Repent

The West’s political and banking elite are running out of time to repent and make amends for their crimes against their various nations.

“The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all hope for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not give me any way to react (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans to survive.

I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.”
– Dimitris Christoulas

Saints busted again

Now it’s more annoying than ever that the Vikings fumbled away the NFC championship to this gang of lying bozos:

Williams’ speech, delivered less than two months before the Saints’ bounty scandal became public, was revealed to Yahoo! Sports by Pamphilon, who had access to various team functions for much of the 2011 season.

Pamphilon, who directed the critically acclaimed “Run Ricky Run” documentary for ESPN, is working on a project featuring former Saints special teams ace Steve Gleason, who is suffering from ALS. Pamphilon has released an audio recording of the profanity-laced speech (also obtained and listened to by Yahoo! Sports) on his website and said he believes “there’s no doubt at all” that Williams put a bounty on Smith in the meeting.

Said Pamphilon: “At one point Williams says, ‘We hit [expletive] Smith right there’ – then he points under his chin [and continues] – ‘remember me.’ Then he rubs his thumb against his index and middle fingers – the cash sign – and says, ‘I got the first one. I got the first one. Go get it. Go lay that [expletive] out.’

It’s now clear that the Saints merit the harsh penalty they received from the NFL Commissioner. If Payton was wise, he’d withdraw his appeal at once. And the fact that the Saints organization is now attempting to feign outrage over the way in which Pamphilon exposed their continued lies is simply despicable.

Medieval Pre-Keynesianism

From The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin:

Following the example of the more advanced people they had conquered, the Tartars began issuing their own paper currency, and after 1260, when Kublai Khan completed his conquest of China, he made it the regular institution reported by Marco Polo. In Marco Polo’s day the notes were still passing at full face value, but in the last years of the Mongols’ Yüan dynasty (1260–1368), floods of paper money once again signaled inflation. When the first emperor of the new Ming dynasty (1368–1644) took over, he cut back the paper money in circulation, and finally succeeded in stabilizing the currency.

From its beginnings in China, printing bore this guilty association with unsound currency. For centuries printed paper money appeared to be the only form of printing known to European travelers. A paper-money debacle closer to the West added to the ill-repute of printing. In Tabriz, capital of Mongol-conquered Persia, both Venice and Genoa kept commercial agents during the early years of the fourteenth century. The extravagance of the Mongol ruler Gaikhatu Khan from 1291 to 1295 put pressure on his treasury, which he tried to relieve by issuing paper currency. Block-printed in 1294 in Chinese and Arabic, each of his notes bore the date of the Muslim era, a warning to forgers, and the cheerful prediction that now “poverty will vanish, provisions become cheap, and rich and poor be equal.” But the magic did not work. After only a few days of compulsory use of the paper, commerce was disrupted, markets closed, and the Khan’s financial officer was reported murdered.

We like to flatter ourselves that we know so much more than our predecessors. And yet, the idea that printing more money will lead to economic growth as well as reductions in poverty and income inequality can be seen in almost every Paul Krugman column that mentions the money supply. The problem isn’t that his solutions are old, failed policies from the 1930s, but that they are old, failed policies from the 13th century.

The only difference between the treasury of Gaikhatu Khan and the Federal Reserve is that the latter has had the sense to slowly increase the money supply, thus delaying its eventual day of reckoning. But the cold, hard, mathematics means that day will eventually come.

The Barca machine

Grantland’s game diary for the second leg of the Milan-Barca quarterfinal:

Brian: Sometimes I watch a bit of play that just knocks me over the head with WHAT A WEIRD TEAM BARCELONA IS. They just won that penalty by bypassing a couple of completely plausible shots in order to stroke the ball around in the area like they were playing a very casual game of hot potato. They were literally trying NOT to pass the ball into the back of the net, and now it’s 1-0.

If you’re the heads-up display in the Barca-player visual-software interface, how do you decide when to light up for “shoot”? There are like nine floating circles that have to converge, at which point the software runs an algorithm that determines whether the resulting shot would be beautiful.

Three things struck me most about watching Barca effortlessly beat the Rossoneri. First, it’s like watching the Harlem Globetrotters. They don’t just make the pass instead of taking the shot, they make another pass, and sometimes a third, before taking the shot, and sometimes this all takes place inside the opposing box. I’ve never seen anything like it. They don’t so much waste opportunities as blatantly ignore them.

Second, they press frighteningly well. I would estimate that at least one-third, and possibly as much as one-half, of Milan’s attempts to clear the ball were intercepted or otherwise failed. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Milan defense was playing back on its heels in full, catenaccio from the start, but no sooner did they take the ball away than they lost it, usually in their own half of the field.

