Thinksgiving

and Be thankful for what you've got
 

  LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy: A Coalescence of Interests
By Joseph P. Farrell

Signal To Noise At The BBC

Perhaps this explains why American television is constantly ramming British affectations down our ...er um ... throats. [ie: Piers ... and Simon ... and Stuart ... unbelievable]

And so you open Pandora’s box to find the seedy ingredients of British populism. It’s not just names, or performers and acts, it’s an ethos. Why is British light entertainment so often based on the sexualisation of people too young to cope? And why is it that we have a press so keen to feed off it? Is it to cover the fact, via some kind of willed outrage, that the culture itself is largely paedophile in its commercial and entertainment excitements? Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked by journalists cynically feeding the ravenous appetites of three million people who love that stuff, and that’s just the ones who actually bought the News of the World. When Leveson’s findings are duly buried, will we realise that it was the nation’s populist appetites that were on trial all along?

Lincoln, Lincoln bo Bincoln Bonana fanna fo Fincoln

Fee fy mo Mincoln, Lincoln!

Let’s Get Small

The word politico originated in the seventeenth century as a term of moral derision, and furnished the title of Matthew Josephson’s 1938 study of the graft-riddled Congresses of the Gilded Age. For VandeHei and his cofounding editor John Harris, however, the moniker was a conceptual upgrade: they originally planned to launch their Capitol Hill tip sheet under the plain-vanilla name “Capitol Leader” but evidently settled on the epithet as a better summation of their journalistic ambition. In terms of strict diction, you can’t fault their decision. In debuting a minute-by-minute chronicle of the permanent campaign by, for, and about terminal Hill insiders, VandeHei and Harris went all in on the enabling fiction that the seamiest features of human nature—which would find full expression in Politico’s quest to discredit rivals, to distort simple political aims and ideas with drive-by caricatures, and to float personality-based digital memes across the gossip-driven agoras of social media—were themselves somehow news, and therefore newsworthy. In the bald effort to define (and, of course, to win) a whole new race to a whole new journalistic bottom, the faux-statesmanlike overtones that came with a name like “Capitol Leader” simply weren’t going to cut it.

Come On, Feel the Buzz by Alex Pareene @ The Baffler

h/t karoli @ Crooks and Liars

The Only Man Harsher Than Moi

...Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the ‘bankstatocracy’ that has led to what the mainstream financial media calls an ‘unintended’ wealth gap in the consumer sector – between those who recovered from the recession, and those still struggling. Any suggestions that this wealth gap might be intentional is ‘suspicious’ behavior, according to the US government.

Political Speech Recognition

That makes the entire Inside Baseball discourse a giant time sink, a cancer, an exercise in “Look! Over there!” After all, when everybody’s talking about how Eastwood hosed the Romney campaign because he misused a prime time slot, nobody’s talking about Gitmo, Afghanistan, or 23 million unemployed, are they? (There are entire lists of what we’re not talking about.)

And wasn’t that the real story? That, for one brief moment, a speaker turned human asked some questions that both candidates, and both parties, find very unpleasant?

Two Cheers For Clint Eastwood - Lambert Strether - 09/02/2012

solicitous and naomi$@?*$

Friday, Aug 10, actually in NYC

naomi$@?*$ 02:44	Hi how you doin?,, I'm naomi and im so wet and horny and looking for some fun. Wanna see me naked on my webcam? I just got out of the shower and still have my towel on with no undies <3
solicitous 02:53	well of course i do!
naomi$@?*$ 02:54	cool ..

Reporting from the House of the Dead

“Dog! You have desecrated the Spirit of the Lamp!”

RT's Capital Account for May 30, 2012.

See also: Zero Hedge

Supplication in the House of the Dead

Depends on what you mean by “reach-around”

When I visited the office of a noted Wall Street gray eminence the day after Paulson accepted the job as treasury secretary, my host said to me, "There’s been a lot of talk about why he did it, and the best explanation I have heard is that he and a lot of the guys he is close to Worry about potential market disruptions that could be big problems if the right guy is not in there with his hand on the tiller. I think he feels like he can really add some value and that he may really be needed? (The mortgage crisis later suggested there may have been some merit to this thesis.)

It is remarkable that there has been a relatively low level of outcry about the steady flow of executives from 55 Broad Street to offices inside the Washington beltway. Vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International Bob Hormats, himself a former senior official, said, "It is fairly unusual. . . I think it is because it has been demonstrated that when Goldman Sachs people get into these jobs, they give no preference to Goldman Sachs. There is no shred of evidence that they use any of[133]their influence on behalf of Goldman Sachs. If there were, just once, given the remarkable activity of Goldman Sachs in the private sector, it would be over. There would be an incredible hue and cry."

Standing On The Top

“That funk is here to stay, oh (We understand it)”

The Power Of Politics

Clearly, the richest would not be drawn to politics if politics did not offer them additional power above and beyond that which they had already acquired through financial or other professional success. Winning (or seizing) political office, or having the ability to influence political decisions, or having a base of political support directly empowers individuals. The source of the power is multifold. It is the power of the institutions that one has leadership within. It is the power of allocating the resources and setting the agenda for those institutions. It is the power to influence the creation of new laws and regulations, which offer the ability actually to institutionalize key ideas. It is the power of the history and national identity associated with those institutions. It is the power that comes from having quantifiable support among the people of a country or region. Government service is seen as legitimizing, as service to the community, with high posts also seen as the capstone of a career (although they often provide additional access and networks that can offer further opportunities for profit post-government). This leads directly to many top business leaders taking massive pay cuts to work in government.

