Posts from — January 2013

That’s apparently the “theme” of the Davos economic tax dodge where the superwealthy reduce their fortunes by paying various people to give talks that no one really understands because they don’t make sense in the real world. Parsing the various explanations they seem to want it to mean ‘if you get lemons, make lemonade’, but my first reaction was that it was bad marketing copy for a vibrating bed with a foam mattress.

The whole concept makes even less sense when you listen to the attendees complaining that ‘uncertainty’ is holding back growth. Here’s a clue: the only thing that is certain is that at some point you will die. Everything else is subject to change.

The people doing all of the kvetching don’t seem to understand that risk is an integral part of capitalism. The religion of austerity is the main culprit as far as the world’s problem with growth. It has made things worse wherever it has been imposed, but the people who attend Davos think it is the only path to take.

CBS reports on the Israeli elections:

JERUSALEM In a stunning setback, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line bloc fared worse than expected in a parliamentary election Tuesday, exit polls showed, possibly forcing the incumbent Israeli leader to invite surprisingly strong moderate rivals into his government and soften his line toward the Palestinians.

TV exit polls showed the hard-liners with about 61 seats in the 120-seat parliament, a bare majority, and the counts could change as actual votes are tallied.

The unofficial TV results had Netanyahu winning only 31 seats, though he combined his Likud Party with the far-right Yisrael Beitenu for the voting. Running separately four years ago, the two won 42 seats.

One vote, if this result holds when the actual ballots are counted, is not much of a margin in a parliamentary system, and Netanyahu will probably seek some padding by pursuing a partnership with at least one more party.

This is not the result he assumed and the media had predicted when he called the election. He was looking for a clear mandate. There is no guarantee that he will actually be the Prime Minister in the new government. In any case, it makes early elections almost a certainty.

Update: After the first actual count it is a tie, with Bibi & Company getting 60 seats, not 61. In Israel you vote for the party not the candidate, so there is no way to grab seats by cutting deals with individuals, it’s all about parties. The vote isn’t official yet, so it may change again.

Does Zero actually believe what he said in his speech to today?

Based on what he has done in the last four years, there is no reason to be at all optimistic that anything in that speech will actually be relevant to the policies and proposals coming out of the Executive Branch. After four years you would hope that the White House had figured out that the Republicans have no intention of doing anything that might look like a ‘win’ for this administration.

The House has already indicated that they think that working more than two days a week is cruel, and unless something is done about the filibuster in the Senate, nothing will occur there. Everything is in place to see absolutely nothing done by the US government in the next two years at a minimum.

The really absurd part of this entire event was listening to various and sundry talking heads talking about the total failure to extend an olive branch to the losers. You wonder where these people have been while Zero has been clear-cutting olives groves to present them to the Republicans, only to see them burned.

The Bill of Rights is patterned after the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and then adapted to the The Virginia Declaration of Rights. Those are the principal sources, and the right to bear arms is in both.

Those who lived through the Revolution had a deep aversion to a standing army because of the conditions imposed by the English before the Revolution with the assistance of a standing army in the Colonies. They supported the militia model, with citizens responding to threats by forming ad hoc units. This is the essentially the ‘posse’ that people see in cowboy movies. A lot of people were also suspicious of ‘select militias’, essentially today’s National Guard, as being too close to a standing army.

NTodd has covered this in posts like this, and has done a lot of research into the contemporary discussions that were taking place as the Constitution and Bill of Rights were being written.

What we have is a compromise in both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, so there is no one meaning of anything you read in them. In some cases rants took place over single words, and changes were made to get something that would pass. The people involved had their opinions, and the states had their priorities, so many things are purposely vague to avoid offending people and/or states in many places.

Today everyone is talking about guns, but the Second Amendment doesn’t specify any particular type of ‘Arms’. People may have the ‘right to bear arms’, but there has been no outcry over the almost total ban on switchblades in the US. In most states non-lethal stun-guns and chemical sprays are either banned for most people, or heavily regulated. I don’t remember any great discussion over these laws.

All gun owners have done by refusing to negotiate is make it appear that they are on the same side as the whackoes who carry out these massacres, and that is not where you want to be.

Mustang Bobby, among many others, is gobsmacked by the Wall Street Journal’s concept of the ‘downtrodden’ in this society. With the median income for a household in the US stuck around $50,000, the Wall Street Journal wants to focus on the plight of households with six-figure incomes.

