Psychopolitik 2.0

Explain how this makes any sense: seeing it as a sign of top talent, w/ unemployment at long term highs employers are favoring…people that already have jobs.

I can’t even imagine the boss in the Dilbert comics doing this.  That’s how ridiculous it is to me.

Props (& more commentary).

Last year I read something along the lines of this.  Some of the speculation was wrong:

-A “tight money” policy has not been embraced, actually the opposite.

-The Fed has MORE power now.  In fact, so much so that H.R. 1207, Ron Paul’s Federal Reserve Transparency bill, actually has enough co-sponsors to pass the House.  Clearly it wasn’t principle that led to that, otherwise it would’ve happened a long time ago, but fear.  I suspect many supporting it think of it as a stopgap to save the Fed, as opposed to something that’ll popularize calls to bury it.

Anyway, that wasn’t my point.  This is:

Officials with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have informed Bernanke about a plan that would have been unheard-of in the past: a general examination of the US financial system. The IMF’s board of directors has ruled that a so-called Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) is to be carried out in the United States. It is nothing less than an X-ray of the entire US financial system.

As part of the assessment, the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the major investment banks, mortgage banks and hedge funds will be asked to hand over confidential documents to the IMF team. They will be required to answer the questions they are asked during interviews. Their databases will be subjected to so-called stress tests — worst-case scenarios designed to simulate the broader effects of failures of other major financial institutions or a continuing decline of the dollar.

That was June 2008.  Tommorow will be July 2009.

So…what happened?

In case anyone is wondering what I’m doing at the moment, I’m enjoying some vintage Dillinja (“Jah Know Ya Big” is playing right now) at the moment with a brew.

Hope you’re enjoying yourselves.  I am.

BTW: trust me, that beer is a lot better than it sounds like it’d be.

Edit: now I’ve got some Sharon Jones playing.  Fuck the hipsters, I like this deep-soul revival shit anyway.

Keynes: “In the long run, we are all dead”

Average person: “…and I’d like the cause of death to not be starvation”:

Households pushed their savings rate to the highest level in more than 15 years in May as a big boost in incomes from the government’s stimulus program was devoted more to bolstering nest eggs than increased spending.

The higher savings rate is healthy in the long term, economists said. But without vigorous consumer spending, the government may have to do more to revive the economy, possibly through further tax breaks and spending. [...] The savings rate, which was hovering near zero in early 2008, surged to 6.9 percent, the highest level since December 1993.

“What?  People are saving money in preparation for leaner times instead of buying iPhones?  Disaster!!!”

All you had to do to figure out the problem with “stimulus” was consider why spending cratered in the first place: the economic status quo of consumption beyond boundaries of reason ran into the brick wall of “Hah!  Now you have NO money!  Take THAT!”.  When people are in fear of going broke, when they do have extra money the rational thing to do is keep it, because for all you know you might need it later.  This is only read as troubling if ones concept of the economy is that spending at all costs is key & damn the future.

People will spend again when it doesn’t look like a bad idea to do so.  Saying the economy won’t get better until it gets better sounds like mere crankery, but it has actual meaning, in that “better” in the first case refers to a healthy level of activity.  It’s the latter definition — the economy structurally making some kind of sense, so people can rationally participate — that is the hard part.  Savings is creeping up, fulfilling the piss-off-Paul-Krugman part of the recipe, the rest is yet to come.

Noticed this story about a inter-bureaucracy gang fight re: the southern border:

A proposal to send National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to counter drug trafficking has triggered a bureaucratic standoff between the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security over the military’s role in domestic affairs, according to officials in both departments.

The debate has engaged a pair of powerful personalities, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, in what their subordinates describe as a turf fight over who should direct the use of troops to assist in the fight against Mexican cartels and who should pay for them.

At issue is a proposal to send 1,500 additional troops to the border to analyze intelligence and to provide air support and technical assistance to border agencies. The governors of Texas, Arizona, California and New Mexico made the request in January, drawing support from Napolitano but prompting objections from the Pentagon, where officials argue that it could lead to a permanent, expanded mission for the military.

No surprise there.  Large organizations in general, and the government in particular, function with a certain internal tension even within their tightly defined culture.  They aren’t going to argue border patrol vs no border patrol, so they argue about who is in charge.

So what does Dear Leader have to say about this?

