Deja Vu All Over Again - part the first

Well, we're revisiting Olde The Manchurian President's stupidity. All over again.

The White House explained that its May 9 decision to dismantle the directorate was intended to "streamline" operations. In reality, it was far more than that. Memories of the Ebola crisis in 2014 have faded, and the Trump administration implicitly is signaling that it flatly rejects the notion that health security ranks as a true national security policy priority.

This is what happens when poorly educated shitkickers in the empty states get to say who runs the Damn Gummint.

Thought for the Day - 24 February 2020

OK. So, today the Dow dropped 1,031 points. If you know of any econometric model that predicted that, let me know. Ditto for any econometric model that knows what to do with that info. Most of the real world is driven by events, not data streams.

I Am A Patriot

I pledge allegiance to the Hair of the Fascist State of Trump, and to the Barr for which it stands, one Tyranny under Ivanka, divided, with poverty and disease for 99%.

Krugman vs. Zombies

It's too much to ignore

What's your name?
Who's your daddy?
(He rich) Is he rich like me?
Has he taken, any time (any time)
(To show) to show you what you need to live
-- 'Time of the Season'/The Zombies 1968

In today's rant, Krugman calls out zombies in the Right Wingnut brigade.

And crucially, the housing bubble was an international phenomenon; Spain had a bigger bubble than we did, followed by a worse slump. Did the U.S. liberals force Spanish banks to make bad loans?

And, of course, what's worse is that Spain's experience was largely based on bad vacation home loans. This is one of them.

The Great Recession had its roots (not that I'm following any orthodoxy that I know of) in the DotBomb. Following that meltdown, all the Big Money Holders went looking for some other place to stash their excess moolah. What they wanted was high return at low risk of another meltdown. No such instruments exist, of course. But, the answer was obvious to everyone: mortgages, particularly residential. Not spectacular returns, but better than Treasuries, and there's never been (so the legend went) sector/nation wide collapse of home mortgages. The problem was that if you had hundreds of millions (or more) of moolah, buying up individual mortgages was out of the question.

Enter, stage right, securitization instruments. There was a new problem: where was the necessary supply of securities to sop up all that excess moolah? The answer stage further right, was Countrywide, making loans for McMansions to the poor. If it all stopped there, then the mortgage companies would have gone belly up once it became clear that the poor couldn't pay for McMansions. But no one noticed when Blythe Masters invented the credit default swap (CDS). This grenade allowed anyone to bet on the solvency of anyone else in the form (titularly) of insurance, regardless of whether the bet was made by anyone involved. The result was a chain reaction through the finance sector when the Viagra wore off. The assumption, clearly, by the likes of Countrywide and the regular banks that lined up like lemmings, was that if a few/some/many of these subprime McMansion mortgages went stinky, well we still have the house, so we'll just sell it again and clear the note. The 'asset' didn't disappear. But supply doesn't create its own demand, alas.

Only the nuttiest of the Right Wingnuts still bray that supply side mantra, 'supply creates its own demand'. If that were true, producers would continue to not only continue production in the face of deflation and collapsing demand, but take advantage by boosting output. You do believe that's how the Real World Works, don't you? If it were true, there would never be recession, much less depression in any economy any where any time.

Among the early examples of mortgage-backed securities in the United States were the farm railroad mortgage bonds of the mid-19th century which may have contributed to the panic of 1857.
-- the wiki

What's that fable about those who ignore history?

A Must Share

All in all, this might be the funniest post I've seen in a very, very long time. You must read. If you have a developed sense of humor. How I came to find it is certainly TMI.

Thought for the Day - 14 February 2020

Well, time for another Valentine's Day Massacre. The pundit class is engaged in mowing each other down in a circular firing squad. They are all, that I've heard and read, attributing the Barr ABC interview to him 'rebuking' The Manchurian President's tweeting and such. Which is true.

But the point of the rebuke, "I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.", is merely that the heat of The Manchurian President publicly demanding that DoJ punish enemies and favor friends makes it impossible to keep doing so. Hasn't actually stopped Barr yet, of course.

Some people are such fucking morons. The truth is staring them in the face.

