U3 and let 'em eat cake

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If Marie Antoinette were alive today, she'd be down with the U3 method of calculating unemployment. This method of calculation is cold-hearted, soulless and a downright infuriating insult to the American people. For it declares some of the worse off among us, those that have exhausted unemployment benefits and have given up looking as non-persons unceremoniously tossed out of numerator and denominator.

Perhaps economic calculations should indeed be soulless, but they shouldn't be Satanic, and the U3 calculation is.

It's simply a way to gin up a better looking number to report, by creating an ever-shrinking "eligible employment base," down to almost 59% of adults these days, from a high of 65% just a few years ago. This measure simply tosses those folks out of the base and recalculates. Poof - through modern day statistical witchcraft, hoards of our fellow Americans disappear. A potion no less offensive than that of the witches of Macbeth, whose brood called for "liver of blaspheming Jew."

By the end of 2009, 1.5 million Americans will be thus cooked out of the sauce. Look for some of theses government-declared non-people to be taking to the streets in food riots by Christmas.

Our government needs to stop hiding the truth in statistical chicanery. The closest measure we have to an apples-to-apples measure of comparison to the way we calculated unemployment during the Great Depression is the U6 method. The U6 method adds back in the discouraged lookers and those who have had to settle for crappy part-time work to put some food on the table. Even that measure does not adjust for the millions of people who are working but have had their hours and pay slashed, sometimes dramatically. By the U6 measure, unemployment isn't far from 18%, and is up in the low twenties in some cities. This is flirting with Great Depression territory, and our government and media needs to start being upfront about this. True, the U6 number is released every month, but it's the U3 that gets all the attention. A number that actually ticked down a tenth of a percent in July, even as 247,000 more Americans found themselves out of a job.

Let's start reporting honest numbers, using methods that would please a Teddy Roosevelt or Thomas Jefferson, and leave cold-hearted Marie, whose thoughtless inconsiderations have already been judged, to the ash heap of history where she belongs.

McCain down the drain

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How often does one find himself critically positioned to effect history for the better? When the financial crisis exploded onto our attentions in 2008, John McCain was so positioned.

Hank Paulson wanted 700 billion dollars to prop up failure. To bailout the very bankster crooks who got us into this mess. All eyes were on McCain as he suspended his Sarah-rejuvenated campaign. Now was his chance to do the very kind of thing he had done throughout his career - take the maverick position against monumental waste and unfairness. Instead, he goes to Washington, sheepishly says "aye," and so co-opened the floodgates to Bailout Nation. As we began a course of not addressing the fundamental imbalances in the economy, but trying to ponzi scheme our way out of it. This time generational in scope - robbing future generations to prop up and bailout Modern Banking Nobility. Feudal lords of our land and coin, who through decades of psychological trickery have positioned their foot upon the American neck.

Not only was a "no" the right thing to do, but politically it would have been perfect. Who cares if a legacy-panicked George Bush was for it, W was a pimple in the polls anyway by that point. And Obama's whole campaign was about gluing Bush and McCain at the hip. And yet a McCain "no" would have left Barack Obama on the side of George Bush! Defending the absolutely indefensible. And Bailout Nation would then be Obama's albatross.

But at that critical juncture, when everyone was shell-shocked, looking for leadership, looking for someone to stand up and say "no way!" to the sick raping of the American people and lavish rewards to their rapists, and McCain was uniquely positioned to be that person, he tosses it all away. He had first and ten, and chose to punt! He had his chance to turn the tables on those money-changing rapscallions, and cast them clean out of our once sound Temple. Instead he invited them over for tea.

That was your chance Senator. Thanks for nothing, and enjoy Bailout Nation.

Predictions 9/1/2009 - 3/1/2010

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I want to get these on the record now, calling them like I see them.

1. The American economy will recover nicely. The only problem though, is that the American economy is no longer here - we shipped it over to India and China. The fairytale fiasco we have left here will fall off a cliff. Bubble Blowing Ben Bernanke will ponzi around funny-money, keeping the GDP and markets puffed up for a bit, but the whole ponzinomics shell-game will fall on our heads. Look for a big stock market drop by mid-October and food riots by Christmas. Christmas sales will be the worst on record.

2. Very long, bitingly cold Winter in the East. At least 2 big Noreasters. This will make the swine flu particularly bad in the East. It will be bad nationwide, but nothing like 1918. Still, it will make the upcoming flu season about 3 times as deadly.

3. There will be no healthcare bill. We're due for a national "Oops" moment, when it falls on our heads that we're quarreling about healthcare with another Great Depression unfolding all around us. Healthcare will get put on hold.

