Vicissitudes And Constants
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Four Arms' LiveJournal:
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| Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | | 10:32 pm |
| | Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | | 1:08 pm |
Damned Persians
This is what you get for allowing yourselves to be disarmed. I note that the cops weren't the ones beating and killing demonstrators: it was the Basiji militia which they brought in especially for the purpose. Might have gotten interesting if some demonstrators had been armed. We shall see how things develop, but I am much less optimistic about it than I was even a few days ago. Eventually, I think it will happen eventually. Probably soon. Maybe not soon enough. . | | Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 | | 4:42 am |
I Should Go On Record Here
I think an Iranian revolution more likely with every day that goes by that the demonstrations are not suppressed. And if the government did suppress it, I think it might do nothing but accelerate the revolution. Those who know me will remember that I have been predicting a transformation in Persia for, oh, what? Fifteen years now? Persia will be an important US ally (again, and on a more equal basis this time) within five years. Astute students of the situation will note that the Shi'i are not actually as much of a problem as the Wahabi, and that 'Saudi' Arabia stands at the root of far more anti-US feeling than Iran. . | | Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 | | 4:32 am |
Susan Gratia-Hupp
Ms Gratia-Hupp lost her parents in the infamous "Luby's Cafeteria" massacre. Here she talks about gun control issues. . | | Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 | | 10:00 pm |
Quote
All too often education actually acts as a form of aversion therapy, that what we're really teaching our children is to associate learning with work and to associate work with drudgery so that the remainder of their lives they will possibly never go near a book because they associate books with learning, learning with work and work with drudgery. Whereas after a hard day's toil, instead of relaxing with a book they'll be much more likely to sit down in front of an undemanding soap opera because this is obviously teaching them nothing, so it is not learning, so it is not work, it is not drudgery, so it must be pleasure. And I think that that is the kind of circuitry that we tend to have imprinted on us because of the education process. -- Alan Moore | | Friday, February 6th, 2009 | | 8:05 pm |
Is It True That The English Word "Analysis" Is Derived From "Anal," As In Anal Probe?
How does the Anal Probe work? The Anal Probes range from simple to complex. The crudest probe can be improvised with a drinking straw, bit of newspaper, baseball bat or spoon. The most complex probes manufactured by The Anal Probe Corporation guide and propel themselves through the entire digestive tract while collecting and logging samples. The logged samples are indexed by time and location within the digestive tract. The probe enters anally and exits from the subject's mouth in about 30 minutes full of samples. . | | Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 | | 4:38 am |
Gene Wolfe
Up for a Nebula again. From last New Year's Eve's Eve interview: --- My great theme is memory. I’m rarely aware of that as I write, but I realize it as I read. Another theme is reality. A good many writers are writing propaganda. I don’t do that. I know that not all politicians are crooked. I know that some soldiers are brutal criminals, but also that most are not even close to that. I have been accused of writing only good and bad women, but that is because those are the only kinds I’ve ever met. There is nothing in my work that readers will find nowhere else, although I wish there were. I try to serve good, honest writing. I make the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold – or try to. A great many other writers are doing the same thing.--- How has sf changed? The giants are gone. When I started writing, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke were all producing. You have to have lived in both periods to understand what an enormous difference they made. Fantasy has lost Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The Harry Potter books are good, but they are YA. Neil Gaiman is our best fantasist and is giving us wonderful books and stories. Another giant has arrived, which may be why fantasy feels so much healthier now. Both science fiction and fantasy have value, for the present and for the future. It’s important that they be there – and that they be good, and thus read by as many as possible. The interesting point is that fantasy is very, very old and SF a stripling. The oldest known fiction is fantasy, I believe. The first great fantasy, GILGAMESH, comes to us from the dawn of civilization. Fantasy assures us (quite truthfully) that the universe is inconceivably wide and wild. Once I wrote a poem about a man who lived on an island whose population believed it to be the only place. He walks around the island, and from a lonely beach sees another island. Fantasy is that walk. “Things could be different,” says fantasy. “They could be very, very different just over that hill. Have hope.” SF assures (quite truthfully) that they will be. “They may be better,” says SF, “or they may be worse. But they will not be like this.” . | | Sunday, January 4th, 2009 | | 11:34 am |
| | Sunday, December 7th, 2008 | | 9:34 pm |
Fun With Other People's Money
