A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

The following graphic gives a very good picture of the world economic crisis:
Click to Enlarge
The above proves there is no justice. The fraud and corruption on Wall Street has triggered a worldwide crisis. But the hit on the US economy is small compared to the hit on many countries around the world. Life is not fair.

On the other hand... a lot of right wing nuts and isolationists in the US are probably dancing in the streets. Their long held dream has come true. Globalization is melting like snow on a hot summer day as trade shrinks and shrinks. If they are lucky all international trade can come to a stop and we can pull the buggies and horses out and return to the "good old days" when the only refrigerator was a box in which you put a cube of ice hacked from a frozen lake and brought to your house to sit and melt in you "icebox" to keep your perishables from rotting. Yes... the good old days.

Heck... why not go whole hog. The doom-and-gloom crowd are jumping for joy. Their dreams look as if they may come true. Why stop with the evaporation of "international" trade. Why not become "locavores" where all you can eat are the root crops and wild berries that grown near the rapidly shriking cities. Instead of the "good old days" this crowd is excited about going back to clan-on-clan warfare as it was lived on the Serengeti hundreds of thousands of years ago.

This is what greed and corruption promises to deliver. A world in which the rapacious rich can look about in horror as their pockets stuffed with funny pieces of currency can buy them nothing because their unrestrainable risk taking has delivered us a new world, a world without an economy. A world that Hobbes famously called life lived in the true state of nature: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".

Alternate Reality

Here is a side-splittingly funny bit of alternate reality from the website Sadly, No!:

Dick vs. the Asteroid

Over at America’s Shittiest Website™, Peter “The Mustache of Enhanced Interrogation” Kirsanow tells us all how super cool Dick Cheney’s torture defense was yesterday:

Cheney: Adult [Peter Kirsanow]

A serious, important speech.

Politicians and the media seem unduly impressed by favorability polls, often drawing unwarranted conclusions from them. Since Cheney has relatively high unfavorables, it’s assumed that the public dismisses his statements.

It would be interesting to see the results of a more finely calibrated poll, one that compares how well-respected, competent, and effective the subject is perceived to be relative to similarly situated individuals. As a friend succinctly puts it, “When that big asteroid finally heads toward Earth, who’s the person you’d most want to be in charge?” I suspect Cheney would score at or near the top.

Interesting story!

Here at Sadly, No! Research Laboratories, we recently detonated a hydrogen bomb near a massive pocket of electromagnetic energy, thus creating a parallel timeline where Dick Cheney actually did win the 2008 presidential election and where he did deal with an asteroid assault during the first year of his presidency! Read on, if you dare, to see how this counterfactual history played itself out…

On October 15, 2009, a small asteroid crashed into a rural area of Wyoming, killing 2,000 people in a small town and leaving a massive crater 60 miles wide in the ground. President Richard Cheney, who was just awakening from a nap in his underground White House lair, was informed of the crash by Chief of Staff Alberto Gonzales, who the day before had handed him a memo from NASA with the headline “Asteroid hurtling toward the United States.”

“That damned space rock has just assaulted my home state!” Cheney snarled. “Nobody could have predicted this would happen!”

Cheney called a press conference later in the day and urged Americans to show strength and resolve in the face of this unprecedented assault on the Heartland.

“Asteroids are evil rocks,” said the president. “We do not negotiate with evil rocks; we defeat them.”

The story of President Cheney’s rise to power is a strange one. Despite having an approval rating of -345% as vice president at the start of 2008, Cheney threw his hat into the ring during the Republican primary after every Republican simultaneously dropped out of the race.

“I thought I had a good shot at becoming president until I remembered that I shared the same party as George W. Bush,” explaned ex-candidate Mitt Romney. “We could run an Abe Lincoln-Ronald Regan ticket this year and still lose.”

On the Democratic side, John Edwards beat out Hillary Clinton in a spirited primary in which Edwards used populist rhetoric to capitalize on the furor created by the Federal Reserve’s massive bank bailout program that launched in the wake of the Bear Sterns collapse in March. Promising Illinois Senator Barack Obama had initially considered running for president in late 2007, but in the end decided not to run because his prospects for success were too small.