Avedon Carol features another space cadet – Matt Yglesias. It is hard to imagine the level of gall required by someone who writes a column for Salon to complain that retired people are “producing nothing of economic value”. Someone needs to explain the Law of Supply and Demand to Master Yglesias before he is allowed near another keyboard. The lad might want to have a discussion with Florida economic development officials before he derides the ‘economic value’ of retired people. [Sorry, if you think I’m being hard on him, but the ignorance on display is just unbearable.]

Heated Cat Pad

You got a problem with that?

[Editor: Mini-Sox, who isn’t so mini anymore, is enjoying the hood of the Honda during the cold snap of two weeks ago, as opposed to the current cold snap.]

Friday Ark

It is cold and windy locally which is an improvement over last night when it was cold, windy, and rainy while I helped a neighbor look for an escaped ferret. I was sure that the ferret would figure out that it was a better idea to get out of the rain and into an enclosed space that was dry, but my neighbor insisted on flashing lights around and whistling for the poor creature.

First thing this morning I took my Mother for a doctor’s appointment that the doctor’s office had neglected to record three months ago when the appointment was made. That meant a return trip this afternoon which finished up with a major traffic jam caused by two vehicles attempting to occupy the same space at the entrance to Walmart.

After that I had to go and pick up some materials that should have been ready yesterday, but someone forgot to tell the people who actually produce the materials that this needed to be done.

Then a stop by the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions that were the result of the doctor’s visit, only discover that the doctor’s office had ordered the wrong medication.

Meantime, even if I had had the time to use the camera, the cats are all crouched in or under something to stay warm, while trying to figure out where the ‘cat’ with the stubby legs and tail came from. Catblogging will may be delayed.

I also discovered that my very own Congresscritter Jefferson Beauregard Miller, had voted against the latest bill to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy. This will come back to haunt us when we get smacked by our next hurricane, as the REPUBLICAN Congresscritters from New York and New Jersey made quite clear.

I was reminded of this Lee Judge cartoon when I read in the Local Puppy Trainer that the school board is going to fund school resource officers.

The school district is broke, but they are committed to coming up with $500,000 to put sheriff deputies in the 26 elementary schools until school is out in June. The Sheriff has said that coverage for this semester will actually cost about $1 million, but he would split the cost with the district.

In Zero’s gun control proposal [.PDF] he talks about ‘incentives’, but I seriously doubt he is going to get enough money from Congress to cover the real costs of putting resource officers in elementary schools, even if someone could convince me that it was good idea.

The proposal covers the obvious stuff and plugs a few of the serious loopholes in our current laws. It also has the CDC return to reporting on firearm violence. The CDC had issued reports about it for years until the NRA twisted some arms in Congress and got it stopped. The NRA didn’t like the numbers that were being reported, so they killed the reports.

Speaking of reports, they must have seriously changed the input form used as the basis for the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report because in nearly a decade of filling it out for my little department I don’t remember any questions about the type of firearm used in crimes. That would have been a real PITA, because that is in the case files, not the summary sheets that I worked from. The big city departments might have the manpower to track that sort of thing, but most local police departments are happy if they can find someone who is able to fill out the required form and get the state police off their back.

Susie Madrak pointed to this Guardian article that notes:

The National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said in its monthly health check that the economy shrank by 0.3% in the three months to December. Against a backdrop of weak consumer spending and a drop in manufacturing output, the estimates from NIESR may add fuel to campaigns for George Osborne to adopt a more radical approach to generating growth.

And then I found this BBC article that mentions:

Last month, Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, cut its growth forecast for this year to 0.4% and warned that the economy may have contracted in the final three months of 2012, and may do so again in first quarter of 2013.

The eurozone economy as a whole is already in recession, having contracted in both in the third and fourth quarters of last year.

This is a good thing to keep in mind while you watch the government of the United States play Calvinball with our economy. There is no doubt what the policies everyone seems to be advocating will do – push us back into recession, just like Europe.

Put people back to work repairing the infrastructure and they will have money to spend to increase demand for goods and services. When they are working they will pay taxes which reduces the deficit and strengthens Social Security.

So, Zero is trying to explain the impact of Congress refusing to raise the debt limit, but he doesn’t understand, or even appreciate what this stupid game is going to do to people who make up the bottom half of the economy.

Some of these people are already in trouble because they were counting on their tax refund to pay off some bills and keep them going. The Fiscal Bluff delayed the IRS from even beginning to process tax returns until January 30^th, and the debt limit problem could prevent the IRS from sending the refunds out until after it is settled. At a minimum the people who were counting on their refunds are going to incur interest and penalty charges as well as late fees. Some of them may well be evicted, or be unable to get needed medical treatment.

