Vox Popoli

From Slashdot: I remember buying 5.25″ floppy disks with Lifetime guarantees. I forget the name of the company, being pretty young back then, but they used to have an elephant head on their logo. I guess maybe they figured people might take the term “lifetime guarantee” seriously.

Ah, yes, Elephant Memory Systems. I still have stacks of folders full of pirated Apple II games saved on their floppies packed away in storage. As the two founding members of the Thieves Guild, which tended more towards the distribution end than the cracking front, Big Chilly and I used to spend hours and hours playing Wizardry, Autoduel, Aztec and other great games of the greenscreen era.

Unlike many of the retro games that are being remade, Autoduel and Aztec would actually make for good modern games. Falling through the floors, the creepy tentacled octopus things that have to be chopped to pieces by machetes, and the rooms that unexpectedly fill with water – until Wolfenstein 3D, Aztec was the only game that ever made me jump in my chair. Come to think of it, somebody should have done Swashbuckler 3D.

I think it was the Apple II that convinced me that I like computers better than the average human. I was a social reject until tenth grade, when the ranks of the Beautiful People unexpectedly opened as I grew taller and became a top athlete, but even so I was never quite able to convince myself of the supreme importance of the social hierarchy. I got invited to the right parties and while I sometimes went, it was never a priority.

I remember very distinctly the look of complete disbelief on the football captain’s face when he asked me if I’d be showing up for the bash at someone’s house that Friday night and I told him that no, I’d just gotten a new game the day before and I was itching to get home and spend the evening playing it. I’m not quite as bad as Big Chilly, though, who would sneak out of fraternity parties his freshman year of college in order to get back to his dorm room and play Wizardry – a game he’d played through in junior high – on his Macintosh.

People ask why I don’t get out more. Hmmmm…. I have a hot blonde, a 3.4 GHz machine with a monster 3D card and a 4.5 x 6 foot projection screen. I have no interest in the big room with green carpet – there’s nothing out there for me.

Elephant Memory Systems. “Never Forgets”.

Robert Novak writes: George W. Bush’s campaign planners intend to shorten debate on the party platform at the Republican National Convention in New York in order to limit conservative opposition to the president’s policies. In the past, platform committee members have arrived in the convention city early Sunday the week before the GOP convention begins. This time, however, several delegates have been alerted that there is no need to get to New York before Monday, with platform meetings not scheduled to begin until Tuesday. That would leave only two and one-half days of platform committee sessions during which conservatives could push their positions on prescription drug subsidies, education and immigration.

That’s an interestingly open admission of the president’s anti-conservativism. Perhaps one of these days conservatives will wake up and realize that he has more in common with John Kerry than he has with them. You’d think the fact that his operatives are actively planning and working against them would serve as some sort of notice that he is not on their side and never was.

The entire S&P price action in the Futures is being controlled by one counter party. All the guys strongly hate them: their CME clearing number is 990N and they clear through Gelber trading. That one account is solely responsible for the current level of the S&P.

They are the ones that are throwing the S&P up overnight. Then they are the ones that are sitting on the bid all day long, supporting the market action. The S&P pits have been decimated, absolutely ruined. There is no volatility, so all the traders have left. Now the hot pit is the Eurodollar pit. Go figure, that used to be like watching paint dry. All the traders I have talked to view the market as being rigged. They keep waiting for the price action to break loose, but it never does.

They are stunned by the lack of volatility. And furious. Time after time after time 990 just sits there on the bid. Don’t they ever go away. They just absorb the entire market and then push the price wherever they want it to go. “Gee, I wonder who that counter party is.” They are all terrified of shorting, because every time they do, they get drilled. I thought it was just my systems that weren’t working that well, but they are far more dispirited than I. Intervention at its finest, your tax dollars at work, providing the ultimate tax to us all.

We have watched 2000 contract market orders on the Bid at key down levels of – 50 and – 100 on those rare days when 990N decides the program trading will revert to a well-defined pattern of “allowable” retracements. The Mini’s are being rigged in order to provide “support” for swollen price levels. They have to be for now, as without the daily rigging, “Price” would revert to its inherent “Value”, a disturbing proposition to those benefiting from the financial economy’s adolescent denials.

Counterparties provide an important function in any exchange, liquidity. Given the incessant “intervention” by 990N, there is very little liquidity beneath these markets to provide real support. I am actually writing you to alert you to this complete market manipulation and to see if you had any pull to get the word out to different traders and the media. I am one of the biggest S&P traders in the world as far as volume per day in that I average over 40,000 round turns per day on the screen in the e-mini. I tell you this because that is how I know one house is completely manipulating the market everyday because of all the trades I do with this guy. I know it sounds hard to believe that one person can control a world market but trust me: this is occurring. He works for the firm Gelber, which is house 990.

This is the basic premise for his game. He waits until the market is relatively slow, around 9:30 to 10:00 everyday, usually when the “paper trade” starts to subside then he begins a theme, mostly always long and he begins to buy. He is always looking for confirmation of his theme with what other people are doing. When the market stops trading in his direction he then drops in a offer of 300 to 700 which he sees if anyone is interested in buying it. If there is no interest he then buys the order from himself, with the order actually trading. He does this enough times until he attracts other buyers which then hits price points and the market runs violently in his direction.

