The Obami choose Chaos #2

PETER SUDERMAN: President Obama Admits That ObamaCare is Unworkable. “This president’s announcement today that the White House will allow health insurance companies to continue selling plans that do not meet the Affordable Care Act’s minimum criteria—-millions of which have already been subject to cancellation notices—-is likely to be a pivotal moment in the political fight over the 2010 health law.

Pivotal indeed.  By making this 'concession' he screws the insurance companies because letting the healthy keep their older, cheaper plans while the sick sign up for the new insurance fatally undermines the devil's bargain that was necessary to get the insurers to play namely: "make the young and healthy pay through the nose and we'll cover all comers, no questions asked".  And of course he waited to announce this until the insurers had issued their rates for next year - so they can't protect themselves with pricing.  And since there is no underwriting, they can't limit their exposure.  They will lose billions.  Unless they totally withdraw from the market.  And I'm sure the administration is telling them that if they withdraw they will be for all intents and purposes out of the health insurance business forever.  Poor bastards are trapped like rats in box.  But this is what comes of conspiring with progressives to rig the market for yourselves.

And there of course will be no actual law submitted to Congress changing all this, Obama will simply amend the law by executive fiat, like the elected Monarch that he is.  The Constitution be damned.  In honor of Barack Obama, the first of his name I present a little light music:

"It's beginning to a lot like Caracas, everywhere I loooook!"  (With apologies to "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas" or:

"Loot, loot, loot, loot, loot the Man,
Loot, loot, loot, loot, loot, the Man,
Loot, loot, loot, loot, loot, the Man.
Loot the Ma-a-an, Ta-ake his ha-a-and (and arm and leg and assets and equity).
We're Obama rock 'n rollin', Obama rock 'n rollin' tonite"  (With apologies to "Barbara Ann")

After Failure comes Flailing

Well it's all but official now: there's no way out for O'care. It tripped coming off the blocks and is crawling blindly off into the shot put landing range weeping softly. Its opponents (me! me!) are cheering louder than than the crowd at a Miley Cyrus prison concert when the twerking begins and the press - heretofore the easiest lay at Capitol High - are primly straightening their skirts and touching up their makeup on the way to the Principal's office to claim "that nasty man, Barack Obama, seduced us" (over and over and over again).

And 535  sweathogs are taking the campaign slogans developed from focus groups and busily turning them into 'amendments' to Obamacare.  It's crazy time at Capitol high and the inmates are bouncing off the walls.  And during crazy time, failure turns in to destructive flailing.  It's as if each of the 535 had light sabers that couldn't be turned off.  Here are the most likely sweat-crazed results:

• Postpone the individual mandate.  This will make lots of people happy.  It will result in millions of sick people signing up and no healthy ones.  It will cost the insurers billions.
• Let people keep their current plans.  This will make lots of people happy.  It will cost the insurers billions and the chaos and confusion will also make them look stupid, diverting attention away from the truly stupid.
• Establish a Federal Charter that mandates a common, low cost Federal plan standard.  Even if you could get the Obami to completely reverse field philosophically from mandating wildly expensive prepaid healthcare to mandating modest catastrophic policies you are setting up a future catastrophe.  Like replacing 50 petty rent seeking bureaucracies with one intergalactice champion rent seeking bureaucracy that you can never escape.  This is the dumbest idea I've seen a conservative come up with since, well I can't think of another one right now.

So regardless of which looney idea our light saber wielding 'lightbringers' come up with we are in for a year of chaos, confusion, waste and economic destruction towards no useful purpose.  All I can say is remember what 'ol Claytie Williams said:  lay back and enjoy it gang because they done already raped ya.

Hattip:  Instapundit.com

French out tough the Obami on Iran

The French won't sign on to the Obami's cave to Iran.  So if they're the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" what does that make us? The hamburger munching capitulation baboons?

http://m.nationalreview.com/article/363875/france-derails-iranian-suckers-deal-clifford-d-may

The Feds Can Buy Anyone ANYONE

It turns out that the Feds paid news site WebMD boku bucks to pitch pro O'care tales.

While I'm sure the Obami were neck deep in this one the fact is that  in a world of seemingly infinite quantitative easing and decades of continuing resolutions the enterprising bureaucrat can always find slush funds to bribe with. I mean when threats of imprisonment, forfeiture and destruction aren't enough. Our Federales are fabulously rich, incredibly cruel and practically unaccountable.  Break 'em up, break 'em all up.

http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/12/webmds-healthy-deal-with-obamacare-millions-of-dol/

The Ethanol Lunacy

Yep, that's about it.  You won't be surprised that the combined Federal Remocrat/Depublican Obami party favors more, more, more!  The Feds use crap science (we're all going to burn!) to justify a new round of criminal rent seeking.  When more science comes in showing that not only are we unlikely to burn but that ethanol production is environmentally and economically catastrophic the parasites have dug their way deep into the body politic and can't be dislodged.  Which is why it is stupid to do domestic policy at the monopoly Federal level.  Once these nutters get a sufficient pretext to ram something in you have no chance of every getting it back out.  Break it up, break it all up.

Taken from Real Clear Energy Sidebar:

• ETHANOL CONTROVERSY
  • AP Report Critiques Ethanol
  • Millions of Farm Acres Damaged
  • Prairies Vanish Under Policy
  • Industry Reacts to Investigation
  • Green Source With Dirty Secrets
  • Time to Kill the Ethanol Mandate

The Fundamental Assumptions Underlying O'care are all wrong

The following is a comment I posted on Samizdata (a site I highly recommend BTW) in response to a post about some fresh new piece of Obamacare lunacy.  It really is the stupidest law ever, gang.

The remarkable thing about O’care is that its fundamental assumptions are so flawed. First, that the US healthcare system is ‘bad’, ranking 37th in the world according to WHO when in fact when you control for auto accidents and murder (both much more common in gun and driving mad America) American life expectancy turns out to be highest in the world.

Second, they assume that health insurance improves healthiness. The only two large randomized studies to test this (Rand back in the early 80s and Oregon Medicaid in the past few years) could find NO quantitative health impact of having insurance (although the Oregon study found a self assessed 30% reduction in ‘depression’ – of course if someone else suddenly began paying a big chunk of my rent or food bill I’d probably become less depressed too).

Third, there is an assumption that health insurance equals access to health care. One that my English friends on this website have much more familiarity with than we wasteful yanks. The best actuaries estimate a successful O’Care will increase unit demand for healthcare services by 30% without increasing supply. And in the US today, the poor’s health plan Medicaid already has huge problems with access. As does Romneycare in MA where getting in to see a new physician typically takes between 1.5 and 2 months vs. days or a week in the rest of the country.