“I’m a half-black dude with the middle name ‘Hussein,’” Obama explained. “I can already imagine all the emails that are gonna go around about my birth certificate and my secret Muslim faith. Win this election? No I can’t!”

Heading into the summer conventions, Edwards chose Delaware Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate, while Cheney covered his center flank by nominating pro-choice Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Spector, whom Cheney convinced to join the ticket after promising to let him use the CIA and the FBI to investigate the New England Patriots’ illicit videotaping program.

“My Iggles… won that game… fair’nsquare…” bellowed an enraged Spector during his RNC convention speech. “Bill Belicheat… will soon feel the wrath… of the fed’ral gubmint!”

While initial post-convention polls showed Edwards taking a comfortable 485-point lead over Cheney, the race was thrown into turmoil after Weekly World News photographer Mickey Kaus snapped pictures of Edwards engaging in illicit sexual activities with a Sasquatch and the Bat Boy. The Democratic ticket was further hurt during the vice-presidential debates, when the gaffe-prone Joe Biden said that Cheney “deserved a great deal of praise for the compassion and love he’s shown toward his bulldyke daughter.”

On November 4, 2008, 346 Americans went to the polls and voted for Dick Cheney, giving him a decisive 50-vote victory over John Edwards.

One year later, Americans were mourning the deaths of their fellow countrymen in the Wyoming asteroid crash. An enraged Cheney was determined to never let another asteroid crash into the United States again and had decided to use any means necessary in order to achieve that end. Cheney reasoned that it was not enough to merely respond to asteroids after they crashed. For America to be truly secure, the government needed to attack asteroids long before they reached orbit. To this end, he decided that the United States needed to set an example to other asteroids in the galaxy by launching a preemptive strike on the large asteroid that was menacingly hovering over the Earth: namely, the moon.

In order to build his case for war against the moon, Cheney worked to strong-arm NASA into proclaiming that the moon could come unhinged from its orbit to the Earth at any moment and that the military needed to destroy the sinister heavenly body in order to safeguard the homeland. When NASA officials balked at his request, Cheney hired George C. Deutsch, a disgraced former NASA press aide, to go through the agency and make lists of all scientists who displayed signs of disloyalty. Once the list had been completed, the scientists were then rendered to Cheney’s underground White House lair for interrogation. The following transcript was taken from a video of an interrogation session under the White House on March 16, 2010:

[An unknown NASA scientist is tied down to a waterboard in President Cheney's underground lair. Cheney and NASA Grand Inquisitor George C. Deutsch enter the chamber to start the interrogation.]

DEUTSCH: My liege! I have brought forth the Unbeliever to receive your judgment!

CHENEY: Fine work, my young apprentice. And what are his crimes?

DEUTSCH: My liege! He refused to sign a loyalty oath proclaiming that our solar system has been scientifically proven to have been created by an Intelligent Designer!

CHENEY: Bah! The heretic will rue the day he defied my will! Tell me, heretic, do you not regret your lack of faith?

[Cheney pours water over the scientist's head, causing him to gasp and writhe in pain.]

SCIENTIST: GLAAAAAAAAARBB!!! ACK! Please, yes! I repent! Just stop it with the water!

CHENEY: You are wise to confess, heretic! You may achieve penance for your actions by doing one simple task: signing your name to this official policy document that proclaims the moon to be a mortal danger to the security of the United States that must be eliminated!

SCIENTIST: Buh, buh, but sir? You’re talking about destroying the moon? Thu, thu, that would be extremely unwise because…

[Cheney pours more water on the scientist.]

SCIENTIST: GLARRRRRRB!!! OK, OK, I’ll sign it! I’ll sign it, I’ll sign it!

CHENEY: That’s good. Now here’s the pen. Let’s…

[A knock at the door interrupts Cheney. Deutsch opens the door and a hunched-over Alberto Gonzales shuffles in carry a basket of dead rabbits.]

GONZALES: Master, I have brought you your daily basket of fresh uncooked bunny rabbits to devour!

CHENEY: That is excellent, Alberto! Bring them to me!

[Cheney examines the basket and his grin quickly turns into a snarl.]

CHENEY: Alberto, these rabbits are already dead! How can I enjoy my meal if I do not first participate in the slaughter?

