Bookie-Client Confidentiality

I have a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell:

Data reported in the news media and other sources show that the prices, or spreads, on California CDS wrongly brand our bonds as a greater risk than those issued by such nations as Kazakhstan, Croatia, Bulgaria and Thailand. The perception ofrisk could adversely affect the price of our bonds when we go to market. That makes the CDS market important to our taxpayers. That is why I want to fully understand the municipal CDS market in general, the market for California CDS, and [Goldman-Sachs'] role in these markets.

Lockyer is feeling the heat, but then again, anyone stupid enough to take the job of California State Treasurer deserves to roast in his own juices. California doesn't need Goldman-Sachs to ruin its prospects for funding and recovery; the majority of Californians have already mastered the art of economic destruction, and had been hard at work long before this Depression began to manifest.

The ship's going down, and they're arguing about the position of the deck chairs.

Negative Rights

This is, unfortunately, not the worst of it (links to .PDF):

JUSTICE GINSBURG: But I really would like you to answer the question that you didn't have an opportunity to finish answering, and that is: What other enumerated rights? What does the privileges and immunities of United States citizenship embrace?

MR. GURA: The unenumerated rights, Justice Ginsburg?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Supreme Court of the United States of America. The popular wisdom is correct: anyone can grow up to be a Justice, Senator, or President. Anyone.

The Epic of the Eight-Fold Invisible Hands

I, for one, welcome our new tiny-pocketed arachno-capitalist non-overlords.

The West: An Interpretive Dance

Via the Smoking Gun:

JANUARY 28--Two Tennessee women who accused a man of rape have admitted to cops that they had consensually agreed to sex with him in exchange for a pack of cigarettes. One woman told investigators that the duo filed a phony police report because they "didn't enjoy the sex," according to cops.

Split between them, a five-dollar pack is about $2.50. Now, what two (or more) consenting adults do with themselves is none of my business, but I think he was taken for a ride, so to speak. Were they more attractive, or were another intoxicant involved, then perhaps they would have a case; regret is the new threshold of evidence.

Would they lie about something as serious as rape?

When in doubt, empty the clip

- The story is slightly aged, but it's probably still fresher than the last packet from Telkom.

- "Muskelkraft Flieger" would also make a great rock-band name.

- They're trying, but without a towel and large, friendly letters reading "DON'T PANIC", this is going nowhere fast.

- Having decided to take my chances without the above, I'd like to have one of these instead. (With video goodness.)

- Evidently, we're just not modeling hard enough; pass the chicken entrails and bones, please.

- Speaking of financial modeling...

I'm interested to know if this works

Speaking of instituitions...

If at first you don't succeed, use a bigger mallet:

In essence, the report calls for a new Bretton Woods-style system of managed international exchange rates, meaning central banks would be forced to intervene and either support or push down their currencies depending on how the rest of the world economy is behaving.

The proposals would also imply that surplus nations such as China and Germany should stimulate their economies further in order to cut their own imbalances, rather than, as in the present system, deficit nations such as the UK and US having to take the main burden of readjustment.

Of course! Brilliant! What could possibly go wrong this time?

Wait for it...

Although many economists have pointed out that the economic crisis owed more to the malfunctioning of the post-Bretton Woods system, until now no major institution, including the G20, has come up with an alternative.

No alternative that favors State-control of the currency, that is. Of course, no government (or aspiring government, or ramshackle clubhouse staffed by tin-pot soapbox dictators) worth its swirling cesspool of crawling parasites would advocate such a restriction on the most subtle form of taxation, would it?

WTS: Choppah, LNIB

It's a nice gesture, but that's about as far as it goes:

State officials estimate the giant two-day yard sale being held at a state warehouse will bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition to clearing out office products, the state is also selling unclaimed property from state parks and items confiscated by law enforcement, said California Department of General Services spokesman Eric Lamoureux.

The prison department contributed dental chairs and surplus prison shirts and jeans.

"This is a win-win for the state and for shoppers," Schwarzenegger said in a statement Tuesday announcing that a selection of items also would be sold on eBay and Craigslist. "Together we are eliminating waste and providing great deals in this tough economy."