If the Social Security and VA checks don’t go out in February because of the debt limit, many of the people who were counting on them are going to incur additional costs they can’t afford, and it is not unreasonable to assume that some of them will die as a result of not being able to buy their medication. This isn’t a concern of the politicians because they don’t know any of these people, as they don’t send money to campaigns or have lobbyists.

The media talks about the National credit rating, and not paying interest on the debt as if those were critical issues, and ignore the people who are going to be hungry, sick, and/or homeless because of juvenile games being played in Washington.

Dave Barry in the Miami Herald covers the newest game in Florida: The Python Challenge.

The game is covered at the official web site, www.pythonchallenge.org. If you put Python Challenge into Google it will send you to www.pythonchallenge.com, which is a game for programmers learning the Python language.

Florida has a python hunting season in an attempt to keep down the number of pythons that have infested the Everglades, and to reduce the number of people in the state to who think wading in a swamp that is known to be infested with constrictors that can swallow them is a reasonable thing to do. Every contestant who is swallowed improves the gene pool and save the lives of the native animals that inhabit the ‘Glades.

They are offering cash prizes for the biggest python caught, and the most pythons caught, but discriminate by not offering anything of value to the pythons, other than a possible free meal.

One of the ways that an individual can acquire precious metals is by buying the bullion coins of national mints. The US Mint produces bullion coins for silver, gold, palladium, and platinum. If you go to the Mint’s website for the one ounce platinum coin you will see this:

All American Eagles are legal tender coins, with their face value imprinted in U.S. dollars. Although their face value is largely symbolic, it provides proof of their authenticity as official U.S. coinage. The one-ounce platinum coin displays the highest face value ($100) ever to appear on a U.S. coin.

Given that an ounce of platinum is currently selling for over $1600, it should be obvious that the amount imprinted has no connection to the value of the metal used. If you tried to use one of these coins to pay your taxes, you would only get $100 for it, not the value of the metal.

That small paragraph establishes two important facts: the value of the metal and the amount on the coin are not connected, and the coin is “legal tender”.

Digby reads the New York Times and reports that the White House is telling Krugman that they are refusing to mint the coin “as a way to put the onus for avoiding default entirely on the GOP.”

Mattbastard at the Agonist notes that Kevin Drum is happy with Zero dumping the coin, but if the White House thinks that the Republicans are going to get all of the blame, they should read Athenæ.

If the coin is minted and has $1,000,000,000,000 stamped on it, it is legal tender and the Fed has to accept it at face value.

This move has made the debt limit, and possible shut down of the government, a petty political battle on both sides. No one seems willing to act like an adult and solve problems when they can have an artificial crisis that will screw up the lives of a lot people who don’t need any more stress.

In the early hours of January 13th, 1969 I was forced to accept something that I had known for a while, but had pushed to the back of my mind: I was mortal and was going to die.

This was the first of several incidents when my chance of survival was a good deal less than 1 in 2. This wasn’t the scariest, but it was the first, and following on the heels of the terrible events of 1968, it had the biggest impact.

In the end the only “death” was an airplane, Rivet Ball, the Air Force’s only RC-135S. The military version of the Boeing 707, the fuselage broke in half, like an eggshell, on impact. A very talented pilot, John Achor, the aircraft commander, was responsible for that miracle.

I provide more detail on my other site.

CBS reports that: NRA vows to fight everything on Biden’s gun agenda. No one knows what is on the agenda, but that doesn’t bother the current leadership of the NRA.

Up until the mid-1970s the NRA was a pretty good organization. It promoted weapons safety and conservation, basically an organization for hunters and target shooters. Then the whackoes took over, and it has represented the gun manufacturers ever since.

I heard someone on the radio say that the NRA position was that we didn’t need any new laws, we just needed to enforce the existing laws. I’ve said the same thing myself, but there is a major difference – I haven’t been spending millions of dollars to prevent that from happening, and the NRA has.

There hasn’t been a permanent director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in six years. Every nominee has been blocked. As a result, when budget cuts took place there was no one to fight for the Bureau. They didn’t have adequate staff 6 years ago, and the problems have just escalated.

I assume that at least the old Assault Weapons Ban will be pushed through Congress, and possibly some limit on bulk ammunition purchases. Congress has to do something. The NRA should have done more than send a flunky to the meeting with Biden and just issued a blanket “NO!” to changes, if they wanted to represent gun owners. They really work for the weapons industry, so they don’t have to worry about actually representing their membership.