4. The world will "decouple" from the US. A new world currency will be formed. The US, Britain will have a severe depression, Japan and Russia will a severe recession , Canada, Australia, Germany and France will have a medium-sized recessions, China and India will slow somewhat but maintain growth by expanding their domestic economies. The dollar will be in crisis, near worthless.

5. Widespread civil unrest will take place the second half of 2010 and accelerate in 2011, the next 6 months will lay the groundwork.

6. Look for a Republican "walkout" on Barack Obama at the Jan 20, 2010 State of the Union speech. This will be drummed up as racism by the media, and a cultural explosion will ensue.

Of pubes and radio

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When I was 15ish, me and a friend would get stoned in this room off his bedroom called "The Studio." His dad owned an advertising agency, and the room was filled with cool surplus AV equipment.

On one such occasion, my friend brought the little rug that was in front of the desk, up on the desk and started inspecting it for pubes. He was in bliss, and it was a very funny occasion as he would pluck off pubes and separate them into little piles by name. There was the Linda pile, and the Denise pile, and I forget all who else pile. All the victims of his sexcapades since the last vacuuming were diagnosed and sorted. My friend preferred diversity, so there was a wide array of colors, lengths and thickness to aid the sorting process. Looking back now, it's a good thing for him that all his girlfriends weren't Chinese, or it would have been a very long afternoon, but I digress. But it was a funny thing for two stoned 15 year-olds to be doing.

Except deep down inside I was hurting. Because I had no rug with pubes. Well, my own. The dog's. And perhaps some renegade pube that blew in from another room, but that was about it. And I was embarrassed that this exercise in pube identification was the closest I had come to a real life pube other than the afore mentioned.

But this post is not about pubes, or my friend, or childhood wishes unfulfilled, or any of that, it's about me wanting to do a little night radio show. So far it seems like anything but that, but I'm getting there.

In my 20's I started getting a little bit of confidence, and the "I can do it too" thought started to crystallize within me. My niece was dating a very bight British engineer named Simon. I liked Simon, and we frequently chatted about events of the day whenever he'd visit with my niece at various occasions. But I found many of Simon's insights and opinion on certain subjects to be not as well-formed as my own. Around this time is when I started to grasp that engineers, mathematicians, chemists, you name it, don't have to be these "smart people" I need only gawk at, but I too could be one of those people. So I began school, and 6 years later (now near 30) I received my master's degree in mathematical statistics, a field I have now been working in for 16 years. So I did reach a point in life where I did not just have to live vicariously off of someone else's pubes, but started to get a few of my own.

Now I find myself at another "me too" moment in life. I'd really like to get my voice out there. I have a great gift of gab and grasp of issues that can stir people up in a conservative/populist kind of way. I'd love a little radio show, but radio is something only "other people" do.

But pubes and college degrees and careers were something that only "other people" did, yet over the years I've come to have my own fill of these things. With pubes I mean my own of course, but hey, a fill is a fill. But life keeps going, and after one meal we find ourselves hungry yet again.

And I know that if I step up to the plate, I can always be one of those "other people" myself. But part of me thinks radio might be a stretch too far, and doubt can be a killer. Is radio something I can really do, or is it just more of someone else's pubes? Is this whole quest a pube too far?

I need some inspiration. Perhaps I should call Simon, or maybe go back to The Studio and get stoned. Maybe there's even a time-forgotten fossilized pube or two still laying around to remind me from whence I came, and how far I've traveled.

Oh Soviets, we hardly knew ye

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When they were called Mujahideen, we idolized and romanticised them. Rugged, well leathered Afghan resistance fighters, coming down from the mountains to bloody the Soviets, then like gear-laden-billy-goats they'd retreat back up the slopes into the mysterious tough-as-iron world from which they were forged

Heck, we even had America's #1 beefy-bone-head, Sylvester Stallone cast them as freedom-loving brave-hearts in the shamefully overlooked by the Academy masterpiece, Rambo III. But that these same Mujahideen would form the core of the Taliban, that they were Shariaists who represented a brutal shudder-inducing theocracy was something we absolutely did not know.

And shame on us for not knowing it. And we must never forget the lessons of not knowing it - that the world is full of ironies we don't understand. All we wanted, me too at the time, was for the Soviets to get bloodied. We couldn't see past the Cold War. So Carter started arming the Mujahideen and Reagan accelerated it. Then the world sat back aghast (and this even before 911) at what the Taliban actually were. We watched them blow up 1,500 tear-old carvings to Buddha, literally destroying irreplaceable national and world treasures because it supposedly went against their religious creeds. Women were not allowed to be educated and religious death squads were formed, enforcing Sharia law with an iron fist.

