Reasons to be cheerful #1

Never mock a man with a bayonet:

Morning rant

I can be a bore on this Geithner thing. It doesn't take a holistic view to condemn Geithner. There's no nuance required. It's black and white. You can't appoint a tax cheat as Tax Chief. One more time. You can't appoint a tax cheat as Tax Chief. It destroys consent and taints the whole Administration. It's less Geithner's character that interests me in this matter than Obama's. If he won't act on this elementary point, he lacks cunning as well as good policy. Maybe he's just Carter II. Conservatism's outstanding politicians, Romney and Palin,should team up now and start campaigning for and against Obama's good and bad policies. Why wait? History won't. 'What good policies?' you ask. Oh, I dunno. I just said that as tho Obama weren't the authentic fake that Spengler describes.

Taxation For Dummies

The first saying on the quotes page of the IRS website is:

Tax is what we pay for a civilized society.

The New York Times editorialises ahead of today's Senate confirmation vote on Timothy Geithner, Obama's nominee for Treasury:

... the nominee admitted that his failure to pay tens of thousands of dollars in federal taxes had been “careless” but “unintentional” ...

We were not impressed with Mr. Geithner’s excuses for his tax problems, but barring any new damaging disclosures, we heard nothing disqualifying. He is clearly an intelligent man and Mr. Obama is entitled to pick his own team.

I was not impressed with the Times's blatant scofflaw scofflogic. There are 2 ways for Government to ask for my money:

1. Give us your money or we'll take it by force and you will get hurt. That is theft.

2. Give us your money, it's right to obey the law. That is citizenship.

Had Geithner a better record than accomplice in the present mess, it were still wrong to appoint an obvious, serial tax cheat to the job of tax chief. Maybe if he were pro-life that would disqualify him in the eyes of the New York Times as it seemed to disqualify otherwise unassailable appointments to The Supreme Court. It's not only the partisanship of the Times that grates, but also the stupidity. If I were a machiavellian President, I'd conserve colorable moral authority, especially in fiscal matters. Now noone need pay federal taxes because it's the right thing to do. You can't steal from a thief. How about a tax on hypocrisy?

The last quote on the IRS page is:

Income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf.

Full disclosure: In this society I might cheat at tax were I sure I'd not be punished, partly because I'd be richer, but also because the authority to take my money depends on votes from people who pay little or no tax but receive subsidies. Their votes are bought with my money. However I'm not auditioning for Treasury Secretary. In fact I overpay tax since the effort of tax avoidance is outweighed by the disturbance to the intellectual tranquillity on which my speculator's lifestyle depends.

It was agony, darling

I had a back tooth out this morning. The tooth broke and the dentist spent 10 minutes wiggling and extracting each of the 3 roots. At the end he showed me the apex of each bloody root to prove there was no debris. Then I came home and sat thru this:


I'd rather repeat the tooth extraction every day till I have no teeth than watch that again. Then you can start on my nails.

You really cannot make this stuff up

Charles Krauthammer has mischief in his eyes, thank God, when he tells of his crush on Obama:
It's pleasant to fantasize that Obama will enact conservative policies when reality bites, but here's the truth: Obama is a piece of fluff. He's never been sternly tested, but when he's been gently tested he sides with convenient evil then lies about it, whether it's Reverend Wright, Professor Ayers or, most definingly, the Born Alive Infants Protection Act in Illinois.

There's little chance he'll have the guts to do the inconvenient right thing, but, oh my, he'll sure sound as tho he wants to. Don't watch his lips and don't watch his hips, watch what he does. He'll convene a Fiscal Responsibility Summit. He says:

his administration will begin confronting the issues of entitlement reform and long-term budget deficits soon after it jump-starts job growth and the stock market.

"What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further," he said. "We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else's."

Yadda, yadda, yadda. His nominee for Treasury secretary is a blatant tax cheat. If Obama persists in nominating Geithner, you'll know he's stupid as well as immoral. Every time an American completes their tax return, they'll be thinking about Geithner's scam at the IMF.

What might have been

In the late '90's I had an apartment in Galaxy Towers, Gutenberg, New Jersey, looking out on Manhattan from the 2nd highrise from the right in this picture. Had I been there this afternoon I might have got a great shot of US Airways flight 1549 ditching in the Hudson. Alas. The shot below I took from a ferry like the ones at the rescue, looking north to the GW Bridge with New Jersey left and Manhattan right.


Update: Imagine the stricken plane gliding down over the GW Bridge. Apparently the plane came within 600 feet of the bridge, but it was ok as the pilot, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III, had the presence of mind to hold his EasyPass up to the cockpit window.