Quick math check: being excessively generous and estimating to a cool one million fiat-bills, out of twenty-six billion dollars of debt, that comes to four one-thousandths of one percent of the total state debt.

I'm really glad these modern, forward-thinking politicians are on the job, or else the Peoples' Republik might be in real trouble.

The stupid, it burns!

The goggles, they do nothing!

I hate this state.

Yet another argument against universal suffrage

Edgy, but largely without a point

It's an excellent scam, but the situation defies belief:

The first “anti-stab” knife is to go on sale in Britain, designed to work as normal in the kitchen but to be ineffective as a weapon.

The knife has a rounded edge instead of a point and will snag on clothing and skin to make it more difficult to stab someone.

Getting one's self killed with one of these "safe knives" won't make one any less dead for the effort. In fact, there is danger in the idea that there is any such thing as a "safe knife" to begin with; as even the most wet-behind-the-ears Scout knows, a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one due to forcing the blade during use, and failure to treat any tool with respect will inevitably lead to injury.

One hardly knows what to expect next; a universal ban on grinding wheels? Perhaps cleavers? Rocks? Whiffle bats?

Pathetic.

One Man's Trash

Last night, after working on the MythTV box for a while, my long-time friend and I plug in a hard-drive that I had sitting on my desk for an indeterminate amount of time, as I really couldn't remember where it came from (this happens when there's more than ten floating around at any given time). New, SATA, 200+GB drive. I had figured that it belonged to the system I built for Elle a while back (who, as a budding Linux acolyte, I am very proud of).

My friend (we will name him Sisco) fires up the tower and prepares to format, but notices that there happens to be an NTFS partition already on the drive. After some discussion, I figured that I had tried to install XP from Elle's HP laptop (another story of frustration and woe), but being unsure of its nature we decide to investigate further, as the partition size isn't consistent with standard operating procedure. Sisco reboots the tower, this time with Archlinux on a USB-drive, and we start scanning the contents of the directories on the drive: Firefox history, cookies, Documents, Firefox bookmarks, etc; nothing matches up with any expectations that we had for our prospective users.

Curiouser and curiouser; we attempt to boot the drive by itself. Nothing. XP is completely borked.

Sisco ups the ante, and starts a Ubuntu Live CD to examine the contents of the drive previously unviewable from the command-line.

The user, who shall remain safely anonymous, had copies of the user's passport (scanned), résumé, and his William D. Ford Direct-Loan disbursement information (which is to say, everything) on the Desktop. Needless to say, there was enough information here to cause all sorts of mayhem with his life, and probably the lives of his references with a little additional phishing.

Finally, a beautiful display of irony: the résumé lists "advanced computer skills" as one of the user's talents.

It turns out that the drive had been given to me some years ago by a roommate that inherited it from another roommate previous to my occupation of the house; I imagine that since XP was shot, they assumed that the drive itself was trashed and subsequently ditched it. Luckily for him, Sisco and I ended up with the drive (the sensitive data will be destroyed, and likely irreplaceable data will be emailed/mailed to him), but not everyone is so fortunate.

Folks, please, if you value your privacy, take some time to either fix or destroy this sort of sensitive information on your hardware when upgrading or tossing your desktops or laptops. It's an easy mistake, but that doesn't make it any less costly in the end; this means using something stronger than Mickeysoft at some point (see here: dd (command)), or physically destroying the drive. Encryption is not only highly recommended, but borderline mandatory. (I'll have some links up in a later post, as this is a rather broad topic.)

Lastly, if you are not joined at the hip to a Windows-only application for work, I would suggest scrolling to the top of the page and giving Ubuntu a try; it runs in memory for those trying it without an install, it's intuitive, clean, infinitely more secure than Windows or Apple, and it's free. FREE. As in, "free beer".

Join us.

When a problem comes along, you must empty the clip

Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and all it took was a couple of comments for me to realize that something without comment-space would be unwieldy. So, we're back to "round-up" posts until I get this figured out. Here are the links, preserved for posterity:

- US Customs poised to ban one-handed assisted-open knives.

- "Isn't it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?"

- Use a camera, go to jail. (Via Lew Rockwell Blog)

*(Conor Clarke refutes his argument thusly.)