Finally, they assume that even if everything turns to crap at least it will be more equal crap. But in fact, systems that ration care bureaucratically often offer less equality of access: bureaucracies reward people who can follow rules, make appeals, leverage connections, and live in places where lots of affluent doctors want to work (i.e. near their homes). There’s no real evidence that this system offers more equality of access than the US system. Indeed, the US wouldn't get the highest (gun and car death adjusted) life expectancy in the world if large parts of the population couldn't get access.

Leave it to the Progs to do the exactly wrong things for the precisely wrong reasons. Again and again and again and…

Obama: Trapped in the happy talk bubble

Jim Geraghty points out that Barack Obama is probably not lying to us when he tells us that the Exchange From Hell will be fixed by Nov. 30 and that everything else will go right.  Instead that's probably what he's being told.  And never having the opportunity to develop managerial skills (and being temperamentally unsuited for them) he makes the Lawyer Managerial Mistake.

The  Lawyer Managerial Mistake goes like this:  the Lawyer (or Rookie) has subordinates who are supposed to deliver complex tasks/results.  He receives status updates from them that sound strangely overoptimistic but instead of investigating to get to the truth of the matter, he tells himself that the subordinate knows that if he lies about progress and then fails to deliver he'll be 'in trouble' and will suffer 'discipline'.  So he's constantly 'surprised' because he refuses to get involved until something goes officially 'wrong'.  It's the law enforcement approach to leadership - give people all the rope in the world and if they fail hang them.  It has some problems:

1. It turns all forms of failure into malfeasance.  Most subordinates fail not because they are bad guys doing bad things but because they are inexperienced, frightened, confused, ignorant.  Beating them for their ignorance doesn't reduce it.
2. It obscures the objective:  the objective of a project is to deliver its benefits, not to 'hold people accountable'.  The reason we punish people under the law (well the original reason) was to establish a moral standard and deter transgressions against that standard.  Punishing people for failure to deliver on objectives may feel good but it is still failure.
3. It absolves the leader of responsibility:  many projects fail because of unrealistic objectives/expectations.  In this case, the failure has little or nothing to do with the subordinate but instead implicates the leader.

Here's some Obama examples from George Will:

"He seems to think that his job as chief executive is not to be the executive but to be angry at his own administration when it doesn't perform well," said the syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor. "Fast and Furious, the IRS, Benghazi, NSA, investigation of our Mr. Rosen, there's just a list of things that surprise him."

And some more from Jim Geraghty:

But there are plenty of other times Obama's been surprised by the result of his own policies. He seemed to think that reaching out to the Iranians would lead to a change in the regime's behavior and attitudes. Then he thought they would appreciate him not calling them out on their atrocities; he later regretted his "muted" stance during the regime's bloody crackdown in 2009.

He was surprised to learn that shovel-ready projects were not, in fact, shovel-ready.

He was surprised to learn that large-scale investment in infrastructure and clean-energy projects wouldn't create enormous numbers of new jobs.

He was surprised that his past housing policies hadn't helped struggling homeowners as he had promised.

The "recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized."

When a woman says her semiconductor-engineer husband can't find a job, Obamasaid he was surprised to hear it, because "he often hears business leaders in that field talk of a scarcity of skilled workers."

This is clearly going on around PPACA:  Obama is trapped in bubble after nested bubble of happy talk that he is happily repeating.  And in honor of happy talk I give you Happy Talk the song.

Fauxahontas vs. Hillarincompetence?

Progs are all atwitter about Elizabeth Warren (she's Indian, you know) challenging Hillary, Inc. for the 2016 nomination.  Imagine that:  after the Black Jesus, we'll get Fauxahontas.  Hallelujah! Too funny. Maybe they should go back to Kerry - he's turning out to be a real Poindexter at State.

Yes I-Ran!

We're turning Confucian-ese I really think so

The battle for slots at prestige colleges is becoming insane.  Which makes sense because as we shift from a performance oriented economy to a static state run status economy, the battle shifts from cost, quality, responsiveness to acquiring positional credentials that entitle their bearer to extract economic rents from others. Which leads to crazed battles for access to the right credentials: not skills or education mind you, but the right scraps of paper.

It's all so progressive. Just ask the Mings.

The eleven nations of North America?

These types of categorizations are always fun.  Although there is no way that California's Central Valley is anything but el Norte.  From the Daily Mail.  Enjoy.

The administration has had more time to implement Obamacare than the US spent defeating Hitler

Putting things in perspective: March 21st 2010 to October 1 2013 is 3 years, 6 months, 10 days. December 7, 1941 to May 8, 1945 is 3 years, 6 months 1 day.

Of course President Obama had those nasty Nazi Republicans shooting at him and...well...um....

Andrew Huszar: Quantitative Easing nothing but a banker enrichment scheme

The WSJ has a column by Andrew Huszar, an ex Morgan Stanley MD that the Fed brought in to execute its quantitative easing program.  He is scathing in his denunciation of a program that generated virtually no gains in the real economy but tripled the value of big bank stocks and helped concentrate 70% of all banking assets in the hands of the 0.2% biggest banks.

This is a $4 Trillion and counting regulatory capture.  Makes the farmers and old fart's fiscal depredations look almost ascetic.

Oh, and I almost forgot:  he fears QE is inflating another asset bubble.  Meet the new disastrous policy, worse than the old disastrous policy.  Because we will get screwed again.

Explain to me again what this wonderful Federal Superstate is for?  I mean aside from stitching up even more of the wealth and power for the northeastern liberal gentry.  Break it up, break it all up.

Overcriminalization of business

This NYT article describes the problems with overcriminalization.  Problems like being prosecuted for actions that you had no reasonable reason to believe were illegal.

In a corporatist world all of the various interest groups are in a cold war with each other to gain power and wealth.   Overcriminalization is one way that the uberstate maintains control and primacy.  I'll bet you Federal Pariahs like the 'Koch Brothers' are getting a lot more scrutiny than its pets like Warren Buffet.  Which is why there are so very few business leaders willing to openly challenge the Federal superstate.

And as the superstate's coercive regulatory plaque builds up, the economy slowly but surely runs down.  Slower and slower, weaker and weaker until it chokes to death.  State parasitism is a fatal disease that we desperately need to find a cure for.

Meet the old boss, same as the new boss

Hmmm.   Gallup: Both men and women prefer a male boss.

