Masson's Blog
The anniversaries are getting less exciting, but it occurred to me that this is the 6th anniversary of this blog. My WordPress software tells me this is my 4,775th post and that there have been 22,460 approved comments. (The comments would be higher except that for the first year or two I used Movable Type and I never migrated the comments over when I switched to WordPress.)
Thanks everyone for continuing to read and comment. This has been a very enjoyable hobby for me over the years.
I’ve seen a number of things about “Quantative Easing” around the Internet recently. I’ve been told that it’s totally not just printing money, but it still sort of looks like printing money. These bears agree:
(via Matt Taibbi).
Judge Posner calls the term “Quantitative Easing”:
a pompous, uninformative term for a central bank’s buying debt (bonds, mortgages, commercial paper, etc.) in quantity in an effort to depress interest rates in order to stimulate economic activity. Recently the Federal Reserve began buying $600 billion (for starters) worth of long-term Treasury bonds. It is buying them with money that it creates by a computer stroke. That money will expand the money supply relative to the output of the economy and thus (depending however on how rapidly the money circulates) increase inflation, which in turn will reduce the burden of fixed debt and, it is hoped, thereby encourage people to spend more.
Taibbi notes the aspect of the process that looks an awful lot like a subsidy to Goldman Sachs. Among other thing, instead of using the new money to buy Treasuries directly from the Department of the Treasury, it goes through Goldman Sachs under conditions pretty much guaranteed to have the Federal Reserve buying them for the worst possible price.
Maureen Hayden, writing for CHNI, has an article quoting Rep. Wes Culver as supporting another try at getting a gay marriage ban into the Indiana Constitution.
Conservative state lawmakers say they expect to re-introduce legislation in the next session that would clear the way for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
Indiana already has a law that bans gay marriage, but supporters of a constitutional amendment say it would offer protection against court action.
“I’m all for it,” said state Rep. Wes Culver (R-Goshen), co-author of a bill that was blocked by House Democrat leaders when they were in control.
The Indiana Supreme Court already upheld the law in 2005 (under, I believe, specious reasoning having to do with reproduction but not explaining the right of, say, post-menopausal women to marry.) The real urgency these folks are probably facing is that public support for giving gays the same rights as everybody else seems to be steadily on the rise.
It’s always a danger to project your own experience onto the world at large, but I believe polling data supports my doing so in this case. I’ve gone from homophobic to indifferent to supportive of gay rights over the last 20 years. I think the world is headed in that direction; and I wouldn’t be surprised if guys like Rep. Culver see that trend as well.
Either way, I’m not a fan of mucking about with the state Constitution absent some great need. The inclusion of the tax cap legislation, I suppose, has diminished the document as a statement of guiding principles and pushed it down the road to more of a supplemental version of the Indiana Code. Still, we should do what we can to keep soon-to-be obsolete crap out of there. We should avoid sending the signal (any more so than we already do) that we’re an intellectual backwater, hostile to progress, by deliberately injecting discriminatory language into our founding document. Otherwise, we’ll likely reaffirm the notion that we’re just the big middle finger of the South sticking up into the Midwest.
The New York Times has a fun (though probably unavoidably simplistic) tool that lets you choose your budget priorities and try to balance the budget.
Tom Levenson points out that this tool highlights how much the budget balancing priorities of the Blue Dogs seem to prioritize wealth transfer from the middle class to the wealthy.
My approach shows that returning tax rates and military levels to Clinton-era levels goes a long way toward balancing the budget.
I grew up in Richmond, where I generally learned to like Cincinnati teams. But then a funny thing happened when I went a few miles across the border to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I met Cincinnati people. And, I fell in with a Cleveland crowd. Now, I actively root for Cincinnati to lose. Over the last 20 years, I have not often been disappointed.
Today’s Colts’ win over the Bengals was ugly, but gratifying nonetheless. The Colts are pretty much being held together by spit and baling wire at this point. So, the defense had to step up big and the Bengals had to gift wrap it for them. That’s pretty much what happened, with the Bengals committing 5 turnovers, including two picks run back for touchdowns. (The second of these was called back after a review, but I take issue with that – if there was “indisputable evidence” that Carson Palmer actually touched Tyjuan Hagler, let alone caused him to fall, the networks opted not to show that video.)
The Colts netted only 180 yards passing and 76 yards rushing. Manning has typically been throwing for 310 yards per game. But he doesn’t have a whole lot in the way of targets. Reggie Wayne is double teamed pretty consistently. Jacob Tamme has emerged as a solid option now that Dallas Clark is out, but he’s new and hurt himself. And Pierre Garcon is always a question mark in terms of whether he’s going to hold on to a ball.
At least we don’t have Terrell Owens who maybe talented, but looked like a no effort prima donna out there. He gave up on a pass he could have at least knocked down which resulted in the Hagler interception; then, as time was running out, he was jogging back to the line, costing his team the waning seconds of the game.
It’s going to be tough sledding the next couple of weeks if some players don’t get healthy pretty fast.
A blog called Gin and Tacos seems to have a similar distaste for the insistence of the talking heads on cable news to take limited data on election results and project a grand theme about “what the voters are saying.” His simple explanation – districts where Obama won more than 55% of the votes returned Democrats to the House. Otherwise, not. “[T]urnout fell 18-20% compared to 2008. Some people who showed up just to vote for Obama did not show up again, and some people who voted for him decided to vote Republican this time.”