President Obama has signaled that he is open to the idea, asking Congress for $250 million to deploy the National Guard while also saying he was “not interested in militarizing the border.” The issue, which has been stalled before a National Security Council policy committee, will be decided by the president. (emphasis mine)

You see, he doesn’t want to militarize the border.  He just wants to send a bunch of people, in uniforms, who work for the government and are authorized to carry weapons for purposes of state, to the imaginary line that demarcates where the United States of America ends & Mexico begins…

Nice one.  I can imagine the application of this logic in everyday life now:

-”Officer, I wasn’t speeding, I was just in my car going faster than what that sign back there says”.
-”No, honey, I didn’t stay out late getting drunk at a strip club, I simply had several beverages made from fermented grains in a gathering place where young women do clothing-optional dancing & acrobatics, and enjoyed their talents so much that I felt it an insult to leave the show early”.
-”Naw, dude, I didn’t smoke your stash, all I did was simultaneously study the effects of igniting dried marijuana leaves & measure my lung capacity”…

A couple months back, I insinuated that Antonin Scalia was “objectively pro-molestation” due to his line of questioning in a case before the Court.  Today, a correction.  Even Scalia has limits:

A public school violated the privacy rights of a teenage girl who had to disrobe on suspicion she had ibuprofen pills, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in its first decision on student strip searches.

By an 8-1 vote, the justices upheld a ruling that the school and its officials violated the U.S. constitutional right that protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

The ruling by the nation’s high court was a major defeat for school officials who had defended the strip search as necessary for student safety, school order and combating a growing drug problem

There was a partial dissent, with only two in the majority saying that the school officials could be held liable.  Along with the cowardice of shielding the school from liability, there was a troubling subtext of “well, if it was something more dangerous than Ibuprofen…”.  But one positive thing about cynicism is that low expectations are easy to reach, and if you’d asked me before the ruling I’d have bet 5-4 against the violated girl.

So, 8-1, and Scalia wasn’t it.  Who was odd man out?

Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the part of the ruling that Redding’s privacy rights had been violated.  Thomas said the ruling “grants judges sweeping authority to second-guess the measures that these officials take to maintain discipline in their schools and ensure the health and safety of the students in their charge.”

Clarence Thomas: objectively pro-molestation.

Y’know how when you go to a mall food court, over each stand there’s the list of prices?  Earlier today, I was sitting down to some chinese food and watched three people in a row walk up to one that sold pizza by the slice, point at a pizza, and with a straight face say “…how much is a slice of this?”

What made it funnier was the employee behind the counter craning her neck to look at the menu board before answering.  People are amazing, ain’t they?

To the state-liberals out there: if you ever find yourself about to ask a libertarian “who will protect the environment without government?”, consider crap like this first:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Clean Water Act does not prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from allowing mining waste to be dumped into rivers, streams and other waters.

In a 6-to-3 decision that drew fierce criticism from environmentalists, the court said the Corps of Engineers had the authority to grant Coeur Alaska Inc., a gold mining company, permission to dump the waste known as slurry into Lower Slate Lake, north of Juneau.

“We conclude that the corps was the appropriate agency to issue the permit and that the permit is lawful,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority.

The corps permit, issued in 2005, said that 4.5 million tons of waste from the Kensington mine could be dumped into the lake even though it would obliterate life in its waters. The corps found that disposing of it there was less environmentally damaging than other options. (emphasis mine)

I’m thinking the real problem here is the idea of an institution that can claim the authority to approve dumping in the commons, in complete ignorance of what people actually in the surrounding area may think.  Call it a hunch.

Props.

Some stories just speak volumes.  All emphasis mine:

Border guards in Chiasso see plenty of smugglers and plenty of false-bottomed suitcases, but no one in the town, which straddles the Italian-Swiss frontier, had ever seen anything like this. Trussed up in front of the police in the train station were two Japanese men, and beside them a suitcase with a booty unlike any other. Concealed at the bottom of the bag were some rather incredible sheets of paper. The documents were apparently dollar-denominated US government bonds with a face value of a staggering $134bn (£81bn).

How on earth did these two men, who at first refused to identify themselves, come to be there, trying to ride the train into Switzerland carrying bonds worth more than the gross domestic product of Singapore? If the bonds were genuine, the pair would have been America’s fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the UK and just behind Russia. No sooner had the story leaked out from the Italian lakes region last week than it sparked a panoply of conspiracy tales. But one resounded more than any other: that the men were agents of the Japanese finance ministry, in the country for the G8 meeting, making a surreptitious journey into Switzerland to sell off one small chunk of the massive mountain of US bonds stacked up in the Japanese Treasury vaults.

You have to wonder about the logic of a world where such documents are even remotely considered to actually be worth that much.  The global financial/monetary system is amazing…

By “amazing”, I mean “absolute top to bottom nonsense”.

(cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats)

I don’t just link to people I agree with on everything, as you may know.  But I do keep it to people who, if I would disagree, I could see myself having a reasonable discussion about it.

The moment I started typing this, I had 3 blogs in my blogroll that are written by self-described “conservatives”: Cunning Realist, Cynics Unlimited (we’re talking Canada w/ that one though, keep in mind…), & Andrew Sullivan.

Well, read this, then look over there again.