Hattip instapundit.com

Income and education by zip code: with a massive flaw

This is a great interactive chart:  you can find out the income and education level vs. the rest of the US for any zip code.  But it has a horrible flaw:  there is no adjustment for cost of living.  The result is the Northeast looks far richer than it really is.  The brutal truth is that real per capital income is higher in Oklahoma or Alabama than in New York State.  A reality that this chart completely misses.  Indeed, I wonder how much of the so called 'income inequality' in the nation is spurious, reflecting the fact that lots of lower income people live in lower cost states and vice versa.  Hmm, I'll have to noodle on that one.

Make minimum wages match cost of living

Don Boudreaux recommends that if the government is going to set minimum wages, it should set all other prices as well.  While I think this is a clever riposte, I think it's a lousy tactic (silly economist).  The real way to fight this recurring lunacy is to require that minimum wages be commensurate with cost of living in a given area. That way if we had a $10 minimum for America at large (Cost of living index: 100) then Manhattan would have a $20 minimum while Houston would have a $9 minimum.

Get that accepted as a standard and watch the so called ‘compassionate ones’ in big blue cities panic.   We’ll never have to worry about minimum wage shenanigans again.

The Modern Double Standard

One of the ways that it isn't your father's world any more is the way society treats sexual misbehavior differently for men and women.  Take sex tourism:  male sex tourism is considered deviant, even criminal while affluent, older women travelling to poor countries to buy 'love' from young men is 'celebrated' in films and TV shows.  Here's a good discussion of the phenomenon.

This is just part of a broader modern double standard:  males desire for sex is considered to be illegitimate unless validated by a woman's equal desire.  And since men's sex drives are so much stronger than women's this inevitably results in male sexuality even in marriage being considered excessive, a burden, even deviant.  And outside of marriage it gets even worse: male porn, overwhelmingly visual and graphic, showing unattainable women enthusiastically showering men with their heart's desire (lots of athletic, lights on sex) is rightly recognized as diseased.  Female porn showing unattainable men enthusiastically showering women with their heart's desire (money, status, obsession) is studied in churches as a window into souls.

The impact of this on marriages is devastating.  Wives come to look upon their husband's normal sexuality as abnormal and a burden while frustrated husbands secretly feel the same way.  As a result they can't talk about their needs with their wives (or anyone else).  And since they and their wives consider a man's normal needs inside of marriage to be somewhat illegitimate it becomes much easier for husbands to turn to other forms of illegitimate sex (porn, prostitutes, more willing women) to fulfill their illegitimized humanity.

This is a much bigger problem than it was in the the old, patriarchal society.  Back then most men had few realistic sexual outlets other than marriage and their wives were taught if not to be enthusiastic, at least 'dutiful'.  Today mere boys learn (as they always have) that girls are expensive, humiliating and ultimately frustrating so they turn (as they never could before) to an ever increasing flood of graphic and 'realistic' in the gynecological sense, porn.  Boys are learning that your HDTV is cheap and will never reject or humiliate you.

It seems that the true sex ratio between women who want men and men who can be bothered to burn money, time and ego to chase women has turned decisively against women.  The result - as always in our social economy - is that women have found that they must 'give' more and more for less and less to get and keep the attentions of men.  In a very real sense the feminist 'liberation' from sex inside marriage unless they wanted it has led their daughters to be trapped in a world where they find that they need to sexually exert themselves to even get to marriage.

In short, today's mothers and fathers by failing to deal honestly with their sexual relationships have truly screwed their kids.  And the 'orthodox' church, dominated by men who are women pleasers (you can't really lead a serious church unless you are at least in your 40's and 'happily' married), has decisively sided with its target matron customer, validating her illicit desires (see female porn above), anathemizing her husband's and in general validating her natural prejudices.

But the real question is what in the hell do I tell my kids?

This is a test that I'd like to give to our 'leaders'

A government that would rape, torture a man to find a fistful of drugs is not worthy of our allegiance, obedience or respect

Agree, Disagree?  Discuss.  Read the obscene story here.

You know my opinion.

Hattip Mark Perry

Actually, I think the Elephants have their hands around each other's necks

Anti Semitism now a left wing problem.

It seems that Jews are fleeing Europe again.  Anti-semitism is all the rage these days in the muslim banliues and Council Estates.   But it's also 'hip' to hate in the tonier precincts of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank.  Today Jew hating is a leftist obsession as this report from WR Mead explains.  Of course the greatest Jew hater of all time led a party called the National Socialist German Workers or Nazi party.

These 'cats may believe in government but they have absolutely no idea how to govern

The Obami are perhaps the most statist crowd to get power since Woodrow Wilson (our last academic President). They believe in government with all their hearts and minds.  It's a pity they don't know a damned thing about actually, you know, governing.   They are continually deriding the private sector as greedy, corrupt, unable to deliver on what people need without their intervention.   They have constantly dictated, mandated, manipulated, prosecuted, persecuted, and nudged the people to behave as they see fit because they are so much more capable and wise than we are.  And if you ask them where this spectacular competence and wisdom came from, they point to a political campaign.  But BHO didn't run the campaign, he was the talent. Like Barbra Streisand on tour it was other people who did all the planning, budgeting and coordination, BHO just waltzed up to the mike and 'sang' to the rapturous applause of the true believers or the mainstream press. But I repeat myself.

And like that loud dumb blonde, these 'cats have absolutely no idea what they are doing. They've shoved their oars into virtually every nook and cranny of the US economy, driving a ferocious capital strike that has real unemployment nearing depression levels without the foggiest idea of how it was all going to work.  Egged on by an equally ignorant partisan press, no one who was anyone asked the hard questions (of course we Republicans and Libertarians screamed bloody murder but you see, we're not anyone, because we don't believe).

This failure to even minimally govern extends far beyond healthcare.  The EPA is in the process of executing a 10X increase in its regulatory coverage.  10X due to CO2 despite there being no surface warming for going on eighteen years.  I'm sure that one is going to be painless.  Dodd Frank, the lunatics guide to financial regulation is lost in the swamp.  Stunningly, these poindexters took the half dozen competing agencies that 'regulated' financial services (I've always wondered how can you 'regulate' something when the regulators are so chaotic and 'unregulated'?  Don't they just introduce more complexity and uncertainty into the system?) and instead of rationalizing them they added another.  And of course all the blood and treasure we spent in the middle east to establish a little stability was arrogantly swept away to the point that staunch allies for over 70 years are now announcing publicly that they are ex allies and are seeking to make a deal with the Russians.  To top it off, BHO is selectively enforcing immigration, gun, minimum sentencing and other laws as if they were just a list of suggestions for his perusal.