For those of you that like pictures, the government is not a socialist abomination! For those of you with basic reading-comprehension, this is a lie!

*(I'm using asset information from the US flow of funds account. This chart is basically an updated and modified version of one I did for the business site, using slightly different data and a slightly different metric. There were some very thoughtful criticisms of that chart, so I decided to make a new one using asset information.

That said, this measure isn't perfect. I'm excluding a lot of assets -- households, farms, the financial sector -- in part because there's no precise data (see here for more) and in part because I want to avoid the same assets being counted twice. And I don't include liabilities. Please let me know of other methodological suggestions in the comments section.)

Here's a methodological suggestion: try including the liabilities. Richard Fisher, of the Dallas Federal Reserve Board, takes pair of pliers and a blow torch to the argument:

Add together the unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Social Security, and [the total unfunded government liability] comes to $99.2 trillion over the infinite horizon. Traditional Medicare composes about 69 percent, the new drug benefit roughly 17 percent and Social Security the remaining 14 percent.

I want to remind you that I am only talking about the unfunded portions of Social Security and Medicare. It is what the current payment scheme of Social Security payroll taxes, Medicare payroll taxes, membership fees for Medicare B, copays, deductibles and all other revenue currently channeled to our entitlement system will not cover under current rules. These existing revenue streams must remain in place in perpetuity to handle the “funded” entitlement liabilities. Reduce or eliminate this income and the unfunded liability grows. Increase benefits and the liability grows as well.

Just a quick guess on my part, but I don't think that the collected assets of the government at any level amount to even one-tenth of their liabilities. Where exactly is this money supposed to come from, Mr. Clarke? When one starts to muddy the waters between public and private ownership and control, liabilities do not exist in some quantum-state, trapped in some Social Security lock-box like a geriatric and vegetative Schrödinger's cat; they exist as a real unfunded problem, growing exponentially and swallowing nations in the process.

Peddle your sophistry elsewhere, you sycophantic hack.

Better ladder than never

Honestly, I can't make this stuff up:

ACADEMICS at Oxford University have banned step-ladders from its world famous Bodleian library – because of health and safety fears.

The ban means students are unable to reach books on the top shelves but dons refuse to bring them lower because it would remove them from their “original historic location”.

"Besides," the health and safety officer said, "it's common knowledge that those books contain ideas not listed in the Party-approved literature lists, and we certainly wouldn't want that sort of rubbish floating about within easy reach... It causes sluggishly-progressing schizophrenia, and if that's not a health and safety issue, then I'm the Queen-Mum."

Naiveté, intractability, and the aftermath

One must spend money to make money, nes pa?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama proposed on Thursday nearly doubling funds to enforce U.S. tax laws next year, with an aim of more than quadrupling funding for tax compliance to $2.1 billion within five years.

The budget plan seeks $12.1 billion for the Internal Revenue Service, responsible for collecting and enforcing individual and corporate tax laws, for fiscal 2010, which begins October 1. That amounts to a roughly 5.2 percent increase over the IRS budget for 2009, which was $11.5 billion.

The budget proposal, which must be approved by Congress, includes a $890 million request to boost tax enforcement, including in the international arena, an increase of $400 million from 2009.

Brilliant; I suppose that we should start referring to the agents as "revenuers" for time-period parity.

However, according to the President of the Dallas Federal Reserve, this is all irritatingly pointless:

No combination of tax hikes and spending cuts, though, will change the total burden borne by current and future generations. For the existing unfunded liabilities to be covered in the end, someone must pay $99.2 trillion more or receive $99.2 trillion less than they have been currently promised. This is a cold, hard fact. The decision we must make is whether to shoulder a substantial portion of that burden today or compel future generations to bear its full weight.

Now that you are all thoroughly depressed, let me come back to monetary policy and the Fed.

It is only natural to cast about for a solution—any solution—to avoid the fiscal pain we know is necessary because we succumbed to complacency and put off dealing with this looming fiscal disaster. Throughout history, many nations, when confronted by sizable debts they were unable or unwilling to repay, have seized upon an apparently painless solution to this dilemma: monetization. Just have the monetary authority run cash off the printing presses until the debt is repaid, the story goes, then promise to be responsible from that point on and hope your sins will be forgiven by God and Milton Friedman and everyone else.