Burdensome White Dude

“Whitey On The Moon”

[Cecil] Rhodes schemed and behaved like a politician, not a merchant. He acted with the ruthlessness and calculated brutality of a mediaeval warlord. He was a brilliant manipulator and, some would argue, swindler, his actions made noteworthy by his audacity. The legends and myths surrounding him are legion. He bought newspaper companies, both secretly and openly, because of his conviction that “the press rules the minds of men.” He has been accused of pressuring doctors to suppress information concerning a smallpox epidemic among the African labour force of his diamond mines, believing that this information would disrupt production because labourers would steer clear of the region; and it would, of course, cost money to pay for inoculations—money he did not want to spend.

Ydyʼát Wwynd

meshuga!

Oh Brudder

“D'ere goes me bread 'n' buttah”

My wife and I, in view of our own less than lavish accommodations, tried to imagine that we were in touch with Davos’s roots as a destination for a spa cure—literally the place about which Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain.

Mann, of course, had no idea quite how magic the mountain would become. Walking through the metal detector into the welter of activity in theKongress Hotel’s lobby, it was once again clear. A small pride of women swaddled in mink and all manner of tasteful bling glided past looking vaguely predatory and, frankly, frightening. Behind them came their husbands, a group of U.S. senators including John McCain of Arizona.
p. 16

David Rothkopf, Superclass - 2008

More “Pierce-ing” Disapprobation

Why Is America So Happy for Facebook?
w/ Keebler elves working in a nuclear missile silo

If we cheer for big money simply as big money, we're simply never going to get right again. If we pretend to be vicariously rich in order to avoid the fact that so many of us are becoming unnecessarily poor, if the shift of the national wealth has within it elements that we're willing to root for as though they were the U.S. Olympic Plutocrats Team, we will get ourselves suckered again and again. This was a triumph of the insiders, of the people who concocted credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, and the people who will do it again, over and over, unless a more critical eye is placed upon them by the institutions of self-government. This does nothing to ameliorate the effects of our rigged casino economy. It solves nothing connected to wealth inequality or unemployment. It is magic numbers on the screen to which only a very few people have the password, and they're not sharing it with anyone.

Charles P. Pierce

How Much Is That Doggie In The Window

I do hope that doggie's for sale

This highlights almost every salient fact about how Washington functions with regard to such matters. First, if you pay a sufficiently large and bipartisan group of officials to lobby on your behalf, you will get your way, even when it comes to vaunted National Security and Terrorism decisions; if you pay the likes of Howard Dean, Fran Townsend, Wesley Clark, Ed Rendell, Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge and others like them to peddle their political influence for you, you will be able to bend Washington policy and law to your will. As Andrew Exum put it this morning: “I guess Hizballah and LeT just need to buy off more former administration officials.”

Glenn Greenwald @ Salon

Definitely A Trend Here

This country just gets better and better...or something

Web Riffing: Jive

Lonely Road Trees

Most Profitable “Industry” In America

It's not that I have anything against Humana, per se, but leveraging the profit motive off of health care seems antithetical to the implied mission. Do people become doctors, or hospital administrators, or insurance company executives because they want to help

Columbia Journalism
Review:
Rocket Internet,
Gas Taxes,
The Price of Health Care

those who find themselves in physical distress or because it's an obscenely lucrative and captive market?

CJR's The Audit starts with industrial strength German intellectual-property Internet thieves, rolls by the gasoline tax, and falls into health care spending. A chain of disparate items I would never have assembled, but enjoy entertaining now that they've pointed it out.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Perhaps, but I'm an avowed agnostic, so ... what do I know?

Data is not information and wisdom is something yet further refined and derived. How much does this "American Way Of Life" actually cost, anyway?

Cui bono?

Mish → Stansberry

→ Hues of Context

Fatally Flawed Approaches to the Budget Deficit and Taxes;
Debt Will Swell
Under 3 of 4 Republican Hopefuls'
Tax Plans
↓
The Corruption of America
↓

Money is a disease, power an affliction.*

Where you're coming from determines what you'll see, and who you are shapes your perception. I agree with the broad outlines of Stansberry's argument, but question some of his assumptions and many of the conclusions found within the article at the second link above. The first assumption I take issue with is a certain unenlightened disinterest in vogue with  reactionary polemicists' arguments for the elimination of progressive taxation. Ironically this is a seamless fit with the general theme of “entitlement” as the source of widespread corruption in America.

Mish Math i

Shed's (Disability Fraud) Spread

	Series		Mish Math i	(Scale) Size		Period	ƒ(x)
1	LNU00074597		Population with a Disability *	4	Solid	M	Thousands of Persons
2	GDP		Gross Domestic Product, 1 Decimal	2	Solid	Q	% Chg fYA
3	U6RATE		Total unemployed, plus ‡	4	Solid	M	%
4	UNRATENSA		Civilian Unemployment Rate	4	Solid	M	%
5	UNRATENSA * 1.377		Mish-timated Unemp. Rate with 25% Fraud	5	Dotted	M	% * 1.377
6	UNRATENSA * 1.125		Mish-timated Unemp. Rate with 10% Fraud	5	Dashed	M	% * 1.125

* Civilian Noninstitutional, 16 years and over
‡ all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons

Moody's Aaa/Baa, Unemployed, GDP, Dow Jones ...

click the image to open full size in a new window

... Utilities Over Trans., S&P, and “Spiky”

Having only a chimerical clue to what –  if anything – these charts might be saying to a seasoned trader or (un)ideologically compromised economist, it's still easy to vouch for their intriguing nature. The “Spiky” orange line recalls a “Treasury spreads' ratio” for the differences between 30-year and 2-year to 10-year and 2-year bills.