GONZALES: But muh-muh-Master! Your doctor told me that you shouldn’t slaughter live bunnies just days after you suffered your twenty-seventh heart attack!

CHENEY: BAH! INSOLENCE!!!

[Cheney pulls out his rifle and shoots Gonzales in the face with birdshot. Gonzales, yelling in pain, flees to seek medical attention.]

CHENEY: Deutsch! You are now my chief of staff! Go forth and fetch me my rabbits! And make sure they survive until they get here!

DEUTSCH: Yes, my liege

[Deutsch exits. Cheney returns to get the scientist's signature.]

CHENEY: I can’t wait to eat those bunnies!

[End transcript.]

After obtaining all the necessary intelligence from NASA officials, Cheney went on the Sunday morning talk shows and began to build his case for war. In addition to the signed statements of top NASA officials attesting to the moon’s nefarious intentions, Cheney produced an alleged picture of terrorist mastermind Mohammed Atta walking on the moon just days before the asteroid struck Wyoming. Cheney called this the smoking gun that proved that the moon posed a threat too grave to ignore.

Although McClatchy later reported that the supposed picture of Atta that Cheney showed on Meet the Press was actually a photograph of Neil Armstrong, the media in general did not question the premises of the president’s claims. The British tabloids in particular ran wild with the claim that the moon could crash into Earth a mere 45 minutes after being knocked out of its orbit. On May 21, 2010, Cheney went on national television and said that he was giving the moon 48 hours to surrender before he would launch a nuclear strike to destroy it. Senate Democrats, alarmed that the president would declare war on the moon without their consultation, tried to draft a nonbinding resolution telling the president that they might be displeased if he were to launch his preemptive lunar assault. The measure was scuttled, however, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that they wouldn’t have the 95 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster.

Two days after his ultimatum to the moon was met with eerie silence, Cheney ordered to sinister rock destroyed.

The year is now 2012. It’s been two years since Dick Cheney blew up the moon, which caused thousands of smaller space rocks to crash all over the earth, killing hundreds of thousands of people; amazingly, none of these space rocks crashed into the United States. Additionally, the moon’s absence has caused the Earth to wobble more on its axis, thus producing more extreme periods of hot and cold than we have ever known. President Cheney, after suffering his seventy-eighth heart attack, has announced that he will not seek a second term as president. In his farewell address to the nation, Cheney says that the decision to destroy the moon was the correct one because America had not been struck by an asteroid in the two years since.

“In the fight against asteroids, there is no middle ground,” Cheney tells his fellow Americans. “Destroying only half the moon would have left us half exposed.”

Mary Roach's "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife"

I absolutely love Mary Roach's books. This book is another winner. She turns what could be dry and boring into fun, humourous, intelligent, and insightful reading. You may not walk away with a grand theory, but you do gain lots of interesting facts and a deeper appreciation for the subject matter.

This isn't a book for the religious. She makes that clear in the introduction:

The crumbling walls of Jericho. Jesus walking atop stormy seas with palms upturned. The raising of Lazarus -- depicted in my mother's Bible as a sort of Boris Karloff knockoff, wrapped in mummy's rags and rising stiffly from the waist. I could not believe these things had happened, because another god, the god who wore lab glasses and know how to use a slide rule, wanted to know how, scientifically speaking these things could be possible. Faith did not take, because science kept putting it on the spot. ... Was Lazarus a simple case of premature entombment? I wasn't sayhing these didn't happen. I was just saying I'd feel better with some proof.

Of course, science doesn't dependably deliver trusts. It is as fallible as the men and women who undertake it. Science has the answer to every question that can be asked. However, science reserves the right to change that answer should additional data become available. ...

Flawed as it is, science remains the most solid god I've got. And so I decided to turn to it, to see what it had to say on the topic of life after death.

Something Better than the Swedish Bikini Team

Here's a Swedish economist, Hans Rosling, saying some interesting things. Sadly, those of you who are big fans of the Swedish Bikini Team will probably lose interest in the following. But if you can put up with the bad lighting and poor camera work, there is a lot of interesting information in the following...



If you want a classier media presentation, watch this TED presentation by Hans Rosling. The data visualization application that Rosling uses will knock your socks off!

