On the debate

I am afraid you will all have to wait a few more days for Round Four. I was traveling last week and got absolutely no writing of any kind done.

Abandoning the treacherous Tories

A former Conservative Party treasurer switches to UKIP:

Alexander Hesketh’s life has been synonymous with the Tory Party. He first canvassed for it at the 1959 election, aged nine. He was a minister in several departments under Mrs Thatcher, and John Major’s chief whip in the House of Lords for three years. He later became Conservative Treasurer.

So to announce that he is to join UKIP as a high-profile campaigner and fund-raiser is no ordinary political defection.

‘I’ve left for a number of reasons,’ he tells me in his West London home. A key factor is his strong belief that Europe has betrayed this country’s working people.

There is absolutely no excuse for the Tories betrayal of the British people. It is quite literal treachery.

Mailvox: they have eyes

But they really don’t want to see. LH writes about a response to yesterday’s column:

I forwarded your most recent article to a friend of mine who happens to be a supporter of Herman Cain. Rather than address issues listed in your article, his response went ad hominem.

That WND commentator…. likes to hear himself talk… what exactly did he say? I quit reading him long ago… he laid out a pretty good outline with no substantiation. He’s a Libertarian AND a Southern Baptist who claims Italian residency… a pot-smoking, tax-evading foreigner who plays church??? LOL… (I deduced that from his bio) 🙂

I do agree Cain needs to come more clearly on his involvement with the Fed… and I question his objection to a full audit, but he did not say he was against an audit… only that a “full” audit would be cost prohibitive and is not necessary… and I can agreee with that… whenever the government goes on a witch hunt, someone ends up being a scapegoat and it is not usually the one whose head should be offed. By setting parameters to the audit, the field of potential scapegoats is narrowed… I believe that is what he was alluding to…

I totally agree with Cain on whose fault it is if companies succedd or fail… in the context of “it’s not government’s place to decide…” I think the commentator got that one wrong in the end analysis.

keep watching…. The more popular Cain becomes, the more you’ll hear about his faults… Did we hear much of him before the Florida Straw Pole?. Funny how they ignore Santorum. I see a pattern.

The pattern is that if you can’t even win a Senate race, most people will conclude that your national appeal isn’t likely to be significant. There’s nothing funny about it. But it is funny how the Cain supporter cannot see that Cain is contradicting himself by claiming it’s not the government’s job to decide who wins and who loses while he is defending Wall Street and the banking bailouts.

By the way, here’s the final Facebook score from yesterday’s WND columns:

Day on Cain: 40 Likes
Cain on Cain: 823 Likes

Remember this the next time you are wondering how Wall Street and the big banks managed to get bailed out yet again by Republicans in the future. The lesson, as always, MPAI.

Notes on the European economy

Three observations from conversations I had over the last few days.

Spain: The sort of clean-cut pretty college-age girls who a few years ago would be seen working at Estee Lauder counters, at high-end restaurants, and as models or shot girls can now be seen working the suburban streets as prostitutes during the day. According to my Spanish taxi driver, the basic hourly rates haven’t changed, but both the quality and the quantity of the labor available has significantly increased. This suggests that the rates for the previous supply of street hookers have dropped dramatically.

Switzerland: In speaking to a Swiss friend, I learned that car examinations, which are required every two years for older cars, now have a waiting list of up to eighteen months. This waiting list was nonexistent two years ago. The delay indicates that increasing numbers of Swiss are keeping their old cars rather than turning them in as soon as the lease is expired, as had been their previous custom.

Germany: A police acquaintance from the gym returned from Oktoberfest in Stuttgart last week. After hastening to assure me that his interest in such matters was purely professional, he told me that he was astonished by the youth, beauty, and low rates of the nightclub girls, who apparently now go for 30 Euros, down from 70 Euros for less attractive women two years ago.

Lest the obvious escape one, these are all very bad economic signals. In a growing economy, the street whores are toothless old crack addicts working the bus stops at night and the few pretty young girls who aren’t working in some easy retail job are very expensive escorts.