Perhaps we should only allow minimally qualified individuals to run for the Presidency.  OJT is just too damned expensive.

Add this to Jobs Aliens Just Won't do Anymore

Police Anally probe drugs suspect.  Here.

Somehow I think the Gentry will sidestep this

Minimum wage laws have always been for the little people and flyovers.  If you were 'highborn' you could work at jobs that ignored the law, getting experience and connections not available to the rabble. Of course these illegal jobs only apply to the professions of the left gentry - law, government, finance,  politics, media, entertainment, the 'right' charities. You know, the Boni, the Good Ones.  Let an oilman like a Koch do the same in his industry and he must be prosecuted.  After all everyone knows that oil men are evil, criminals really. Not like us at all.

I'm sure the young ladies in this story will get a good talking to.  The Lords do not give up their privileges.

Laws are for little people. Link below.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/178809/

"We're gonna need a bigger boat"

That's from Jaws after Roy Scheider sees how big the shark is.  A similar reaction is sweeping through IT professionals as they process Kathleen Sebelius's latest testimony to the Senate Finance Committee regarding the Healthcare.gov funcionality.  As James Taranto points out:

An expert assessment comes from Robert Charette, a technology risk-management consultant, in an interview with Willie Jones of IEEE Spectrum (IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers):

Jones: Last week, . . . Sebelius assured her inquisitors at a congressional hearing that her department has brought in experts that have a handle on the problems the site is facing. How confident should we be in Sebelius' assurances?

Charette: Not very. They're talking about dozens and dozens of items on their punch list—both in terms of functionality and performance issues. They've got just over 30 days to get through the list. Let's just say that there are 30 items on it. What do you think is the actual probability of getting through testing them, making sure that the system works end to end and that there are no security holes all in a single month? How do you expect to get that done, knowing that every time you make a fix, there's a high probability that you're going to introduce an error somewhere else?

Jones: Let's spin this forward a bit. How do you think this next month will actually go?

Charette: They said that they needed five weeks at the minimum to test it, and they're still making all these changes. Where will that five-week window fit? If they had stopped right then and tested it for five weeks, they wouldn't have been able to finish on time. And five weeks was probably the absolute minimum they needed, assuming everything worked. They're patching the system as they go along and as Sebelius admitted, they're doing very local unit tests (which, by the way, is what got them into this mess in the first place, with each contractor saying, "Well, my stuff works"). If they discover something major, they may have to run the whole system test again.

Jones: So they'll most likely gain functionality, but security is not a given.

Charette: Yes, unfortunately. It would be very surprising if there isn't some type of breach, either at the federal or state level, by this time next year.

And this pessimistic assessment ignores the fact that this system is interfacing with literally hundreds of other systems from hundreds of other companies any one of which could be busted by only one fix.  And according to la Sebelius how many 'fixes' are we talking about?  "Hundreds"

As I said before: we're gonna need a bigger boat.

So it's Hillary's to lose. OK, good government types, are you cool with this?

Now that it turns out that the Young Pretender really was just pretending to be a competent Chief Executive (but in fairness, who could have known? all the other career Senior Law Lecturers who've never published even a single scholarly article have been highly effective chief executives) the Old Pretender - Hillary Clinton - pops up fresh, demure and ever so eligible.  And boy is she rich. She just returned from a two speech junket that earned her a cool $400,000 from those arch egalitarians at Goldman Sachs - a group dedicated to the proposition that what is good for Goldman Sachs is good for...Goldman Sachs.  When combined with husband Bill's steady haul as 'Elder Statesman' the two are estimated to be worth a cool $80 Million.  Boy, I wish I'd become a 'public servant'.

And she is picking up endorsements from the great and the good, well at least the great of the Democratic Party establishment:  Chuck Schumer et al.  And her minions  - no matter how unprincipled and corrupt - are winning important elections.  Yes things are looking very good for a January 2017 coronation for Hilary Clinton, the second of Her Name.  Never mind the political incest, the incompetence, the undisguised greed and the failure to demonstrate either good judgement or leadership skills, the Old Pretender is odds on favorite to retake the Eagle Throne of the elective monarchy that our constitutional Republic has become.

And the question I have for my (overwhelmingly decent, moderate, good government) Democrat friends :  Are you OK with this?  The remarkably corrupt wife of a corrupt ex-President who is so deep in the pocket of the party's Wall Street financiers that she doesn't even try to hide it, waltzing around as your heir apparent?  Is this what the Party of Jefferson, Jackson and Roosevelt has decayed into?  A vehicle for grasping lawyers and financiers to stitch up power in the name of the people?

And if not, what are you going to do about it?

Just asking.

Dems have Terry McCauliffe, we have Deuce Bigelow

Rob Schneider aka Deuce Bigelow and the Making copies guy on SNL has come over to the light (well at least the deep dappled shade).  We get a clown, they get a deeply crooked unfunny clown.  The right has definitely come out ahead.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/30/lifelong-hollywood-democrat-jumps-ship-to-join-gop-endorses-republican-candidate-for-governor/

Oh Pinnochio!

A bit of a spike in the word Pinnochios.  Wonder why?  I also wonder if liar, lying liar, lying sonofabitch and pants on fire have spiked as well.  Ohbama..well.  HT Carpe Diem

How in the heck can this be called an achievement?

Once upon a time I was a buck Partner at an international consulting firm, or maybe Partner First Class but definetely way down the totem pole.  Project fodder, really.  And for reasons still unclear to me I was given the unenviable assignment to parachute into a truly catastrophic large scale sysems and reengineering project for a major telecommunications company that will remain nameless because they have a lot of lawyers who know where I live.

Well, long story made short our client service partner at said Telco had managed to combine the alienation of half of he client's top management with really, really lousy project management and garnish it with apparently random but destructive last minute design changes and the odd 'strategic' 'untruth'.  At $4 million a month.  I've never ever had an experience - before or since - where I've been yelled at, cursed and cried at by different execs all in the same day.  It was that kind of gig.  Of course my 'heroic' efforts (primarily hiding in the men's room until the worst was over) to save the project came a cropper and we were ignonimously chucked out on our ear (quite right IMHO).  I've never really seen anything quite like it.

Until this frosty morn when while finishing my McDonalds flapjacks and sausage I read the Washington Post.  In the touchingly naive way that only very bright 'light workers' who have never implemented anything bigger than the gas in their SUV can do, they outlined the difficulties that the Political Achievement formerly known as Obamacare and before that as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Peepahkaaah) were having.  Reading the lilting cadences of official Washington I was transported instantly back to the phone company.