Malfactors are at it Again

The reason you want to get criminals off the street is to prevent them from repeating their crimes again and again. But Bush, and now Obama, show no real interest in going after the Wall Street bankers who created the economic meltdown.

The following Bloomberg news item talks about somebody who foresaw the catastrophe but was stopped from preventing it. She now is a whistleblower pointing out that the malfactors are at it again...

Brooksley Born, the former U.S. commodities regulator who lost the fight to police over-the- counter derivatives a decade ago, said the banks that caused the financial crisis are trying to stop the overhaul of the market.

“Special interests in the financial-services industry are beginning to advocate a return to business as usual and to argue against any need for serious reform,” Born said today as she accepted a Profile in Courage award from the John F. Kennedy Library. If changes aren’t made “we will be haunted by our failure for years to come,” she said.

As the chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 1998, Born warned that the unregulated contracts posed a serious danger to the global financial system and moved to address changes in how swaps based on interest rates, commodities or currencies were traded. She was stopped by Alan Greenspan, Arthur Levitt and Robert Rubin, who all argued the market could regulate itself.

Lax oversight contributed to the failures last year of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and American International Group Inc., leading to the seizure of credit markets and causing more than $1.4 trillion in writedowns amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has promised that the U.S. will for the first time regulate over-the-counter derivatives, which are a major source of bank profits.

The motivation for blocking her attempt to oversee over- the-counter derivatives was both ideological and financial, Born said in an interview today after the awards ceremony.

“It was an era where the markets were performing very well. Certainly Alan Greenspan believed they were self- regulating and didn’t need oversight,” she said. “The fact that it was a significant profit center for many of the largest investment banks meant that the financial-services industry was adamantly opposed to any inquiry into that market.”

After Congress exempted over-the-counter derivatives from U.S. oversight in 2000, the market swelled from about $100 trillion to $684 trillion by June 30, according to the Bank for International Settlements. The growth included credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, custom-made products barely in use under Born’s reign.

“I was aware that powerful interests in the financial community were opposed to any examination of that market,” Born said in her first known public comments on the current financial crisis. “I spoke out because I felt a duty to let the public, the Congress and the other financial regulators know that that market endangered our financial stability.”

Political Spin

Here is an excellent example of political spin, the art of putting a thought into a person's mind to get their thinking aligned with what you want.

This works best if the person has no historical knowledge, no analytical ability, and is gullible, i.e. not able to put things in context and understand manipulation.



Why do I call this spin?

1. The numbers are not adjusted for inflation. So of course the "trip length" and "speed" are quite modest in the early 20th century when a cup of coffee cost a nickle and some people worked for a dollar a day.


2. Why does he insist on talking about a "Democratic Congress" when he talks about Ronald Reagan's presidency? Sure the Democrats enabled the easy spending of Reagan, but the breathtakingly huge budget deficits were Reagan's idea, not the Congress'.


3. Using the "Republican Congress" when talking about Clinton would give you the impression that it was the Republicans who suddenly got religion and "slowed spending". No, Clinton took the tough decision of to cut spending and raise taxes in order to move the budget back toward balance. The Republicans fought him. They wanted bigger military spending and were unhappy about a "peace dividend".


4. He sets up straw man by pretending to be willing to admit the Bush 43 took the "debt car the fastest it had ever gone in history" so that he can then spring on you the drunken wild drive that he wants to pin on Obama. Well, it won't work. First, the biggest debt -- fastest debt car -- was under FDR fighting WWII if you use real constant dollars and not nominal dollars. Second, this careening "debt car" is not Obama's fault. It was the collapsed economy that Bush delivered that required Obama's spending.


5. The cutsy joke about Obama driving backwards and the stressing of Obama's "own budget numbers" he wants you to focus on Obama and forget Bush 43. He doesn't want you to link the wild ride Bush 43 took you on to the still speeding "debt car" that Obama is desperately trying to get control over. Instead he wants to plant the idea that Obama single-handedly has "stepped up" the level of debt. This is nutty. This is like pointing out that before the firemen arrived the flames were only in the back bedroom, but shortly after they arrived the house is fully engulfed, so obviously the firemen have "caused" the house to burn down.