Some of you will remember a book called "Liar's Poker", which was sort of an expose about the jiggery and the pokery as they occurred on Wall Street in the 1980's. The author of this book, Mr Michael Lewis, has revisited his old haunts and written an article about his experiences, in the light of the ongoing collapse of the world financial system. Here are some excerpts: ___ To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue. ___ I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.” ___ [Steve] Eisman wasn’t ... an analyst with a sunny disposition who expected the best of his fellow financial man and the companies he created. “You have to understand,” Eisman says in his defense, “I did subprime first. I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn’t give a shit what it sold.” Harboring suspicions about people’s morals and telling investors that companies don’t deserve their capital wasn’t, in the 1990s or at any other time, the fast track to success on Wall Street. Eisman quit Oppenheimer in 2001 to work as an analyst at a hedge fund, but what he really wanted to do was run money. FrontPoint Partners, another hedge fund, hired him in 2004 to invest in financial stocks. Eisman’s brief was to evaluate Wall Street banks, homebuilders, mortgage originators, and any company (General Electric or General Motors, for instance) with a big financial-services division—anyone who touched American finance. An insurance company backed him with $50 million, a paltry sum. “Basically, we tried to raise money and didn't really do it,” Eisman says. ___ Danny Moses, who became Eisman’s head trader, was another who shared his perspective. Raised in Georgia, Moses, the son of a finance professor, was a bit less fatalistic than Daniel or Eisman, but he nevertheless shared a general sense that bad things can and do happen. When a Wall Street firm helped him get into a trade that seemed perfect in every way, he said to the salesman, “I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to screw me?” Heh heh heh, c’mon. We’d never do that, the trader started to say, but Moses was politely insistent: We both know that unadulterated good things like this trade don’t just happen between little hedge funds and big Wall Street firms. I’ll do it, but only after you explain to me how you are going to screw me. And the salesman explained how he was going to screw him. And Moses did the trade. ___ [T]he subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. “The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM,” says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he’d hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. “She was this lovely woman from Jamaica,” he says. “One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, ‘How did that happen?’ ” It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. “By the time they were done,” Eisman says, “they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn’t make any of the payments.” ___ This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. “The investment-banking industry is fucked,” Eisman had told me a few weeks earlier. “These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. It’s like being a Scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along, and one morning you wake up: ‘Holy shit, I’m wrong!’ ” Now Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from ceasing to be investment banks. The investment banks were not just fucked; they were extinct. Not so for hedge fund managers who had seen it coming. “As we sat there, we were weirdly calm,” Moses says. “We felt insulated from the whole market reality. It was an out-of-body experience. We just sat and watched the people pass and talked about what might happen next. How many of these people were going to lose their jobs. Who was going to rent these buildings after all the Wall Street firms collapsed.” Eisman was appalled. “Look,” he said. “I’m short. I don’t want the country to go into a depression. I just want it to fucking deleverage.” He had tried a thousand times in a thousand ways to explain how screwed up the business was, and no one wanted to hear it. “That Wall Street has gone down because of this is justice,” he says. “They fucked people. They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.” . | | 3:40 am |
Barack Obama's Birth Certificate
Here is a link to an authoritative debunking of the 'Barack Obama's a FURRINER!!' nonsense we've been hearing way too much of lately. This is nuttery on the same level as 'the GOBMENT and GEORGE DUBYA BUSH is responsible for the September 11 attacks!!' stuff. Those of you who wish to identify yourselves to the world as ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) polaris93-level kooks have no better or easier course before you than to push and to continue pushing this loudly. When refuted or contradicted, remember: raise your voice and repeat what you said. . | | Monday, October 20th, 2008 | | 1:31 am |
| | Saturday, October 11th, 2008 | | 2:00 am |
| | Thursday, October 9th, 2008 | | 8:12 pm |
More Voter Fraud From ACORN
Barack Obama's former employers have been caught more or less red-handed committing mass voter fraud: "All the signatures looked exactly the same," Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican on the board. "Everything on the card filled out looks exactly the same." The forms included registrations submitted in the names of the dead -- and in one case, the name of a fast-food restaurant, Jimmy Johns. Sally LaSota, a Democrat on the board, called the forms fraudulent and said whoever filed them broke the law. " ACORN, with its intent, perhaps was good in the beginning, but went awry somewhere," LaSota said. As readers of this blog know, ACORN played a big part in causing the current financial crisis by intimidating banks who weren't making enough bad mortgages. So I don't know if I can agree with Ms LaSota on that. I think they've been rotten from the beginning. . | | Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | | 4:35 am |
How Low Will It Go?