Some things were different:  instead of a $60 Million project it was a $634 million project.  And instead of one outside contractor (us! us!) they had about 50.  But the basics of the fiasco were the same:  half of the client execs enraged and opposed (the Republican half), absolutely no project management - not even a person called a project manager, lunatic last minute changes, and a whole stack of 'strategic untruths' told to top mangement and critical customers until the very end.  Same story, different verse at 10X the price.  But of course this is our Federal Government so whaddya expect?

Well for one thing, I didn't expect that WAPO would call O'care/PPACA Barack Obama's 'top acheivement'.  I mean how can you describe a world class fiasco as one's acheivement?  The ring tone chaps would never have dreamed of representing our project to the Board as such and had the financial press gotten wind of it they would have scourged, nailed, speared and otherwised crucified the phonies (and us) for it.  Everyone wanted to forget it so much that they fired us in a way that got us paid lots of penalty money.  They wouldn't dream of calling it an 'achievement'.

And for another thing, they lacked the raw chutzpah to come up with the novel notion of blaming the uninvolved half of the executive team for the project's failure to build consensus and a design that supported the entire company's needs. the half that just happened to have no control the project at the point of initiation.  And they sure as heck wouldn't think that the Board would ever, ever believe that the executives who had opposed the project, had no say in its design, had not selected the contractors and had not been involved during the build could be held responsible for the result.  Anyone who had suggested such a ridiculous thing would have had their thorazine drip doubled.

In other words:  calling the somewhat less than catastrophic initiation of a major project an 'acheivement' and the tarring of the uninvolved, essentially powerless opponents of the project as the villains responsible for the fiasco is a creative leap that would literally be beyond the (non-deranged) imagination of any senior private executive that I have known during my long and quite checkered career.  But it seems to be par for the course in Washington where the Glorious Federal Superstate exerts so much gravitational force that it literally bends reality.

And I'm afraid that there's no men's room big enough for us all to hide in until this blows over.  God help us every one.

Schadenfreude: Just Another Way to Say I Love It or Why Liberals Are Smarter Than Conservatives

Recently I have been in a rare good political mood.  I've been skipping on the sunny side of the street because of the healthcare debacle (denouement? catastrophe? or my favorite:  Obamageddon?) that is Obamacare.  There is nothing quite like telling your political opponents (and anyone else who would listen to a crank like me) that their plans were going to end in tears and then turn around and find them in the corner blubbering with mascara running thickly down damp cheeks.  I think I now truly understand what the Germans mean by schadenfreude.  And golly is it fun.

And the fun is just beginning!  The IT was the easy part.  There is no physical or economic law that says you must screw up your systems project (although there is a rule of thumb that says that the Federal Government will screw up any systems project larger than a Windows upgrade) but from now on out the birds hitting the pavement with a sickening splat really will be chickens trying to roost at velocity.  And that's because the other things wrong with the law directly contradict fundamental reality - as Les (As God is my witness, I thought Turkeys could fly) Nessman learned:  like gravity and turkey aerodynamics, the Gods of political economy are cruel masters who do not suffer fools gladly.  Even if you are a five time winner of the Buckeye News Hawk award.

But as I watch Obamacare spokespeople channeling Kevin Bacon claiming that all will be well as soon as those gosh darn IT kids straighten up and fly right and that it's a good thing to cancel millions of policies and replace them with much more expensive options that just happen to not include any of the good doctors or hospitals and so on and so forth I get uncomfortable.  It's like watching a prize fight get out of hand.  The punch drunk defending champeen keeps getting back up bent and bloody just to get knocked down again.  At some point I start worrying less about the outcome than whether his blood gets on my ceremonial boxing loafers.  But the ref won't call the fight because he (like the mainstream press) has ten big ones riding on the Champ to win.  So it goes on until the punch drunk pugilist can no longer stand in the forlorn hope that he can turn it all around with a lucky swing.

Liberals Are the Clever Ones

Which brings me to the point of this post (although my introductory 'excessive celebration' in the end zone was a heckuva lot of fun):  Liberals (and advocates of state supremacy and power in general) are smarter than we conservatives are - they have to be.  It was actually rather easy for this libertarian-conservative to predict that O'care was going to crater:  all I needed to know was the conservative Canon of Tears:  Adam Smith (people are selfish), Ed Burke (they're unpredictable), Fred Hayek (all these selfish, unpredictable people doing their own thing means making them do what you want them to really, really hard), and Connie Eble (shit happens).

After all, predicting that an unread, unproofed 2,700 page law that creates a "national" "program" that seeks to "transform" one sixth of the economy, giving 30 million people insurance, while letting everyone keep their current plan and doctor at a lower cost than today will fail spectacularly isn't rocket science.  Just like it isn't hard to predict that trying to turn two primitive, ethnically and religiously balkanized muslim countries into Jeffersonian (or even Mohammedan) democracies was going to end badly.  I mean talk about putting yourself in places where shit is bound to happen.*

But I digress.  Back to Liberal brilliance:  leftist schemes (I'm using scheme in both the English sense of the word: plans or programs and American:  sneaky, underhanded) like O'care explicitly eschew (gesundheit) assumptions like self interest or behavioral complexity or even shit happening - for a mechanistic, legalistic view of the chaos that is our nation. Like the Ivy League lawyers they inevitably are, they hold to the novel faith that if they write the 'right' runes on the magical Congressional Hard drive and the Bureaucratic Priests press "Enter", then what they will - regardless of the opinions and plans of the other 315 million Americans - will happen as they planned it while they ride off to save the people from some other disaster about to befall them. But of course incompetent geniuses are always making this mistake - just ask Dougie "Dr. Evil" Powers:

Dr. Evil:  All right guard, begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism. 
[guard starts dipping mechanism] 
Dr. Evil: Close the tank! 
Scott Evil: Wait, aren't you even going to watch them? They could get away! 
Dr. Evil: No no no, I'm going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I'm just gonna assume it all went to plan.

Which seems to be what everyone in the Administration above the rank of PHP Coder First Class did. And that brings me to my point, well two points actually:  First of all, liberal schemes always tend to ithe grandiose and complex:  grandiose because that's what liberals do:  they fundamentally transform.  And to do grandiose you need to get everybody in the Zeppelin and that takes a pinch here and stitch there for the endless number of special (in both the adult day care and political corruption senses of the word) supporters with special needs.