WND column

The Magic Negro, Part II: Republican edition

It is completely understandable why Republicans are increasingly enthusiastic about Herman Cain. First and foremost, he isn’t Mitt Romney. The Republican Party elite has been trying to force the mercurial Mormon down the throats of the party’s grass roots for two election cycles, but despite his elegant coiffure and vast money-raising capacity, the average Republican voter wants nothing to do with the man. They quite rightly regard him as less trustworthy and more slippery than Bill Clinton.

UPDATE: I note that Cain’s comments, as highlighted on the Drudge Report, are particularly ironic in light of the government bailouts of Wall Street and General Motors.

Republican presidential contender Herman Cain amplified his criticism Sunday of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement, calling the protesters “jealous’ Americans who “play the victim card” and want to “take somebody else’s” Cadillac.

Mailvox: too much negativity

I found Felix’s ode to the blog to be more than a little amusing. I will, however, correct his mistaken assumption that the comments are unmoderated here. They have always been subject to moderation. I have never pretended otherwise.

I check back here for the first in months, sick of the negativity and the thinly-veiled attempts at conceiling post-moderation behind subjective “rules”. And what do I find? Still, 9 out of 10 posts are negative, and nearly that many are self-congratulatory. “Thousands come to hear what I have to say”. Oh, please. Your writing is so terrible, serving only to assuage your own insecurities, that some of us visit only periodically to see if you’re still on the internet. Your blog has became so played, so utterly formulaic and predictable (1. find some person enjoying their 15 minutues of fame 2. mock them and point out that they will never be successful, never be president, etc, 3. lather rinse repeat). The only thing you could write that would be interesting and uplifting for most of us is a suicide note!

His statistical infelicities notwithstanding, I can’t honestly say Felix is all wrong. The vast majority of the blog posts are negative in some way, but then, I am a reasonably sophisticated economics observer and we are in the early stages of a very large scale economic contraction. I’m still pointing out pretty much the same thing I’ve been pointing out since the spring of 2008, the difference is that now people like the Governor of the Bank of England are saying exactly what I’ve been saying, even if their prescriptions are very different than the ones I would suggest and are doomed to failure. Drat, there’s that negativity again!

But what else can I say? Either economic policies will work or they won’t work, and in the case of the UK’s latest quantitative easing, it won’t work, just as all the other proposed fixes didn’t work, and for much the same reason. What, I wonder, is there to be positive about in the world these days? The so-called Arab Spring? The woeful collection of Republican presidential candidates who won’t even talk about the real issues at hand? The death of Steve Jobs? I suppose I could write long and cheerful posts about how my soccer team won its last game, how good the salmon that Spacebunny made last night was, how the Vikings are going to turn it around, or how pretty the long-legged young girl who was selling her services on the suburban street in broad daylight at noon in Spain was – bloody hell, that’s a negative economic indicator too – but happy substance-free pop culture isn’t my idiom.

The main reason this blog is predictable is because I am a) consistent and b) usually correct. And the reason I am usually correct is because the behavior of human beings tends to fall within a small and relatively predictable range. Most people are not only idiots, but the particular form their idiocy takes tends to be predictable. Look, the moment a powerful banker or politician proposes something that is actually viable, I’ll be pleased to say so. But until one does, I will continue to be negative and subsequently proven correct.

VPFL Week 4

102 Moundsview Meerkats (3-1-0)
64 Bane Sidhe (1-3-0)

79 Greenfield Grizzlies (3-1-0)
60 MS Swamp Spartans (2-2-0)

79 RR Redbeards (2-1-1)
79 Macau Marauders (1-2-1)

73 GroverBeach Quixotes (2-2-0)
42 Bailout Banksters (1-2-1)

66 Green Reverends (2-1-1)
59 Cranberry Rhyneauxs (1-3-0)

Arian Foster is back! And with Michael Turner and Beanie Wells performing at a high level, the Meerkats now have an effective running game to go with the lethal passing of Aaron Rodgers. The matchups predict wins for both the Meerkats and the Grizzlies; a pair of 4-1 starts would put both old school teams in position to make playoff runs. The defending champion, meanwhile, appear to be struggling and Andre Johnson’s injury isn’t going to help.

This is your weekly open NFL thread.

RIP Al Davis

“Raiders owner Al Davis, whose NFL legend as a pioneering rebel began 60 years ago as an assistant with the Baltimore Colts and was punctuated with a 1992 Pro Football Hall of Fame induction in Canton, has died at 82.”