Hussman

From this week's Hussman report.

The risks of a shift in Chinese currency policy are heightened by the still-polite but increasingly palpable tension between China and the U.S. revolving around Taiwan's hints at independence. It doesn't help that the Administration is filling important international finance and diplomatic posts with judgment-impaired political hacks rather than individuals with suitable talent to address the risks.

In short, international interest rate spreads are useful to watch here. In addition, credit spreads (corporate minus Treasury or low grade corporate minus high grade corporate) are also important. At this point, a further deterioration in credit spreads would be a very strong signal to batten the hatches.

The information is always in the divergences.

AtB: March 24, 2005:The Unintended Consequences of Laws...

An interesting tidbit from Crosblog

The Law of Unintended Consequences...
Ohio passes a gay marriage ban that bars "creating or recognizing a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals."

Ohio also has a domestic violence law that makes it a felony for someone with a previous domestic violence conviction to assault a family member.

Correction - that may be "had" a domestic violence law. Since "legal status for relationships..." is now barred, a judge reduced a felony assault on a repeat abuser's live-in girlfriend to a misdemeanor, finding that the new language barred giving the unmarried couple any additional benefits.

Prosecutors are appealing. From the hip analysis from someone who's never read an Ohio statute or case - call it a longshot.

If it's said boldly and without a hint of shame then...

From the final paragraph a NYTimes story about the popular uprising in Kyrgyzstan:

"In Washington, meanwhile, a State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, said Wednesday that the United States had urged the Kyrgyz government to avoid violence and open a dialogue with the opposition. The message being sent by the United States and other nations, he said, was that 'violence is not an acceptable means for resolving differences.' "

Around the Bloggosphere(AtB): March 22, 2005

In my continuing time crunched effort to keep content flowing here at TCA I provided you with another installment of “Around the Bloggosphere”. Since being a dad is a brand new job for me I think I will continue to do these AtB posts for a little while.

Ken

Subject: Campaign finance reform.
Blog: Toehold

I have an idea.

• Individual Americans (and corporations too!) will contribute to a single fund for all campaigning.
• Legitimate political parties (with some fair definition of "legitimate") will draw equally from the fund and distribute what they draw equally to their candidate(s).
• No campaign spending except from this fund.
• All private campaign ads will be funded as if they were a political party.

Keep holding fund raisers, and keep getting those fat checks from fat cats, but share with your opponents. How do you like them apples?

Problems:

• The legitimization of the Party party leads to the public funding a campaign which enjoys itself thoroughly without doing any campaigning.
• The most popular candidates don't want to raise funds.
• J. Random Billionare has a free speech problem if the private ad fund is short. On the other hand, J. Random could contribute enough money to make up the difference and think of it as a tax on "free" speech.

My original idea was to pay for campaigns through a poll tax. Each candidate would account for all campaign spending, and there'd be a number next to the name on the ballot. That number is how much the voter will pay in taxes to fund the campaign if it wins. Slick Politician can run a huge campaign, but the voters may vote for the cheap guy instead. The collected taxes first pay for the accounting and then go to repay the campaign's donors. The result:

• Cheaper campaigns are more appealing to voters.
• Donors prefer to donate to the candidate who wins, but only because they get a refund.
• Candidates still end up with an obligation to the donors because of the risk they took, but an increase in "campaign tax" could eliminate that too (in which case, "donating" to the winner becomes an investment that produces a return).
• How does this account for independent advertising? Maybe it doesn't.

What to do if the candidate spends less than what was given for the campaign? Take the remainder of the pool and distribute it evenly among the donors. This encourages many small donors and discourages individual large donors. If one donor gives half the total pool, and that amount is spent, that donor gets back the money donated, divided by the number of donors. People who donated the least could get back more than they originally put in.

There are probably lots of odd situations I haven't thought of, so I've designed toward behavior that's bad, and it's possible that behavior I think is desirable really isn't. Ultimately I'd like a system in which politicians are "paid for" by a majority (e.g., everybody) rather than any minority. I'm tired of our elected officials being beholden to monied interests instead of the people who elected them. I want to disconnect their funding from the funders. Make all donations anonymous? Easy to defeat.

Maybe someone has solved this problem, and I just haven't seen it. Unfortunately, I suspect a real working solution would never be implemented.

permalink posted by Kyle : 7:39 AM

Around the Blogosphere

Here is an alternative perspective on the world...

Saturday, March 19, 2005

Are We Sinners In Need Of Salvation Or Not?

I am always impressed what deceived men will do for a lie. This afternoon I had two guests who are of the Jehovah's Witness persuasion. They talked and talked and (I know, we've all experienced it) and talked. Yet, if I had not forced the conversation into the direction of Paul's letter to the Romans, we would never have talked about salvation.

What are the issues in evangelization? Are Tim LaHaye's books the main way to convince people to come to Christ? How about rock'n for Jesus at a concert? How about throwing a party at church to show that men need to repent? That seems to be the method today. We could have a Super Bowl party for Jesus.