But - and this is the rub:  to make massive and novel changes is to war against reality.  A reality that is filled with self interest, unpredictability, mass confusion and shit happening.  In some cases you find yourself pushing against self interest, in others you fabricate complex provisions to deal with behaviors that you predict will happen because of something else you've done which is in response to another provision which was to counter a third undesired outcome.  And it's not long before you end up wih 2700 incomprehensible, mutually contradictory pages of legal dreck.

And it is definitely harder to keep track of all of the pluses and minuses, the nested multi-layer flow charts and special deals for special folks that this entails rather than use the simple rules of thumb that us low wattage conservatives use. So simply to get elected and function in Washington liberals must have higher IQs**, particularly when you recall that in addition to conceiving and keeping track of the 2700 pages of flowchart fun they also need to keep straight which narrative goes with which group of special needs.  Get enough of the details wrong and well.....you have O'care.

So hoist a glass to the intrepid liberal statists of Washington DC:  never have so many expended so much brain power to make the irrational and implausible work really badly.  We conservatives stand in awe of their snowballing intellectual achievement.

*None of this is to suggest that Republicans can't do the same stupid things, after all, look at Iraq and Afghanistan.  They were easy to conquer (simple task that we're good at) but an absolute jihadist nightmare to turn into 'respectable' democratic republics or even disreputable balkan kleptocracies.  We should learn from the example of those arch-conservative revolutionaries of yore: the Founding Fathers.  They set themselves a single, very difficult task: ditch the British Empire while retaining basically everything else, even the nasty bits like slavery, puritanism and really bad teeth. Contrast this with the French revolution which tried to turn Frenchmen into Thermidors or whatever and you get the difference between conservative and liberal change.  Too many degrees of freedom will kill you every time.

**This 'smarty pants' attribute of liberals drives conservatives nuts.  And it's our own fault. We continually get into contests with liberals on their territory using their rules.  It's a little like a master plumber entering a spelling bee.  The little alphabet jockeys can spell old elbow wrench's waders off but being able to spell campylobacteriosis or escherichia coli isn't going to do squat (and neither will you) if the toilets back up.

This Chap's retirement must have recently vested

Because the Avatars of the great and glorious state want there to be no choice:  Perimeters and controls is their solution for everything.

REALITY-BASED POLICY: ABC News: Exclusive: After Westgate, Interpol Chief Ponders ‘Armed Citizenry’” “nterpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said today the U.S. and the rest of the democratic world is at a security crossroads in the wake of last month’s deadly al-Shabab attack at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya – and suggested an answer could be in arming civilians. In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Noble said there are really only two choices for protecting open societies from attacks like the one on Westgate mall where so-called ‘soft targets’ are hit: either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.”

H.L. Mencken had the modern superstate pegged long ago:  

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

While Islamic terror isn't totally imaginary, it's ability to threaten our civilization is small.  Particularly when compared to the awesome and mostly destructive power of the modern administrative state.

This 'cat will never work again.

HT Instapundit

And the title for biggest rube goes to....

A lot of people bought into the Barack Obama mystique, not once but twice but the groups that supported him the most have suffered the most brutal declines in household income:  the young and minorities primarily.  But fulsomely supporting someone while they do you harm is the definition of a rube, isn't it?  From the WSJ:

What was largely overlooked, however, is that those who were most likely to vote for Barack Obama in 2012 were members of demographic groups most likely to have suffered the steepest income declines. Mr. Obama was re-elected with 51% of the vote. Five demographic groups were crucial to his victory: young voters, single women, those with only a high-school diploma or less, blacks and Hispanics. He cleaned up with 60% of the youth vote, 67% of single women, 93% of blacks, 71% of Hispanics, and 64% of those without a high-school diploma, according to exit poll

According to the Sentier research, households headed by single women, with and without children present, saw their incomes fall by roughly 7%. Those under age 25 experienced an income decline of 9.6%. Black heads of households saw their income tumble by 10.9%, while Hispanic heads-of-households' income fell 4.5%, slightly more than the national average. The incomes of workers with a high-school diploma or less fell by about 8% (-6.9% for those with less than a high-school diploma and -9.3% for those with only a high-school diploma).

What we really need is another 'decade of greed':

This is a stunning reversal of the progress for these groups during the expansions of the 1980s and 1990s, and even through the start of the 2008 recession. Census data reveal that from 1981-2008 the biggest income gains were for black women, 81%; followed by white women, 67%; followed by black men, 31%; and white males at 8%.

In other words, the gender and racial income gaps shrank by more than in any period in American history during the Reagan boom of the 1980s and the Clinton boom of the 1990s. Women and blacks continued to make economic progress during the mini-Bush expansion from 2002-07. "Income inequality" has been exacerbated during the Obama era.Mr. Obama has often contemptuously, and wrongly, branded the quarter-century period of prosperity beginning with the presidency of Ronald Reagan as a "trickle down" era. For many in the groups that Mr. Obama set out to help, a return to the prosperity of that era would be a vast improvement.

The Census Bureau data on incomes include cash government benefits, such as unemployment insurance, disability payments and the earned-income tax credit (but excludes Medicaid and food stamps). Most of the cash programs have surged in cost during the Obama presidency, yet incomes have still declined for the lowest-income eligible groups. This suggests that wages and salaries from employment have shrunk at an even faster pace than the Census data show. The shrinking paychecks of the past four years are consistent with two unwelcome anomalies of the recovery: a swift decline in labor-force participation to 63.4% from 65.5% during that period and a rise in part-time employment.

What all of this means is that the stimulus-led economic revival that began officially in June 2009—Vice President Joe Biden's famous "summer of recovery"—has only resulted in lower incomes for at least half of Americans, the very ones who were instrumental in electing Mr. Obama twice.

Attaboy, Barry.

Droit du seigneur FBI style

If an FBI agent shoots you it's because you needed shooin'.

The FBI has deemed every agent-involved shooting between 1993 and 2011 as justified.

Every single one.  Helpful hint:  avoid the FBI like the plague because they are clearly not accountable.  And nations with unaccountable paramilitaries (with almost 5,000 unread and uncomprehended laws to choose from) are the cornerstone of the modern compassionate fascist state.

Heck, they might as well just get it over with and pass a general law for 'anti-Federal Activities'.

Cougars: coming to a forest near you

“Every year we see more of them,” said Mark Dowling, a founder of the Cougar Network, a nonprofit research group and a leading source of online information about cougars. “It used to be a rarity when a mountain lion showed up in Missouri. It’s almost routine now.”

Eek.  Or should I say Rowrrr?  Here.