I am sure I do not have to tell you that this is completely illegal to do. He started doing this with 300 lots back in November, now he has made so much money doing it that he is up to 2000 lots. He is completely in control of the market (illegally) the majority of the time. My firm and I have contacted the Merc on three different occasions with video proof that I recorded of my trading. It shows blatantly this guy crossing his orders thousands of times a day. The first person we talked to in compliance admitted that he saw something there when they reviewed the video of the trades I taped of him. He was mysteriously fired the next day.

We then came up with more examples for them to review and in the beginning they claimed he wasn’t doing it. We called them a third time, this time talking to the head of compliance and he finally admitted that they had the guy under investigation because they saw something, but in the meantime he is still allowed to trade and make millions until their “investigation” is concluded.

They obviously love the volume the guy is putting up and how it makes the emini S&P look from a standpoint of a liquid market. But if the public had knowledge of what this guy was doing I don’t think they would be too impressed with the liquidity. There is obviously some kind of cover-up. Do any of the pit traders you know have knowledge this is happening? And do you have any advice on how I can anonymously get the word out with what this guy is doing? I know you are not a true tick by tick “scalper,” but this is getting to the point where it is starting to effect everyone in the marketplace.

I have no way of knowing if this is true or not, but both the VIX as well as Adam Hamilton’s analysis demonstrate that volatility has been at a historically low level for an incredibly long period of time, which is anecdotal support for what this trader is asserting. I have no doubt the markets are manipulated – they are regulated, after all, which is nothing but open manipulation, and one has to presume that the Working Group of Financial Markets was created for a reason.

You might think that we have a free market in this country, but a few minutes reflection about the myriad of regulatory agencies and their actions will soon convince you otherwise.

I’ll be making my monthly appearance on the Northern Alliance radio show on the Patriot 1280 AM at 2 PM central today – some of the gentlemen are out and about so it looks as if we’ll be postponing our cage match showdown on the Iraqi occupation until next month – but in the meantime we’ll probably be discussing the implications of Iraq on the president’s bid for a second term, Air America’s financial shenanigans and how the soccer gods paid back France for its perfidy in Iraq and at the United Nations.

In somewhat related news, the Fraters Libertas are lamenting the fact that their favorite 20-something lesbian blogger turned out to be a 30-something man. This is news? I always thought the first rule of intersexual relations and the Internet is this: if a girl is on the Internet and you have no direct evidence of her sex, she’s a guy.

By the way, no Northern Alliance web streaming yet, but I’m told there will be next month.

Most Americans now say that sending U.S. troops to Iraq was a mistake, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds. For the first time, a majority also says that the war there has made the nation less safe from terrorism. The survey taken Monday through Wednesday shows a turnaround in views toward the war in less than a month. Continued violence in Iraq and questions about the war’s justification apparently are eroding support even as the U.S. moves to turn over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government next week.

It is the first time since Vietnam that a majority of Americans has called a major deployment of U.S. forces a mistake. When the war in Iraq began last year, the public by three-to-one said sending troops wasn’t a mistake. Just three weeks ago, 58% still held that view. Now, 54% say it was a mistake.

I’m not the least bit surprised. The Iraqi War has been over for some time now and the return of the troops is long overdue. Military force should be used wisely, judiciously and only for the purposes for which they are created. The armed forces went in, took out Hussein, captured him and so accomplished their mission. At that point they should have either been given a new military mission or brought home. Nation-building is a foolish and doomed enterprise in which we should never have engaged. The administration’s decision to engage in it will have the net effect of severely weakening the war on method and is unlikely to help the coming war against the jihad.

Now, I actually agree with the basic position Blondesense is attempting to articulate here. But a particular paragraph leaped out at me, as I happened to have translated Benito Mussolini’s Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle only an hour before.

Well, hell no, Mr. Smith. It’s still up to the parental units to decide what their kids watch and if it’s questionable, don’t bring the stuff into the house or turn on the TV if they are not sure if a program is appropriate. If the government wants to do something about the media, how about rolling back all the fascist deregulation of the media and allow independent companies to own some of it thus allowing democracy to flourish, duh.

Fascist deregulation. A fascinating phrase! Not only were the Fascists not exactly known for deregulating things, but to the contrary they demanded regulation – and often outright nationalization – of almost everything in Italy. In addition to demanding a National Council of experts from a variety of fields and creating a General Commission with cabinet-level power, they sought a national policy of furthering Italian culture, a sort of National Endowment for the Arts combined with the FCC and the US Olympic Committee. Mussolini famously declared: “Tutto nello Stato… nulla contro lo Stato.” Everything in the State, nothing against the State. And by “the State” he meant the government.

Now, it certainly would be desirable for more independent companies to own elements of the media. And what prevents this? Primarily government ownership and regulation of the airwaves, as well as the many government restrictions relating to investment and the management of capital. The only answer is more deregulation, not less, still less the government seizure and control advocated by the historical Fascists and their modern descendants. National Public Radio is the epitome of a modern facist institution; the giant media corporations are only quasi-fascist by comparison, their Third Way corporatism notwithstanding.