I am not saying there are not different ways to evangelize. We all use different methods to "springboard" our conversations into the Gospel message. I am simply wondering if we often compromise or miss the message altogether. Have we become like the JWs and missed how the Spirit of God commands us to proclaim God's Word faithfully? Just a thought.

Here is one of the most powerful sermons I have heard in a long time. John Piper preaches on Romans 9. How should we proclaim the Gospel? Click Here.

posted by Howard Fisher | 5:19 PM

American Jobs Blog By Greg Spotts

This is the kind of stuff that Walmart depends on... only it ain't Walmart anymore: it's coming up the food chain.
You can also find him on a report on PBS NOW.
Here's a good book, one that goes way back. You don't even have to read it, you just have to read the title: "Small is Beautiful: economics as if people mattered."
The book is written by a hardbitten, real life economist. Minister of Mines, I think, in the UK. No bleeding heart, he.

Big oil won: we're paying the price in dollars, time and lives

Plan A: end Opec
The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas.

Plan B; (the industry plan) keep prices high
Privatisation blocked by industry
Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.
Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatisation of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved."

Activist Judges Rule!

"Judge Richard Kramer of San Francisco County's trial-level Superior Court likened the (gay marriage) ban to laws requiring racial segregation in schools, and said there appears to be 'no rational purpose' for denying marriage to gay couples."

China is Wal-Mart to the world

In the same way Wal-Mart sends the small local retailers packing, China is putting entire countries out of business. They undervalue their currency and undercut the rest of the world. With their hundreds of millions eager and hungry for low paying factory work, they can win at this game.

Wal-Mart is not the problem here. They are just the most noticeable symptom here in the U.S. (and increasingly in other countries) of China's strategy.

China needs to play fair with international trade, or they should face restrictions.

TiVo.com | The TiVo Homepage

If you have a TV and you don't have Tivo, you are wasting your time, your money, and letting TV run your life.
NOT having Tivo is, in a word, silly. It costs $100. There is a monthly subscription fee: it is well worth it.
Oh, you can transfer Tivo recordings to your computer. You can print them to VHS or DVD, whatever.
For those who do NOT watch TV, that's fine: you'll never watch "TV" again. You will only watch Tivo: you will watch what you want when you want, and if you've found you've "caught a fish" you don't like: you throw it back. Better yet, your kids never watch TV again: they watch Tivo and you get to say what's on Tivo: end of story.
Phone rings? hit pause: the machine goes into record mode immediately. Continue watching tomorrow if you feel like it.

saddam capture: staged?

A former U.S. Marine who participated in capturing ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said the public version of his capture was fabricated.
Ex-Sgt. Nadim Abou Rabeh, of Lebanese descent, was quoted in the Saudi daily al-Medina Wednesday as saying Saddam was actually captured Friday, Dec. 12, 2003, and not the day after, as announced by the U.S. Army.
"I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced," Abou Rabeh said.
"We captured him after fierce resistance during which a Marine of Sudanese origin was killed," he said.
Interesting. He's a US Marine. And he is of Arab descent. He's an American citizen (probably, but not necessarily) but where do his loyalties lie: with the US, with the Middle east, or maybe it's just the truth? Of course, one thing for certain: he is a volunteer: that could cut both ways.

response to query: Your Uncle Sam wants to know what you want to know.

OK: I did the search on fertilizer and diesel fuel. Just like that. No quotes.
This is what google said. (I had tried A9 .com: it said there were NO results. (When did you even do a search, without quotes, that came up with NO results???))
Google gave me the following page, saying the site violates our policy.
So, we know that the government IS looking at our queries and is most certainly recording them.
403 Forbidden

Terror Suspects Buying Firearms, Report Finds

Official comments from the world-of-reality dept:
1) so what: the shit is mostly harmless and no more than what is available to any citizen, resident, or sidewalk shopper. Fertilizer and diesel fuel? Hmmm, have to google that.
2) ummm, why are they "suspected" and by whom and for what?
3) Catch 22, in particular the character of Milo Minderbinder is a must read for economics, politics, policy, philosophy, humor, anthropology.

Derelict Plants Are Crippling Iraq's Petroleum Industry

"And with the petroleum sector crumbling, Iraqi officials must soon decide whether to invest in time-consuming repairs and upgrades, or try to extract everything they can from the creaky equipment, as Saddam Hussein did. It is a tricky decision: Because the rebuilding effort is financed from oil revenues, shutting down the system for desperately needed repairs cuts back on the money available for further repairs."
oh oh
Free at last, free at last, thank god I'm.... poor at last????
See, the good news was that President Bush was really tight in the oil business. The bad news: he (personally) utterly failed at it. His friends, of course, did not.

Brain Research Raises Boggling Issues

"Terry Harrington had served more than two decades for the 1978 murder of a Council Bluffs night watchman when the court reversed the conviction. Something called 'brain fingerprinting' convinced the court that the 'records' in Harrington's brain did not match the scene of the crime or the details of the case."
Ummm, this is something that one would like to know a little more about... it could go either way, no?