Third, Barca stretches the field horizontally better than any team I’ve ever seen. There was always a winger on the far side of the ball, but instead of crossing the balls in the air, the wingers would push the ball inside, force the defender to commit, then a) try to beat him, b) pass off to Messi, or c) pass off to the central midfielder coming up in support. Their entire game is played on the ground, which makes sense given that their front six appear to average about 5’6″. They just keep passing and slashing and pressing until the defense cracks, then instead of shooting, pass three more times for good measure, before finally deigning to make an attempt on goal.

I would have been more annoyed by the two penalties awarded Barca were it not for the fact that the fouls were legitimate, and at least the first time, the ball should have already been in the net twice over by the time the foul occurred. The final score was 3-1, but it could just as easily have been 6-1. That’s not to say Barca is invulnerable, as neither their defense nor their keeper impressed me. A big, fast team with the benefit of a laissez faire referee could beat them, assuming they didn’t run out of steam chasing the little guys around.

The real problem

Some, like Michael Barone and John Leo, say the problem is too much diversity and too little science. Not me. I say the problem is quite clearly the rise of the undead!

The scary thing is that this is what the chairman of the University of California board of regents looks like when dollied up for a press conference. Can you even imagine what she looked like earlier that day, when she’d been freshly unearthed and the mortician hadn’t yet sewn the wig onto her scalp?

Mailvox: the benefits of immigration

In which a historical objection is raised:

I’ve read that the two migrations of Greeks into Italy (the first around Cato the Younger’s time IIRC, and the second after the fall of Constantinople) were beneficial for Italian society because of the Greek learning and culture they brought with them. Are these relevant to your thesis about the negative effect of immigration on receiving societies? As an immigrant to Italy, what is your opinion?

Cato the Younger lived from 95 to 46 BC. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. The Roman Republic is considered to have ended in 29 BC. I submit that this specific example is very relevant to my thesis, insofar as decades of civil war followed by a collapse into one-man dictatorship would generally be considered to be a societal negative.

As for the second wave of Greek immigration, those were Greeks in the Byzantine sense, not the Hellenic. Since Byzantium was still somewhat more civilized than thrice-sacked Rome or the oft-invaded Italian peninsula, this is rather like asking if immigration from the United States to some of the more war-torn African societies would be beneficial. And remember, the difference between Byzantium and the Italian peninsula would likely have been even starker were it not for the Venetian conquest and sack of Constantinople in 1204.

Inflation and the money supply

There is considerable talk about inflation these days, since gasoline prices are hitting historic highs and the Federal Reserve has been increasing the money supply at a very rapid rate. And yet, if we actually take the time to look at a range of data, one thing becomes very clear: the increase in prices simply hasn’t kept pace with the increase in either of the primary measures of the monetary stock.

Annual delta, February 2011 to February 2012

M1: +341.8 billion, +18.2 percent
M2: +882.3 billion, +9.9 percent
US avg gas price: +22 cents, +6 percent
National median home price: +0.3 percent
CPI-U: +2.9 percent

This gap in relative deltas cannot be explained without bringing the credit markets into the equation. And it should be fairly obvious, if not tautological, that an increase in debt is inflationary whereas a decrease in debt is deflationary, as per the law of supply and demand. So why are we still seeing some price inflation despite the contraction in the private debt sectors?

The answer is simple. The rapid 23 percent annual expansion in public debt has allowed the economy’s overall debt level to remain essentially flat for the last four years. In other words, despite all of the foreclosures and defaults, there has been no debt contraction and therefore no deflation… yet. Even so, the only place that the Fed’s herculean attempt to raise price levels by printing, borrowing, and spending money has really been effective is in the stock market, or more precisely, in Apple stock.

I can’t disagree

But that’s hardly the salient point:

“I think if President Obama came out as gay, he wouldn’t lose the black vote,” a cheerful Van Jones told MSNBC this afternoon. “President Obama is not going to lose the black vote no matter what he does,” he added.

He’s certainly not going to lose it to Mitt Romney. But what a very strange thing to say, considering the rumors that have surrounded Obama in Chicago.

WND column

Dissolution and Post-Democracy

It is always difficult for those who live through transitional periods in history to recognize that they are taking place.

While we distinguish between the Roman Republic and the Roman empire, and mark the birth of the Byzantine empire with the establishment of its capital at Constantinople, it is unlikely that the average person living under Roman rule understood, much less cared, that he was a citizen of the Roman Republic, the Eastern Roman Empire or the Western Roman Empire. Indeed, although we call them Greeks and Byzantines, the men of the Eastern Roman Empire still called themselves Romans and believed they, and not the barbarian-infested ruins of the city on the seven hills, were the true heirs to Romulus and Caesar Augustus, even though they no longer lived in Italy nor spoke Latin.