For those who insist on translating the message being sent, the author suggests the American Voter is demanding the following:
1. Social Security reform that guarantees my current level of benefits, alters someone else’s, and cuts everyone’s Social Security taxes to boot.
2. A world-class national infrastructure that can be built and maintained without tax dollars.
3. A balanced budget that doesn’t sacrifice any of the government programs – especially the sacred military-industrial complex and the various old age benefits – that we like.
4. Clean air without pollution controls, clean water with a neutered and underfunded EPA, and businesses that do socially responsible things without any regulation whatsoever.
. . .
It couldn’t be any clearer: we want a government that will resolve every problem we currently face with solutions that require no effort, no sacrifices, and no money.
Today, I’ll go with the Internet. It’s really hard to remember how I did things before it came along. This is a tool that I was, perhaps, waiting for more eagerly than most. When I was 14, I got arrested for a crime the Internet has rendered obsolete. I was stealing phone calls from a local long distance company called Saverline. It worked like MCI or Sprint (like they did at the time, anyway). If you were a customer, you dialed their switchboard number, dialed your long distance number, and then (here is the crack security) dialed your *four* digit code. I (and a number of my fellow Commodore 64 users) would keep dialing until we got a working four digit code. I’d use the number to call long distance to connect to a Bulletin Board System in other cities. I really enjoyed the discussion boards on those systems, but we also used the systems to download games (“warez”). I was also the sort of kid who was likely to pore over encyclopedias and the like when I got my hands on them.
The instant access to so much information and social interaction really is incredible. My kids are going to have no concept of a world without an Internet. They’ll be slightly amazed when I tell them tales of Before; much as I did when mom would tell me that there was a period of time when her family did not have a television.
I try to be respectful of religion, and I know that this guy is not necessarily representative, but the problem is that he’s not an isolated case, either.
Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) is taking a run at becoming the chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Apparently he’s going to skip the science stuff and go with a more Biblical approach to environmental policy. He says that climate change should not bother us because God has already promised not to destroy the earth.
Shimkus already serves on the committee. During a hearing in 2009, he dismissed the dangers of climate change and the warnings of the scientific community by quoting the Bible.
First, he noted God’s post-Flood promise to Noah in Genesis 8:21-22.
“Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though all inclinations of his heart are evil from childhood and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.
“As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.”
“I believe that’s the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it’s going to be for his creation,” Shimkus said.
Then he quoted Matthew 24:31.
“And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds from one end of the heavens to the other.”
“The Earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a Flood,” Shimkus asserted. “I do believe that God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.”
I hope the more religious minded among you can appreciate my problem with this sort of thing. It’s no longer a personal belief that helps you with day-to-day problems. Now it’s being used as a blinder, causing a public official to ignore scientific evidence that contradicts his religious belief in matters directly related to his role in shaping public policy. It’s when religious belief of others has the potential to make my world and my children’s world a worse place that I start getting agitated. (And, this post shouldn’t be about whether or not climate change is man-made or real; rather the idea of ignoring scientific evidence — even evidence ultimately outweighed by other evidence — because it’s incompatible with your religious belief.)
I had similar thoughts yesterday afternoon listening to an NPR report on an Iraqi girl who had been kidnapped and possibly raped and was facing the prospect of being killed by her family for bringing shame on them by getting herself raped. I don’t know that this is an arbitrary religious standard or merely an arbitrary cultural standard, but it’s just another example of people making their world worse for no good reason.
Matt Taibbi has a long and interesting piece on the mortgage foreclosure process. There is a lot of stuff packed in there, but one interesting take away from me was that the mortgage industry’s chronic problem with producing proper paperwork in foreclosure actions isn’t just a matter of being fast and sloppy. Rather, the sloppiness is sometimes a product of covering their asses on the back end of the transactions.
Apparently it was not uncommon for a bundled security product to promise underlying mortgages that the seller did not, strict speaking, own yet. Proper documentation of the underlying mortgage is evidence of wrongdoing in this respect and exposes the seller to liability.
Beyond that, it’s a nice encapsulation of some of the stuff I already knew. The incentives were not structured in a way that made too many people inclined to make sure that a home loan was a sound investment. The people providing information and analysis about the original loan got their money up front and were long gone by the time the loan went sour. Banks bundled up the loans into securities. Rating agencies sprinkled fairy dust over the heap and called it “AAA.” The piles were insured by organizations that couldn’t cover the bet. And all of it was sold off to unsuspecting pension funds and the like. Once the loan goes south, the incentives are all on the side of foreclosing on the property; and the legal system is not structured in a way that is very friendly to debtors or even people merely alleged to be debtors who don’t have resources to hire an attorney.
Today’s is a gimmee. Today, I am grateful for our veterans. I am also grateful for the wisdom of those who came before us in preferring not to create a separate warrior-class. The people who are willing to, if need be, sacrifice their lives for the country, are from the common population. That’s as it should be. Bad things happen when the military comes to be seen as distinct from and better than the rest of the population. That’s when military dictatorships of one form or another start cropping up.
As we honor the men and women of the military, let’s be thankful that they share our strengths and our failings; and recognize that, should the day come when we do not perceive them as ordinary people choosing (or, at times, compelled) to perform extraordinary tasks, our democracy will be at risk.