And the Obama administration is worried about recouping $21 billion a year from corporate-tax loop-holes?

Mogambo Guru is right: we're freakin' doomed.

Black and white, red and yellow all over

The Volokh Conspiracy comments on a conspicuous absence of coverage devoted to the Nordyke v. King ruling:

So I thought that the Ninth Circuit's holding that the Second Amendment binds state and local governments (via the Fourteenth Amendment) was a pretty big deal. It was the first federal court of appeals decision to so hold. If followed, it would invalidate the Chicago handgun ban, plus perhaps some other broad state and local gun restrictions, such as New York City's ban on all gun ownership by 18-to-20-year-olds. And it might well trigger Supreme Court consideration of the issue, since there's now a split between the Second and Ninth Circuits on the issue.

But here's the odd thing: I couldn't find any articles about this in the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, or the Washington Post. (I searched for second amendment or bear arms or nordyke or gun show.) There was early coverage on CNN and in the San Francisco Chronicle, but nothing else in any newspapers in the NEWS;MAJPAP file on LEXIS. Am I missing some stories that just didn't happen to use the keywords I searched for? Or is the court decision just not worth even a brief mention?

And yet, the newspapers remain confounded regarding their failure to attract new readership; truly, there is no saving that which does not wish to save itself.

When in doubt, empty the clip

- Bee warned: there is a fungus among us.

- The logical and inevitable consequences of nationalized health-care.

- Speaking of logical and inevitable consequences: it seems that doing anything except bleating for help to the State (which may or may not respond within three hours) will not only get one murdered on one's doorstep, but will cause the State to deny your family compensation due to its negligence while simultaneously awarding those with sports injuries and "human rights" (read: taxpayer-funded narcotics).

- I have reason to suspect that Zimbabwe has finally exhausted its ink and paper reserves.

- In other news, water declared "wet", and human vision is mysteriously impaired at night; IMF is indicates that it will continue to forecast improvement in order to boot-strap the manufacture of confidence-based goods.

The Eye of the Hurricane

"I believe it is peace prosperity for our time."

World leaders on Thursday heralded the G20 summit as the day the world “fought back against the recession” as they put on a show of unity that lifted global markets and mapped out a new future for financial regulation.

Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, host of the summit, said the meeting marked the emergence of a “new world order”, as he unveiled what leaders claimed was a $1,100bn package of measures to tackle the global downturn, including support for lower income countries and a $250bn plan to boost the international money supply.

The Dow crested above 8,000 today, and gold is almost below $900 per ounce: opportunity knocks.

Carving away the self-lauding double-speak, the various appointed representatives agreed to inflate the the money supply, which as has been mentioned before, does absolutely nothing to alleviate market-correction or compounding failure that is systemic to the fiat-currency banking structure. Indeed, the only thing that continued government-endorsed credit-expansion does in a correction is prolong the correction, and this will be no exception.

It would seem that Chamberlain's ghost still haunts Downing Street.

Persistent thinking getting you down? Try Samhsatrol!

The Drudge Report breaks self-fulfilling prophecy:

NANNY STATE: GOVERNMENT WEBSITE TO WARN OF SADNESS/CRYING OVER ECONOMY
Mon Mar 30 2009 18:43:56 ET

The U.S. government is set to offer an online emotional rescue kit!

"Getting Through Tough Economic Times" will launch Tuesday with a media push across all platforms.

The site is meant to help people identify health concerns related to financial worries.

The feds will warn of depression, suicidal thinking and other serious mental illnesses. It will raise warning flags for: Persistent sadness/crying; Excessive anxiety; Lack of sleep/constant fatigue; Excessive irritability/anger.

The guide will be available starting at midnight at http://www.samhsa.gov/economy.

Developing...

Just knowing that you and I are paying for this crap is causing "persistent sadness/crying", "excessive anxiety" and "excessive irritability/anger".

Washington: if you're going to try to pick my pocket with one hand while trying to wipe my nose with the other, I suggest you use only the fingers you aren't particularly fond of.