Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Microsoft funds startup that disrupts bittorrent.

SOCIALISM:

Bill to overhaul government pensions in Ohio.

"Retirees will see their cost of living allowances cut and workers will be told to put in more years, pay more money into the system and accept a lesser benefit at the end of a long career, if the bills become law.

Pension officials, who have been begging lawmakers to take action for nearly three years, say the changes are needed to shore up their finances for the long haul and to allow them to avert drastic cutbacks in health care benefits for current and future retirees."

The looting is coming to an end because there's no more to loot.

ECONOMY:

This article claims that Ohio employers have thousands of job openings, but they can't find qualified workers.

"In the manufacturing industry, which has been responsible for most of Ohio’s job growth during the past year, as many as 600,000 jobs are vacant across the country due to a shortage of skilled workers, according to the 2011 Skills Gap report from The Manufacturing Institute."

"Another, perhaps equally important reason jobs are going unfilled, is the gap between workers’ expectations and the wages employers are willing to offer, said James Brock, a Miami University economics professor."

I don't buy it. If these people really wanted to hire, they'd raise the wage and hire in slightly less qualified people and train them. Whenever companies say they can't find workers they're really saying they aren't willing to pay the market rate for workers which means they don't really want workers. In our crappy economy, that going rate is pretty low (although it's artificially inflated by government intervention). Something tells me they're intentionally setting standards above the market and keep wages below the market because they gain something from the government by pretending they want to hire. It probably protects them from government aggression. The article eventually gets to the truth:

"Challenger said the economy is growing so slowly that most companies are having little trouble meeting demand for their goods and services with workers already on the payroll."

Exactly. But they gain something by pretending to want to hire. There is a flip side:

"“Workers are trolling in a sense, too,” he said. “They’re saying I could take that job and work for less than I want, but I’m not willing to sell my services at that level.”"

Unemployment benefits plus the value of not having to work are keeping people from taking jobs.

JP Morgan to oust three execs for losing $2 billion in risky trades.

David Stockman describes why I've quit using the term crony capitalism in favor of crony-anti-capitalism.

"The point is, this is not the free market at work. This is central bank money printers and their Wall Street cronies perverting what used to be a capitalist market."

It's not capitalism, so we shouldn't call it crony capitalism. It's socialism in the form of crony-anti-capitalism. He also explains why the claims that our financial system was going to collapse in 2008 were lies.

"That is one of the great myths that I address in my book. The banking system, especially the mainstream banking system, was not in peril at all. The toxic securitized mortgage assets were not in the Main Street banks and savings and loans; these institutions owned mostly prime quality whole loans and could have bled down the modest bad debt they did have over time from enhanced loan loss reserves. So the run on money was not at the retail teller window; it was in the canyons of Wall Street. The run was on wholesale money – that is, on repo and on unsecured commercial paper that had been issued in the hundreds of billions by financial institutions loaded down with securitized toxic garbage, including a lot of in-process inventory, on the asset side of their balance sheets."

The banking system was never in trouble. Only Wall Street banks were in trouble, and they should have gone bankrupt.

"The run was on investment banks that were really hedge funds in financial drag. The Goldmans and Morgan Stanleys did not really need trillion-dollar balance sheets to do mergers and acquisitions. Mergers and acquisitions do not require capital; they require a good Rolodex. They also did not need all that capital for the other part of investment banking – the underwriting business. Regulated stocks and bonds get underwritten through rigged cartels – they almost never under-price and really don't need much capital. Their trillion dollar balance sheets, therefore, were just massive trading operations – whether they called it customer accommodation or proprietary is a distinction without a difference – which were funded on 30 to 1 leverage. Much of the debt was unstable hot money from the wholesale and repo market and that was the rub – the source of the panic. Bernanke thought this was a retail run à la the 1930s. It was not; it was a wholesale money run in the canyons of Wall Street and it should have been allowed to burn out."

So Stockman believes Bernanke was stupid, not evil. It could be. He's constantly wrong. Here's Stockman's investment advice:

"My investing model is ABCD: Anything Bernanke Cannot Destroy: flashlight batteries, canned beans, bottled water, gold, a cabin in the mountains."

Bottled water is an interesting choice. It'll be tough to socialist water supplies to survive the collapse. Maybe the same for socialist electricity.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

How the Roman Empire collapsed.

"Salvian left us a first-hand account of how things went to rot. One of the things he mentions over and over is how the peasant class was obliterated by oppressive taxation and how the small land owners indentured themselves to the large land owners who paid their taxes for them, but in return got their land and their labor, eventually leading to feudalism. Even after the small land owners had lost their land and become coloni – those who worked the land but did not own it – they still were liable for the tax, thus permanently indenturing them to the wealthy land owner who paid it for them."

The Romans suffered a gradual collapse over centuries because it necessarily took time to depreciate the money and raise the taxes. But we have a central bank, so our collapse will be much more sudden. The looting by the central bank is virtually invisible, and the direct relationship between cause - inflating the money supply - and effect - increasing prices - is not so clear as cutting coins. When the collapse comes, the government will quickly collapse, unable to pay thugs to tax us more, so we might escape having to indenture ourselves to a billionaire so we can eat. The rest of the comparisons are scary.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

A look at back a prediction made in 2007 that Arctic ice would be gone by 2012. Wrong again.