The guy putting out this video is slick. He has crafted an attractive visual and carefully put together a "spin" that will lure the unsuspecting down a path of reasoning which is dead wrong. This is politics as manipulation. There is no high minded attempt here to present facts, make sure all sides are examined, and come to a fair conclusion. This is political "argument" as manipulation and deceit.

There is an honest debate to be had between left and right. There are positive values on both sides. But putting out cartoons that gloss over deep issues and leave misleading impressions is not the way to open up political dialog. This cute bit of work presents itself as "simple fact". The world is not "simple fact". There are many ways to see things. Viewpoints can change as the world changes. It is important to use a political framework to help interpret facts, not a bludgeon to stop debate. If you really want to understand public debt, you need to ask serious questions and not put together razzle-dazzle videos that glide over issues that need to be understood and debated.

Media Stupidity

People wonder why newspapers are dying and why media covering is devolving to the sound byte. The following, taken from a blog entry by Robert Cringely, is one good read why people are tuning out to the "news coverage"...

Right now on Google News you can find more than 400 stories all saying the same thing with varying degrees of alarm. The Air Force is three years late in launching a new generation of GPS satellites. The replacement program is over-budget by more than $700 million. The whole mess has been incompetently run and ought to be fixed. All this is true. What isn’t true is that it matters very much to the real world operation of the GPS system or its users.

The GPS system has 31 satellites in orbit right now, the oldest of which has been operating since 1990. For the system to work perfectly it must have 24 or more satellites functioning. The GAO says it is only 80 percent certain that the Air Force can maintain full coverage before replacement satellites can be launched. This lack of confidence is not based strictly on the idea that eight or more satellites will go dark over the next couple years, but that some undetermined number of satellites will go dark, the Air Force will make no progress in replacing them, and that the remaining satellites will be unable, for some reason, to be moved into new positions, filling gaps in coverage. That’s quite a combination of improbable events and makes me very suspicious of the 80 percent number.

For the GPS system to work requires that the receiver in your car, airplane or iPhone be able to simultaneously track at least three satellites (four if you require altitude information). If your receiver can show the satellites it is tracking (many can) you’ll see the number in sight is usually five to seven satellites with the rest being over the horizon and out of view.

If your GPS equipment was purchased in the last couple years it probably makes use of the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), which is a system of ground stations and two geosynchronous satellites that help your receiver correct for ionospheric variations that can slightly degrade GPS performance. Without WAAS your GPS is only accurate to 7.6 meters. With WAAS accuracy is about one meter. The reason we care about this is because GPS is used now to land airplanes and the difference between 3.8 meters above the runway and 3.8 meters below the runway could ruin your whole day.

In addition to improving GPS accuracy over North America (and just North America — there are different systems for Europe and Japan), WAAS also effectively adds two virtual satellites to the GPS constellation. These are the two geosynchronous reporting satellites, which for ease of use in the system are treated by receivers like regular GPS satellites except they for some reason don’t seem to move in the sky. For WAAS-enabled GPS receivers, then, it is possible to maintain acceptable accuracy with only ONE (not three) of the regular GPS satellites in view.

The chances of the GPS system going down are very remote — FAR lower than the 20 percent suggested by the GAO. That’s because the GAO ignored completely in its analysis the implications of WAAS.

So what’s going on here? Why is this even a story?

The Air Force is late and over budget and the GAO wants to make a point of that. The best way to make that point is by putting the technical story in the worst possible light, which the GAO has done to an extreme that I think is excessive. This is just political infighting.

What’s worse, though, are those 400+ news stories that miss the point entirely. Where is a professional and questioning press? It looks to me like 400+ media outlets rewrote the GAO press release and left it at that, giving-in to the fear-mongering that has become the way government policy is promoted these days.

The point Cringely is making is that "news" organizations do no analysis or assessment of the information they are provided. Consequently they have become what Brad DeLong calls "stenographers", not reporters. This is worse than no value added. This is information degradation because it plays into the hands of political spinmeisters or corporate PR flaks. The information is worse than useless because it has been "processed" to sell you something. It isn't information. It is propaganda. It is deception. It is an attempt to turn you into a zombies, an army of undead that does their bidding.