9,000? 7,000? 4,000? 850? Where do *you* think that the Dow Jones industrial average will trough? I have a crisp new American five dollar bill for the lucky boy or girl who picks the winner. Which may, by the time we have a winner, be worth fifty dollars in todays money, or may, by the time we pick a winner, be worth only a couple of cents. . | | Monday, September 29th, 2008 | | 5:05 pm |
| | Sunday, September 28th, 2008 | | 9:53 am |
More About Fannie And Freddie
Regulators were concerned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2004: there were congressional hearings. Members of one party were pushing for more regulation. Members of the other party thought - and said - that everything was fine, and expressed their anger at the regulators. Here is a video - it is less than nine minutes long. Who is responsible for the current crisis? I note that this video repeats the claim that Franklin Raines, the former head of Fannie Mae, advises Obama on economic matters. This claim is disputed: U.S. Presidential candidate Senator John McCain has sought to tie Raines to McCain's opponent Barack Obama, in an effort to discredit Obama on economic issues. McCain says that Raines advises Obama. Raines and Obama state that he does not. Obama is the 2nd highest recipient of contributions from Fannie Mae employees of any American politician, receiving over $126,000 since 1989 - 95% from individuals at Fannie Mae the remainder from PAC contributions. On July 16, 2008, The Washington Post reported that Franklin Raines had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters." Also, in an editorial in August 27, 2008 titled "Tough Decision Coming", the Washington Post editorial staff wrote that "Two members of Mr. Obama's political circle, James A. Johnson and Franklin D. Raines, are former chief executives of Fannie Mae." On September 18, 2008, John McCain's Campaign, published a campaign ad that quoted the Washington Post's claim that Franklin Raines advises Barack Obama on economic matters. The ad also notes that "Raines made millions and then left Fannie Mae while it was under investigation for accounting irregularities". Both Raines and the Obama Campaign claim that Raines is not an Obama advisor and has never advised Senator Obama. When the claim that Raines was an Obama advisor appeared multiple times in the Washington Post (first July 16th) months before the McCain ad, the Obama campaign didn't seek a correction. However, they did seek a correction from the Post after the ad appeared. . | | 8:19 am |
Ten Minute Video
This video is dense. There is a lot of information, all checkable, in here. Who is responsible for the current economic crisis? Who tried to stop it from happening? Who stopped them from stopping it happening? . | | Friday, September 26th, 2008 | | 11:20 am |
| | Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 | | 11:43 am |
John McCain's 2006 Attempt To Fix Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac
Which candidate foresaw the credit crisis and tried to do something about it? As it turns out, John McCain did ... three years ago.... Excerpts from his remarks made in the Senate at the time: ... Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically created” by the company’s senior management... ... Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. Th[is] report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac. The [Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight] states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator’s examination of the company’s accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform. For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs–and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.. | | Sunday, September 14th, 2008 | | 4:36 am |
"Neighborliness"
"If I am sitting pretty and you've got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can't, what's the big deal for me to say, I'm going to pay a little bit more? That's neighborliness." If that is Obama's rationale for making the tax code even more steeply progressive than it already is, it's no wonder voters are having second thoughts about his economic aptitude. "Neighborliness." Perhaps that word has a nonstandard meaning to someone whose home adjoins the property of convicted swindler Tony Rezko, but extracting money by force from someone who earned it in order to give it to someone who didn't is not usually spoken of as neighborly. If Citizen Obama, "sitting pretty," reaches into his own pocket and helps out the waitress with a large tip, he has shown a neighborly spirit. But there is nothing neighborly about using the tax code to compel someone else to pay the waitress that tip. Taxation is not generosity, it is confiscation at gunpoint. Does Obama not understand the difference?. |
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