Finally, democracy is not freedom and the two should never be confused. How is a more independent media likely to bring about the near-term demolition of the tri-partite structure of government and the replacement of the constitutional republic with a national referendum-driven system? Unless, of course, by democracy you mean a system of proportionate representation designed expressly to limit democracy, which we already have, in which case it has presumably already been flourishing for, lo, these past 215 years.

As the argument finally stumbles towards its corrrect conclusion that the government has no responsibility to ensure that all visual entertainment is child-friendly, the fact that the resident blonde would never make such asinine and ignorant statements forces me to conclude this is simply another case of attempted thinking while liberal.

Grant Wahl writes on CNN/SI: Strange but true: Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo was named for Ronald Reagan, a favorite of his parents. Wonder what the Gipper would think?

If the Gipper saw him play, he’d love it. I’d rather have C. Ronaldo on my team than his more famous counterpart. He was the most dangerous player on the Portuguese side yesterday, and if Ashley Cole hadn’t a) showed incredible stamina and b) played an excellent game, he probably would have scored at least once. The entire game was a battle between the two players but you could tell what tracking Ronaldo was doing taking out of Ashley, as he stopped making his trademark runs up the left side before the end of the first half.

To paraphrase Space Bunny on Ronaldo, “doesn’t that kid ever get tired?” Even at the end of the game, he looked ready to play another 90 minutes. I just wish he didn’t play for bloody United.

Cliff Kincaid writes of Pat Buchanan: It was shocking news that Patrick J. Buchanan, Ronald Reagan’s communications director, is getting $500,000 to write a Bush-bashing book to be titled, Where the Right Went Wrong…. there are disturbing indications that Buchanan, who left the Republican Party in 2000, may even back Ralph Nader for president. Buchanan’s American Conservative Magazine featured a front-page article, “Ralph Nader: Conservatively Speaking. The long-time progressive makes a pitch for the disenfranchised Right”….

Yet Buchanan’s magazine sounds increasingly like a left-wing publication with its constant talk of America’s “empire” around the world. This is a variation of the old Soviet line that the U.S. wants to dominate and control the world. It’s disconcerting to see conservatives who played key roles in fighting communism using such noxious terminology.

First, Pat Buchanan is never going to endorse Ralph Nader, who is a neosocialist egomaniac. However, there is a real point of connection between a leftist like Nader, true conservative like Buchanan and a libertarian such as myself. All three of us are diametrically opposed to the sacrifice of national sovereignty embraced by the Democratic Party and the dominant Bush-worshipping faction of the Republican Party.

What Kincaid and many other economically-illiterate Republicans fail to understand is that America does have an empire. It is a shadow empire, to be sure, but it weighs more heavily and is felt more strongly than the Roman or British empires ever were in their dominions. Ironically, the empire of the Imperial Dollar has never been more fragile or more in danger of collapsing than today, and with its inevitable collapse will come the reduction of America’s stature on the world stage.

Nader’s solutions are likely to prove disastrous than helpful, but unlike Bush and Kerry, he is neither invested in the present system of interlocking globalist institutions nor interested in sacrificing American interests to them. Pat Buchanan realizes this, and in the very fact of the two distinctly different men finding common ground, demonstrates how the most deadly danger to the long-term existence of America lies within.

There is a bitter joke in South Africa: what is the difference between Thabo Mbeki and Robert Mugabe? About ten years. As Mugabe drives Zimbabwe ever deeper into socialist nightmare by murdering the nation’s only productive class and confiscating their property in order to turn it over to feckless squatters, Mbeki gives South Africans clear warning of his long-term intentions to transform that country into yet another Left-wing African hellhole.

“In this climate taxation is depicted as the confiscation of what is properly our own — an intolerable burden that should be reduced. The social, the collective and the public realm are portrayed as the enemies of prosperity and individual autonomy… and worse are opposed to the moral basis of society grounded as it should be in the absolute responsibility of individuals to shoulder their burdens and exercise their rights alone.”

He [Mbeki] noted that [UK columnist Will] Hutton argues that Western democracies had been characterised by “one broad family of ideas that might be called Left — a belief in the social, reduction in inequality, the provision of public services, the principle that workers should be treated as assets rather than commodities, regulation of enterprise, rehabilitation of criminals, tolerance and respect for minorities — and another broad family of ideas that might be called Right: An honouring of our inherited institutional fabric, a respect for order, a belief that private property rights and profit are essential to the operation of the market economy, a suspicion of worker rights, faith in the remedial value of punitive justice and distrust of the new.”

Mbeki emphasised that there could “be no doubt about where we stand” with regard to this “great divide”. It is to pursue the goals contained in what Hutton called ideas “that might be called” Left.

At least Mbeki, unlike the majority of American Democrats who should more properly be termed Democratic Socialists, understands what it is he is rejecting in turning his back on law, order, private property, and age-old institutions. He is the more intelligent form of political evil, whereas the American “liberal” is, by comparison, evil’s idiot cousin, always deluding himself that he is honoring the past by defecating on the present and “fighting” to destroy the future.