Man bites dog: Glenn Greenwald makes sense

Usually Mr. Greenwald is cheering for more state power and restrictions on people's rights:  More restrictive laws and the shackles and cruel punishmens that go with them.  But at least when it comes to the overreaching national security state his judgement is sound.  The money graf from the Guardian:

The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what they do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals.

This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.

Authoritarian Synergy in the Federal Superstate

According to Ira Stoll, the Feds used Verizon's need for FCC approvals to extort 'cooperation' for it's massive citizen surveillance data programs.  No matter how innocuous it seems, when you make the superstate more powerful anywhere, it ends up hurting liberty.  Everywhere.

The Federal Super State is not your friend.  Break it up, break it all up.

Rut Roh!

Virtually Entire US Media Boycotts "Off The Record" Meeting With Eric Holder

A biblical scandal

It turns out that IRS Commissioner Shulman made at least 157 public visits to the White House. Almost twice as many as the next most frequent visitor.  In contrast, the IRS Commish made only one WH visit during Bush administration. Imagine that: top IRS cop makes 157 visits to the Chicago machine's DC branch while conservative and conservative sounding groups are screaming bloody murder all across the country about IRS harassment and not one legal or ethical issue raised for over two years. By the press, ,the Justice Department, anyone in the power structure. Nobody even said "gee, with all of the allegations of wrongdoing flying around here, maybe it looks a bit fishy that Captain IRS is coming here every third day". Verily it is a miracle. Immaculate in its conception. A tale biblical in its import:  HT Instapundit.

Eric 10:38-42

King Holder Version (KHV)

38 Now it came to pass, as they won, that He entered into The City of God: and a certain apparatchik named Hillary received Him into her very White House.

39 And she had a brother apparatchik called IRS Commissioner Shulman, who visited 157 times to sit at The One's feet, hear His word, and help His reelection Ministry.

40 But Hillary was cumbered about with much to-ing and fro-ing, and came to Him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my brother apparatchik hath left me to Benghazi alone? bid him therefore that he help me take the fall.

41 And The New Jesus answered and said unto her, Hillary, Hillary, thou art careful and implicated in many things.

42 But one thing is needful:  reelection.  And IRS Commissioner Shulman hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from him until his indictment cometh.

America has become Hysterialand

Even in Texas.  A Reason contributor describes a lockdown at the GWB library in Dallas due to a false alarm about someone possessing a gun.  In Texas.

The fact is that mass murder and terrorist acts are extremely rare.  And murder hasn't been this low in over 50 years.  Yet we behave like we live in a Mad Max world.  We need to grow up.

Don't talk to the PoPo or FBI without a tape recorder and a lawyer. Ever.

The FBI has a policy of not recording any interview it has with a witness.  Their reasoning is that a recording could contradict their claims that a witness lied to them.  And of course, lying to the PoPo is a felony, one that is very useful in coercing 'helpful' testimony.  And if you haven't recorded the conversation it is their word (minimum two of them) against yours.  Reason has the story here.

You're a fool if you trust the boys with guns and shackles because:  they're not on your side, they're on their side. The same goes for the rest of our criminal, kleptocratic state apparatus.  You should be frightened every time you interact with them.  Which is the way it is in Russia and China.

Ironic, no?

Liberal Fascism MEANS double standard

Legal double standard: Obama administration gives wind energy industry a pass on killing birds, but not oil and gaS.  But don't you understand?  The Left is righteous by definition.  Therefore they can't sin.  Can they?

Fat Chance

Fascist is as Fascist does

It is a mistake to believe that our rulers are anything but self serving power hungry despots seeking to slip their constitutional restraints at every turn so they can more fully get their way.  Place no trust in men because they will fail you.  Which is why we need to break it up, break it all up.

A single morning's roundup of Federal Fascist behavior:

Why Did the IRS Target Conservative Groups? 

Outspoken conservative business leaders that is:  RUMSFELD: IRS also retaliates against outspoken business leaders.

Politico: Israel-related groups also pointed to IRS scrutiny.

EPA waives fee requests for friendly groups, denies conservative groups.


REMINDER: Obama Joked About Auditing Enemies in 2009.

GEORGE WILL: In IRS Scandal, Echoes Of Watergate.

Hey, even Massachusetts Democrats are saying that.

DON’T LET THIS SHAKEDOWN GET LOST IN THE SCANDAL OVERLOAD: Lamar Alexander: Sebelius fundraising ‘arguably an even bigger issue’ than Iran-Contra.

 Rep. Schakowsky: ‘Our Survival as a Species is Dependent on Women Taking Charge.’

 Top IRS official didn’t reveal tea party targeting.  When asked directly by Congress....

Of course it's not lying when Our Lord and Savior does it:  BUSTED: WaPo Fact Checker Gives Obama’s Claim That He Called Benghazi “An Act of Terrorism” Four Pinocchios. 

But it's not a coverup unless a Republican does it. Coverup: State Dept. Kept Media From Speaking To Benghazi Attack Survivors.

I'm sure all the coverage is 'fair and balanced': Top CBS, ABC, CNN execs all have relatives working as advisors for White House.

Journalism groups, lawmakers voice ire at AP phone records seizure.

STACY MCCAIN ON The Fate of Basseley Nakoula.

“Hillary’s promise of vengeance to the father of a fallen SEAL wasn’t that we’d get the jihadis who killed him but that we’d punish the filmmaker. That’s perverse, but in keeping with the fact that she decided to run ads on Pakistani TV apologizing for the film while Islamist cretins menaced American diplomats across the region.”– Allahpundit, Oct. 25, 2012

The wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time: Nakoula was out on “supervised release” for a federal bank fraud conviction. He was $700,000 behind on restitution payments and operating under an alias when he made “The Innocence of Muslims,” a crappy movie that got turned into a YouTube video clip that in turn became the pretext of riots in Egypt and then — it is now generally acknowledged — was utilized as a flimsy excuse by the State Department in an attempt to distract from its embarrassing failures in the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Having become unintentionally famous, the con man Nakoula was arrested and hustled into federal court amid unusually high security two weeks after the Benghazi attacks. We need not wonder why Eric Holder’s Justice Department made this a top priority:

“We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
– Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012 . . . .

But this isn’t really about Nakoula at all, is it?

What the case of Nakoula actually demonstrates is the strangely misplaced priorities of the Obama administration: Eight months later, they still haven’t caught any of the terrorists who killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, but they needed only two weeks to apprehend Nakoula.

And Hillary is a more vicious fascist than Obama will ever be.  Fear the Lady Reaper.

Colleges and Universities: The most 'egalitarian' institutions ever?