Blaming waste milk for global warming.

Hybrid Humvee. Historians will look at this as one of the brightest symbols that our society is committing suicide.

Italian anarchists knee-cap a nuclear scientist, promise to shoot more. This is what pervasive government violence has created.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Look at these abominations caused by our war on drugs.

"A law enforcement official said 37 bodies were found in the town of San Juan on the non-toll highway to the border city of Reynosa at about 4 a.m., but officials were still investigating."

"The discovery echoes several other recent cases in which drug gangs have left bodies scattered in public places as warnings to rivals. Thirty-five bodies were left at a freeway overpass in the city of Veracruz in September. Twenty-six were found in November in Guadalajara."

I'm sure the hypocritical puritans who support prohibition have no problem with the violence they're initiating. The number of dismembered bodies is up to 49.

POLICE STATE:

Connecticut police illegally stop man for radioactivity. He had just been given radioactive dye by his doctor for a cardiac exam.

Being generous, the US government spends $400,000,000 for every American it saves from a terrorist attack. Clearly, the government doesn't spend that money on safety. It spends it on enriching its agents and cronies.

"The Department of Homeland Security just ordered 450 million rounds of special "hollow point" .40 caliber ammunition"

Making the owner of some ammunition company a multi-millionaire. Do you think they plan to shoot 450 million terrorists?

In a free society, cops would act like firemen. In our society, cops have a license to kill, and only a fool wouldn't fear it. I've long said the most dangerous situation the vast majority of Americans will ever experience is a run-in with a cop.

"That they do not feel safe when they see a cop."

That's for sure.

What a great teaser line for a book.

"Sibel Edmonds' new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence."

I just put it on my wishlist.

"Edmonds found at the FBI translation unit almost entirely two types of people. The first group was corrupt sociopaths, foreign spies, cheats and schemers indifferent to or working against U.S. national security. The second group was fearful bureaucrats unwilling to make waves. The ordinary competent person with good intentions who risks their job to "say something if you see something" is the rarest commodity. Hence the elite category that Edmonds found herself almost alone in: whistleblowers."

Ouch.

New Jersey town bans texting while walking. Transportation Nazi LaHood wants to ban texting while driving at the federal level.

WAR:

Defense spending is in a bubble too.

Judge Napolitano compares the Guantanamo 9/11 trials to the British Star Chamber and Soviet show trials. Here's where the judge goes wrong:

"But in America, we still have the rule of law."

No we don't. Not even close.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Top Israelis come out publicly against attacking Iran. Good for them. I like how these comments make Netanyahu look unstable while the Iranians appear rational.

POLITICS:

The establishment pulls shenanigans in Oklahoma, shutting down the convention against the rules because Paul supporters were going to control it, so Ron Paul supporters continue the convention in the parking lot.

MEDIA:

Oprah criticized Michelle Obama.

LOCAL:

Wright state offers a novel attempt to keep the education bubble inflated.

"The College of Engineering and Computer Science will offer 30 Ohio students $6,000 annual scholarships and paid research positions during their undergraduate careers."

"The 30 slots offer a guaranteed internship with a regional employer and a four-year scholarship of $6,000 each academic year. Students will have a summer assistantship, earning an additional $4,000. The university’s annual tuition was $8,070 in 2011-12.

The assistantship is for three years — a minimum of two years with Air Force Research Laboratory and the third with an industry partner."

So this is a way to funnel people into government employment. The whole point of trapping students in debt is to make them into indentured servants of the government, and Wright State is proving that.

"“It’s more than a scholarship. When the students graduate from the college, they will have hands-on experience that gives them a direct line on a job upon graduation, and they will graduate virtually debt-free,” said Dean S. Narayanan."

But they still graduate in debt.

MISC:

When Olympic personnel were in London, government officials would change the stop lights in front of them to green to give them a better impression. It's good to be the king. This shows the real purpose of stop lights: power.

After first defending him, Yahoo ousts CEO over resume fraud.

I don't want the government sending me text alerts. I want it to leave me alone.

Setting another record, The Avengers tops $1 billion after second weekend. I guess movies are another bubble.

"The Avengers again provided the bulk of Hollywood's business. Overall domestic revenues totaled $172 million, up 23 percent from the same weekend last year, when "Thor" led with $34.7 million, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com.

Domestic receipts for the year are at $3.83 billion, 17.6 per cent ahead of last year's with a huge summer lineup yet to come.

Hollywood.com analyst Paul Dergarabedian said he expects Hollywood to break the summer revenue record of $4.4 billion it set last year and top its all-time annual high of $10.6 billion from 2009."

I understand the Avengers are tremendously popular characters, Joss Whedon is a tremendous popular director, the movie was marketed by five previous movies which enabled Hollywood to do something it had never done before, but these numbers signal a bubble.

I wonder how much money Kim K. will con out of Kayne West. You'd have to be incredibly stupid to get anywhere near that gold digger.

Facebook is adopting the pay for perks model so common in games.