The Real Big Brother

The exit line from "The Usual Suspects" is

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

The Right Wingnuts keep repeating the Big Lie that the damn gummint is Big Brother, all done by snowflake leftists. Well, not so much.

Despite Facebook's concerns about the company, Peter Thiel, who sits on Facebook's board was an early investor in Clearview. Facebook, Thiel, and Ton-That all declined to comment on whether Thiel knew about how Clearview was downloading Facebook data and that it was against Facebook's rules.

A major Wingnut is doing Big Brother for profit. The American Way.

Good Grief [update]

There are said to be seven stages of grief. I wonder, are there a number of stages of enamored? As mentioned some times in these endeavors, we've been making yearly visits to Block Island for about two decades. The wife even got us to pony up for a time share or two. That happened during one of the early stages of enamoredness. We go in the very off season, when it's mostly about the climate and the locals.

But as time passed, it's become clear that an isolated place of ~900 souls is ruled in a wacky way; wacky relative to large, diverse, urban culture, that is. The 'Block Island Times', innterTubes edition, lets one keep up, in precis form, with the goings on there.

The defining aspect of the island is that it's getting close to a terminal case of Nantucketitis (the subtitle tells all): a playground for the summer rich, residents be damned. But, there always seems to be a shortage of funds to maintain the infrastructure of the island, both for the islanders and the summer folk. It seems like the islanders, more or less, are subsidizing the summer folk. The latest example is the continuing saga of innterTubes provision. Here's the 'Times' current reporting on the situation. Near as I recall, the process has been on-going for more than a year, and when I first noticed the story, either when we were there or later, I immediately wondered how to pay for fiber(!) to cover that much ground, that far from the mainland grid, for so few domiciles mostly nicely separated from each other?

One answer was this, from an earlier 'Times' report:

"If you think of this as something you need to move forward in your life, it's just something you'll pay for," said committee member Kristine Monje.

Take that sheeple; shut up, we make the rules! And, you should really read through this report as well, to see how small town governance really works. In a nutshell, rubes are just fresh meat to mainlanders who know the score. Having been involved with 'consultants' who, titularly, were to protect our interests, it often happened that the real client was one or more of the RFP crowd.

Well, this week's report on a pricing/cost protocol, shown first, appears headed where it had to: the rich summer folk will "socialize" (yes those crusty don't-tread-on-me New Englanders will use the word when it benefits them directly) the cost. The only question that remains is, to what degree? Interestingly, the town fathers hold out the possibility of fractional payment; if you open your summer house just in July and August you might only be dinged for two months of charge. Now, that will defray the total sum for the islanders, but the only true remedy is to make hook up mandatory for all domiciles, no matter the months inhabited, and pay up that fixed cost of service. The mansions way up Corn Neck Road, for instance, set back half a mile will pay more than the affordables on Cherry Lane. That's how economics is supposed to work. Whether to charge all hook ups twelve out of twelve for service, even when there's no one on the innterTubes in January, is another matter. Most of the cost is amortization of the infrastructure build out (direct cost of service for as small an area as Block Island is basically the power to push the little photons down the glass), so mandatory hook up would go a long way to protect the islanders from catastrophe.

I think one of the things people don't realize [relates to] the question of capital intensity and having to keep spending to keep up with capacity. Those days are basically over, and you are seeing significant free cash flow generated from the cable operators as our capital expenditures continue to come down.

Here's a tale that might curl your hair.

It remains, to my mind, an open question whether useful innterTube service at a Gb/sec is really necessary. Download a movie in a minute or so? Does that really matter? We get Xfinity copper/wifi at 54Mb/sec/computer and no complaints; when it runs, that is.

So, on to the next stage of enamoredness. Small town governance is nothing to which one should aspire. It's not someplace to call home. Just look at Iowa, a collection of small towns run by rubes, scalped by con artists. That was Jefferson's model. Progress and invention and all the good things that make your next generation better off than you are happen in cities. Full stop.

Minority Report - part the sixth

Despite The Manchurian President's crowing here's the truth:

Senators representing 151.5 million Americans outvoted senators representing 169.5 million Americans to acquit President Donald Trump in his Senate impeachment trial.

That's 18.5 million more voting to toss the crook out.

Once again, like Germany in the 30s, the USofA is slipping into dictatorship.