Now it wasn't the Taliban directly that perpetrated 911, but they welcomed Bin laden and his terrorist camps into the country with open arms. And we're left with the supreme irony that a Soviet-style Communist Afghanistan would have actually been more in our national interest than was the post-Soviet Taliban. One take-away from this is that we really don't always know what our national interest is at the time, although we think we do. Another is that we don't understand foreign people, their societal factions, their cultural and religious institutions and proclivities the way we think we do.

This lesson was solidified further in Iraq. Which, by the way, I actually thought we were going to just knock off Saddam Hussein and leave. Not caring what they did next, but just making it clear that governments who may do us harm will get harm done to them first. When it became clear we were actually going to stay to build a Jeffersonian democracy, then we began to understand what we didn't understand. For instance, there never was 1 Iraq, there were 3 Iraqs. The Kurdish north, Sunni center and Shiite south. Apparently, Saddam permitted opposition Shiite clerics to exist. I would have just though he would have had them all killed. But there they were, El-Sadr and the like. What a mess.

I'm tired of these parts of the world. We only need to do what we need to do, both home and abroad, to keep crazies from flying planes into buildings. Let's do no more, and never get caught not knowing what we don't know ever again.

Turn down the noise, I can't hear myself implode!

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Imagine a room with 10 radios blaring, each tuned to a different station. If one station was more important than the others, you would need the extraneous stations tuned off so you could listen to the important one. When they're all playing, it's just gibberish.

Such is the state of our nation today, too many noisy and pointless programs playing all at once. All that matters is the economy. there is no recovery, and there are no green shoots.

The stock market has been puffed up by TARP funds the banks are laundering in through the back door. Money borrowed from future generations to cover bank losses, snuck into the market through the back door. This is Bernanke's Generational Ponzi Scheme - the idea was to recapitalize the banks, while a run-up in the market would induce media green-shoot-gasms that would seduce consumers into spreading wide their wallets.

Instead, the consumer is tapped out and didn't budge. The banks will be withdrawing from the market soon, parlaying 2 trillion into 3 trillion. The additional trillion plundered from your 401k contributions, as the system continues to siphon from the bottom and feed the gangsters at the top. And Don Bernanke sits in the big chair and is gets his ring kissed over the whole affair.

But by mid-October the market will be in free-fall. The commercial real estate, consumer debt, and bailout bubble that Bernanke blew up to hide the housing bubble will be popping in full force. Real unemployment will be near 20%, and though the news media will likely still be going over to Japan to import green shoots, the American people will be crushed.

This is the only radio station that should be playing. We'll never even get to healthcare. The economy will exploding before both Houses have a reconciled bill on the President's desk. And the nation will have one giant "Oops" moment, as we collectively realize that all this time we should have been talking about nothing else but the meltdown.

The idiotic channels that must be turned down so that we can hear ourselves implode are:

1. Healthcare, as mentioned.

2. The junk-science lunacy that is Global Warming.

3. The world ending in 2012.

4. The much ado over Obama's birth certificate.

5. Illegal immigration.

6. Antidepressants.

7. All things Karl Rove and Dick Cheney

8. All things GM

9. Every and all stories about Obama painted as The Joker.

I leave the door open for Swine Flu if it gets serious, Afghanistan and Gitmo. But only when our main station is in commercial.

Pac-President will gobble that co-op for breakfast

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The news media took a breather from finding green shoots in Japan today, to let us know that the Obama Administration would be willing to shift from a Public Option to a co-op on the upcoming healthcare legislation.

Everyone seemed to get briefly orgasmic over this new green shoot in the healthcare debate.

So let me see if I have this straight. Instead of a government option as a catch-all for the uninsured, we're going to take the uninsured - the homeless, the young adults, the unemployed - and have THEM administer their own co-op!

Isn't it obvious that this co-op would end up as a permanent ward of the government? And if it can't swim on it's own, do you think Obama would have any qualms about snatching it? If you do, I have 2 letters for you: G and M.

The chronically uninsured across America are not Dairy farmers in North Dakota, and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) is smoking some of Bernanke's green shoots if he thinks a co-op administered by the uninsured, for the uninsured, has a prayer of working. It will be an endless drain on the government coffers, and Obama will gobble it up faster than Bill Clinton in his prime could do justice to a quarter-pounder.

Why isn't this thing passed by now? The Democrats have both houses, the White House, and 60 votes in the Senate. If they really had confidence in a plan that included the public option, and really were willing to take ownership of it, and thought it would work, they could pass it. Just go hard left in the House and push it through the Senate as a continuing resolution (only 50 votes required). If they really thought it would work, then why not take ownership? They don't need Republicans, Blue Dogs, or folks like Arlen Spectool who doesn't know who he is.