But there is an interesting catch to this crash theory, “theoretical calculations tell us that the satellites created cannot contain any dark matter.” This assumption, however, stands in contradiction to another observation. “The stars in the satellites we have observed are moving much faster than predicted by the Gravitational Law. If classical physics holds this can only be attributed to the presence of dark matter,” Manuel Metz states.

Or one must assume that some basic fundamental principles of physics have hitherto been incorrectly understood.

I always enjoy the moment when scientists finally throw up their hands and quit trying to draw the elaborate epicycles that permit them to force the square data into the round theory. Perhaps the astrophysicists have finally gotten around to reaching this point. The biologists are rather less bright, so no doubt it will take them rather longer to face the scientific reality.

Of course, they can always take the Keynesian approach. “Make it bigger, then it’ll work for sure!” That will buy them a few decades before it all collapses. But eventually every idea, every scientific concept, must stand or fall on its own merits. Science is not democracy and scientific consensus has no more bearing on the evidence than the book-selling consensus has on literary quality.

The Pentagon knows, or least suspects, that Barack Obama/Soetoro is not eligible for the office he presently purports to hold:

A U.S. Army Reserve major from Florida scheduled to report for deployment to Afghanistan within days has had his military orders revoked after he argued that he should not be required to serve under a president who has not proven his legitimacy for office. His attorney, Orly Taitz, confirmed to WND the military has rescinded his impending deployment orders….

A hearing on the questions raised by Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook, an engineer who told WND he wants to serve his country in Afghanistan, was scheduled for July 16 at 9:30 a.m. “As an officer in the armed forces of the United States, it is [my] duty to gain clarification on any order we may believe illegal. With that said, if President Obama is found not to be a ‘natural-born citizen,’ he is not eligible to be commander-in-chief,” he told WND only hours after the case was filed.

This should get interesting. The courts can’t pretend, as they have done numerous times in the recent past, that Major Cook has no standing. Since the military either knows or suspects that its purported Commander-in-Chief can’t back up his birth claims, they don’t want to take the chance of the issue going to court where Obama/Soetoro will be forced to put up or give up.

Of course, this also means that every soldier who doesn’t wish to serve in Afghanistan or Iraq was just handed a get-out-of-war free card. If Obama/Soetoro does not come clean and release his documentation now to settle the matter, this will be an implicit confession that he is not, in fact, eligible to be president. How can he or his defenders possibly justify hiding all of the relevant documents when it means giving every soldier in the U.S. military a veto on accepting orders?

The mutating stories and multiple hospitals where Obama/Soetoro was supposedly born strongly suggest that America’s first Indonesian faux president is not going to be able to keep a lid on his election scandal much longer.

UPDATE – Major Cook gets fired:

According to the CEO of Simtech Inc., a private company contracted by the Defense Security Services, an agency of the Department of Defense, the federal agency has compelled the termination of Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook.

Well, I’m confident firing the guy asking questions will surely help convince the American people that the Pentagon has the utmost confidence in the provable legitimacy of their Commander-in-Chief. Seriously, don’t they have anyone who understands the way propaganda is supposed to work there anymore? If it were Putin, he would have brought the major to the White House for a very public meet-and-greet, privately shown him whatever real or faked documents would satisfy the man, then sent him off to Afghanistan to win an impressive and posthumously awarded medal.

Folks, come on. She’s an affirmative action judge. What else did you expect?

Seidman: “I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified.”

Stras: “I would say that this is not a judge that understands the role of the federal judiciary. A court without subject matter jurisdiction should not decide the merits of an appeal; it is the very definition of an advisory opinion. What I find ironic is that there are a number of difficult cases where the panel in which Judge Sotomayor participated did not write a reasoned opinion (Didden, Maloney, and especially Ricci), but she wrote a lengthy, reasoned opinion over an issue in which the court had no jurisdiction. Go figure.”

Speaking for myself, I couldn’t possibly care less. I hope they put the Wise Latina on the court along with a black lesbian, a crippled Jew, a Somali jihadist from Minnesota, Michelle Obama, and Bill Clinton. The Supreme Court has been a total farce for decades, better that the farce be made open and apparent to all.

And bring back Rehnquist’s gold lamé-striped robes! Better yet, dress them all in gold lamé burqahs.

The Barefoot Bum gives up:

The world, I now believe, does not want to be saved. Whether the ordinary people close their eyes to the precipice towards which we are rushing headlong, or whether they see and simply do not care, or believe God or science or truth will magically rescue the chosen few, I do not know.

I’m not discouraged by the vitriol of the religious, of the libertarians, of the laissez-faire capitalists. I am, however, discouraged by the vitriol (and worse, the often blithe dismissal) of atheists, philosophers, progressives, socialists and communists, always (to my eyes) for daring to disagree with some item of cherished dogma. Perhaps I’m equally guilty of my own vitriol, but I have always done my best to at least avoid dogmatism, to substantiate my anger with facts and arguments. I have received no such consideration from my detractors. Perhaps I am wrong; I don’t think I’m stupid, but who does?

Perhaps I am myself no better than the ordinary person or my detractors; how can I know what I am blind to? Either way: what use is my work? Even the mostly sensible intelligentsia, from Marx to Myers, attract little more than hordes of ass-kissing sycophants: such is the most I could aspire to. Hell with that….

The world cannot be saved, does not deserve to be saved, does not want to be saved.

It would take the proverbial heart of stone to read this heartfelt cry of godless despair without smiling. There is nothing new under the sun; if the Barefoot Bum had ever truly read the Bible he would realize that he hasn’t figured out anything that wasn’t already explained in Ecclesiastes. And yes, if one’s idea of “intelligentsia”, let alone “mostly sensible intelligentsia”, encompasses both Karl Marx and PZ Myers, I’m afraid the question of stupidity must be conclusively affirmed.

It is not news that the world is damned of its own accord, that it is doomed by its own desires. The Good News is the same today as it was two thousand years ago. You are not forced to follow the way of the world. There is another Way on offer.

Robert Samuelson sums up the consequences:

For the past half-century, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP, federal taxes about 18 percent of GDP and the budget deficit 2 percent of GDP. The CBO’s projection for 2020 — which assumes the economy has returned to “full employment” — puts spending at 26 percent of GDP, taxes at a bit less than 19 percent of GDP and a deficit above 7 percent of GDP. Future spending and deficit figures continue to grow. What this means is that balancing the budget in 2020 would require a tax increase of almost 50 percent from the last half-century’s average.

It’s amazing that it’s still necessary to explain that increased spending and higher taxes is not the magic formula to increase societal wealth, the mad visions of neo-Keynesian economists notwithstanding. Obama/Soetoro’s decision to attempt taxing foreign profits at the second-highest corporate tax rate in the OECD will absolutely cause large corporations to abandon the USA. There’s no question about it. I drove through Switzerland recently and saw the billboards that McDonalds had put up throughout the country. The pictures of fries and sesame seeds in the shape of Switzerland effectively raised a middle finger to the UK, since the advertisements were announcing the relocation of McDonalds’s European headquarters that had formerly been based in London. And McDonalds is far from the only multinational fleeing the insane British tax regime for more reasonable quarters.