So he passed the test

To add my admiration to Mick's appreciation of George W. Bush, Kipling's lines are apt:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
.........
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Homer's Guide to Healthy Living..

..work in a nuclear power plant.

"It's safer to work in a nuclear plant than it is in real estate," says Patrick Moore, a scientist and founding member of Greenpeace who began supporting nuclear energy several years ago. He cites data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and notes that a Columbia University study published in 2004, which followed 54,000 nuclear-plant workers for 15 years, found that they had fewer cancers, less disease and lived longer than the average person.

Other pluses -

It's good for the planet:

"If you honestly believe that greenhouse gas is the seminal issue of the day, as world population and economic growth continue to expand, so will the need for electric capacity," says Sheila Slocum Hollis, a partner at the Washington law firm of Duane Morris who specializes in energy law. "Whether to power electric vehicles or for general manufacturing needs, ultimately people are looking toward nuclear as the big power source."

Waste is well-managed:

Exelon and other operators have addressed the problem of nuclear-waste disposal with "dry-cask storage" -- high-tech sealed containers that they keep on their sites. Due to innovations like that, many of the safety concerns that arose after accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and Chernobyl in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) in 1986 have eased.

There's a huge construction backlog that doesn't need new public borrowing....talk about stimulative infrastructure spending:

"Nuclear power is in a renaissance," says Tom Neff, a physicist and research affiliate at MIT's Center for International Studies. In fact, 17 applicants are seeking government approval to build 26 nuclear plants, meeting a Dec. 31 deadline for federal tax credits and potentially ending a 30-year hiatus in the construction of new U.S. nuke facilities.

I trust we'll all be driving to work in nuclear-powered Humvees rather than prissy Priuses. It's greener too! 

Convenient truth.

Color and sound

I've mentioned Jonathan Glazer's movie 'Birth' before. Glazer made an ad for Sony Bravia tv's - no cgi:

And here's the original sound:

h/t ligress

An Intricate Interweaving of Advanced Technology and Sophisticated Traders

Blah,blah,blah.....

One of the critical ingredients in creating the added value which Madoff Securities offers its clients is the firm's intricate interweaving of advanced technology and experienced traders. The firm's position at the forefront of computerized trading is widely acknowledged in the US financial community.

According to the criminal complaint Bernie Madoff made off with $50 b's of other people's money thru The Perfect Ponzi. That's a world record for a criminal charge. My movie about this will be called "The Owner's Name Is On The Door"

In an era of faceless organizations owned by other equally faceless organizations, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC harks back to an earlier era in the financial world: The owner's name is on the door. Clients know that Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm's hallmark.

A starring part will be played by The Lipstick Building, Madoff's business address. I love that corner of midtown Manhattan at 54th and 3rd, where you can find a Houston's restaurant and bar beneath a Barnes and Noble in the belly of the Citicorp Building. How ironic...Citicorp! Once the world's largest bank, brought to its knees by The Great Unwinding of 2008, the same rush to liquidity that exposed Madoff. To quote John Stuart Mill:

Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

Talking about timing tipping the Times (ugh)

Mick makes a good case that a newspaper website won't approach Google in ad revenue. I say there's great potential to improve the NYT content and grow the readership. The NYT is different from all other US papers - it's more widely read by the powerful and wannabes. To the rest of the world, it's the single daily which represents America. It's just that it's so mismanaged and so disrespected that it can't exploit it's uniqueness.

My focus is the stock price. Right now there's nothing in the price for the trophy value or brand value of the business. In a bull market it could easily be worth $5b to own the NYT + 58% of the NYT building + a stake in the Red Sox + About.com + The Boston Globe and some other stuff, but even after the 50% rise since I placed my bet a few days ago the market cap. is only $1b. That $5b guess is without thinking about a hook-up or takeover by a Yahoo! or Google or Microsoft.

Another factor here is that the market may have bottomed - I think so. It touched 7,500 just before Obama started to announce that his economic team would consist of sane experts like Volcker and Summers. Before that it was possible that the US economy would be governed by socialists. There's a Tsunami of money sequestered in zilch interest assets like gold and Treasuries. If that flows back into equities, there'll be an overshoot to the upside taking us back to 12,000 at least. Another tip was Genco (para 6) - a dry bulk shipper under the cosh thanks to the 90% drop in the Baltic Index. Genco's up 60%. I'd still tip potentially bankrupt GM (some good cars, much lower gas prices, incentive to reform the cost base) and Xstrata (base metals). Last Friday the market saw unexpectedly bad employment figures and went up. That's not any bear market I recognize.