Colleges preen about how they are better than private businesses, that their morality is superior to the market's law of the jungle.  But even the greediest private businesses don't charge poor people more in order to subsidize their rich customers do they?  According to Bloomberg this is standard practice at many well known institutions of 'higher' learning.

For this we give them a tax exemption?  Perhaps they're just trying to educate students on how venal and corrupt the world can be.

Damn! Hope and Change be breakin' out all over

We're kicking Euro ass!  Poor Europe, they can't even beat us in suckage.

Related: The Idled Young Americans. “The idle young European, stranded without work by the Continent’s dysfunction, is one of the global economy’s stock characters. Yet it might be time to add another, even more common protagonist: the idle young American. For all of Europe’s troubles — a left-right combination of sclerotic labor markets and austerity — the United States has quietly surpassed much of Europe in the percentage of young adults without jobs.”

HT Instapundit

Catastrophic Success

What happens to people when their jobs can truly be automated away?

The standard argument is that manufacturing as a whole must now be seen as a quaint, buggy-whip-making type activity — one that technology and economic growth have decreed is no longer a viable creator of jobs. But not to worry! The economy marches on, creating more and better opportunities for all those folks displaced from manufacturing jobs. Automation is simply replacing drudge work, as it always has. The real economy is in information, now, not stuff. Everyone has the chance to move up the value chain.

The problem with that argument is that our machines are far better at working with information than we are, except where it comes to actually understanding information, where we still have a bit of an edge. Automation is poised to start killing white-collar jobs with the same ruthless zeal that it used in going after blue-collar jobs. In fact, the use of the future tense in that sentence is superfluous. This is already happening. How else can we account for an economy that is growing overall — however slowly — while the total number of people who work continues to go down?

I think the real question is what is the rate of change?  Manufacturing labor productivity has been growing at 5% per year for a long time.  This has resulted in massive per capita increases in output but is slow enough for us to adapt to it.  If the automation revolution happens much faster, then our institutions may struggle to cope.

Hmmm.

Is the difference between a Depression and a Recession just the scenery?

The last decade has been the second slowest growth decade in American history, barely outpacing the decade around the Great Depression.  Indeed that decade and ours stand out as far worse than any other in the last 210 years.  But it doesn't feel like it did back in the 30's:  instead of soup lines we have a trebling of Food Stamps, instead of men peddling apples, we have people on their 100th week of unemployment insurance and tripled disability claims.  Yet the underlying real unemployment rate remains over 11% and while the misery might not be as visible it is real.  For example, suicide rates are up 50% as more and more people fall into despair.

And the sad thing is that with our massive and ever expanding debt and unfunded liability levels, with the brutal regulatory state expanding its tentacles deeper and deeper into every nook and cranny of the economy and with the nation now totally acclimatized to welfarism and rent seeking, there is very little prospect of things changing absent catastrophe.

Last time it took WW2 to pull us out of the statist cul de sac we had turned into.  What fresh hell will be required this time?

We have change with no hope.

If this chart was for the Oil Industry....

During the GWB administration there were constant accusations of special dealing, particularly with respect to the oil industry and Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton - you couldn't drive down the street without seeing yard sins saying 'no blood for oil' or some such.

So pray tell what should we make of the chart below?  Mr. Obama comes from the Higher Education industry.  And since his accession to the Federal Throne lending to college students - which is almost all Federal - has quadrupled.  And of course virtually every dollar of these loans was immediately passed to....the higher education industry.  With the liability being held by the rubes....I mean the students.

Hmm.  Tricky thing to explain, that.  Good thing the President has the press in his pocket.  Deep.

Coincidence?

The richer and more powerful the federal superstate gets, the poorer the people get.  I guess you can call it 'progressive trickle down economics'.  It's just that it seem that the bloated Federal river runs dry before it gets to the common people.


So since 2001 real per capita spending by the Feds has grown almost 50% or $3,500 in real terms.  10% of (falling) 2012 median income.  Yet increasingly little (well now it's none) of this is finding it's way into pay packets.  So where is the money going?  To social security, Medicare, Food Stamps and other rapidly expanding bits of social democracy to make the people numb to the death of their hopes and dreams.  Oh, and to cronies.  Lots of cronies.



If I didn't know better I'd call all of this 'progressive' social 'democracy' part of an elite scam to protect their power and privileges in all of what Tyler Durden calls the 'Cartel and Rentier' sectors of our economy.  But that can't be true, can it?  I mean everyone who is 'great' and 'good' agrees that the glorious Federal super state must wax so therefore the common man must necessarily wane.  In modern 'Progressive' parlance we need to be 'nudged'.  And poked and shoved and slapped and....looted.  Don't forget looted.

For the greater good,  you see.

L'toilette cest Moi

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/obamas-hubris-problem-90650.html#.UXqUBdJcrtw.gmail

Just for the record:  I too observed a private minute of silence this morning.  For yesterday's dinner.  Sadly, my photographer didn't capture the historic occasion because she divorced me. 

As I often say:  L'toilette cest Moi.   Well actually, no.  I don't believe that I'm a crapper.  That would be crazy.  Sort of like observing a moment of silence when you are alone in your office and then announcing it to the world.  Of course if an egotist spends a minute silent in his office without a photo op, did he really shut up?

Next up;  President Obama observes a minute of flossing in honor of Gingivitis Prevention Week.  Photo close ups of his pearly whites

Sweden: Social Equality is for the wee ones...

Perhaps no nation on earth has been more social 'Democratic' and 'egalitarian' than Sweden. Yet Swedish Kurdish Chicago PHD Tino Sandanadji points out that this has resulted in Sweden having far less social mobility at the top than the US.

According to one study the share of the richest Swedes who inherited their wealth is around, 2/3 with 1/3 being entrepreneurs, while in the United States it was the opposite, with 1/3 of the wealthiest inherited their wealth while around 2/3 are entrepreneurs.

Thus while the Swedish middle class is large and has a compressed earning distribution, at the very top you have a small number of aristocratic families controlling much of the wealth. Mobility into this group is rare, probably rares than it is in the United States. One reason are stronger informal class-barriers, merely earning wealth is not enough to be accepted a member of the aristocratic upper-class. Another more interesting reason may be the unintended effect of welfare-state economic policies.

Once again my Kurd plays Turd doing the backstroke in the progressive punch bowl. And once again Frederic Bastiat - the king of unintended consequences - shows why he should be the first Economist to receive the Nobel Prize posthumously. Reading Bastiat allows anyone to accurately predict the chaotic denouemont of Social Democracy going on all around the world.

Read the whole thing Here.