All show, no tell

There is much not to envy about the US political and legal system, one aspect of which appears to have become nothing more than a charade.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor turned up for her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, for three days straight, answered nearly 600 questions, said nothing, and disowned a number of her own and the President's opinions - opinions that could and should have been defended quite easily.

It was more like a beauty contest, except there were no bikinis and Sotomayor didn't offer that she yearned for world peace or a cure for cancer.

It has taken a couple of decades, but the lesson for confirmations appears to have been learned a little too well, with Sotomayor perfecting the persona of intellectual blandness.

Her history as a judge is one of almost total reliance on precedent, with no intellectual flourishes offered to illuminate her devotion to past rulings and interpretations.

Even during the hearing she stuck like a mindless barnacle to droning recitation of precedents.

In truth, Republicans need have few fears, since it's improbable that Sotomayor will suddenly become an intellectual leader when she arrives on the Supreme Court. Of course, intellectual timidity and hiding behind bookish knowledge isn't really what any country requires for their Supreme Court.

One of the fireman who testified in relation to the tossing out of test results that saw more white and Hispanic firemen promoted, an action that Sotomayor upheld - basically on the grounds that it wasn't her jurisdiction and the Supreme Court could decide these things, if need be (strange that she didn't see herself as the right person to overturn it, deferring to the very court she will now be appointed to!) - noted his objections to that decision, but in front of the hearings he had nothing to say about Sotomayor, he had no opinion. I can see why.

When asked what the hearings revealed about Judge Sotomayor’s legal views, the Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe, a longtime adviser to President Obama who supports her confirmation, had a simple reply: “Nothing.”

There was nothing to see and nothing said.

Intellecutal timidity and disowning one's own opinions is hardly an impressive benchmark for women in high places. A missed opportunity. Again.

A nominee on display, but not her views

Business as usual

Unseemly? Ungracious? Untimely?

Stunning profits from any financial institution in the US would ordinarily be marvelous, spiffingly wondrous news. In the midst of a US induced GFC, it's mega-excellent news.

Really it is.

Goldman Sachs took billions of US tax dollars, sacked around 6000 employees, paid back the tax dollars only a month ago, and are now set to celebrate their recent sterling performance by making confetti from one hundred dollar notes and dry-showering each other on Mondays and Fridays.

Then they'll get down to the serious business of rewarding themselves with seven figure bonuses, possibly bigger and better than the bonuses they'd been accustomed to during the years of milk and honey.

Only a few days ago the Bank of America Merrill Lynch also declared the recession over.

It's done. Just like that. Easy peazy.

Substance always means a great deal more to my uncreative brain than perception, and in the case of Goldman Sachs making the biggest quarterly profit in its 140 year history - yes, that's right, in the last quarter they made more profit than in any other quarter during the last 140 years - one can't turn one's nose up at the substance of the achievement, but on the perception front, one does turn one's nose up at the moral legitimacy of rewarding the remaining Goldman Sachs employees with gobsmacking bonuses for three months worth of startling performance.

Didn't a few thousand people have to lose their jobs to contribute to that profit?

Didn't the US government have to pony up $10 billion to keep Goldman Sachs chugging along?

Didn't they also receive even more billions from the US government (non refundable) via the bailout of AIG insurance?

Plus a competitive advantage from the Asset Relief Program, which allows them to issue debt cheaply?

Still, Goldman Sachs feel they possess the moral authority, based on three months worth of staggering profits, to have already earmarked $11.4 billion for bonuses, with that figure likely to grow before the end of the US financial reporting year.

Yes, it would seem that some segments of the US financial industry have come roaring back, and nothing has changed. Not a thing. Business as usual, as if the last two years were nothing but an aberration.

Sure, the PR might get a little sticky come bonus time, but that's a storyline the captains of industry are used to running around the block until we're all giddy. No biggie.

With big profit, Goldman sees big payday ahead

Update

So much hand-wringing over the perils of the existence of businesses that are "too big to fail", yet here it is: the fallout from the US financial crisis appears to be leaving a mere two banks gloating and profiteering over all the rest.

Along with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan has announced salivating profits for the last quarter, this, despite having been pretty useless at excelling during the boom times. More irony.

The banks are now in full throttle vigorous lobbying mode to put the kibosh on tighter derivatives regulations and consumer protections. Big surprise.

The other market distorting trend is that the top 20 US banks, having received $125 billion from the government in prop-up cash in the midst of the GFC, promptly reduced their inclination to give loans by 16% ($120 billion - almost a match for the funding they received).

The next top 20 banks only reduced their lendings by 4%, or $9 billion.

Meanwhile, all the other little banks combined increased lending during the same period, facing the same market conditions, by 5%.

So, the big banks have learnt something: don't lend money! Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.

Two giants emerge from Wall Street ruins

Duck Friday

Bing, Bing, Bing

The name still sucks, but apparently I'm in the minority on that thought, with the rest of the punters being quite taken with the Bing (But It's Not Google) branding, which is Microsoft's latest foray into the search engine business.

Defying my skepticism, it turns out that Bing is quite a charmer, as far as search engines go.

Nice look, nice feel, preview capabilities, never ending pages (eg, for image results, instead of having to scroll page after page, as per Google) and very often, more impressive - that is, more pertinent - results than those produced by Google algorithms.

For those enamored of tweeting, Microsoft has already added Twitter to Bing results, a feature not available from other engines.

So, this is my three thumbs up for Bing, a rare MS product deserving of our admiration, and set to give Google a well deserved whirl.

Bing versus Google - neat little site tool that brings up side by side search results from Bing and Google, so you can do your own taste test.

Wednesday Wisdom

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.

Frank Herbert

No civil overthrow ... yet

"The author of this site does not advocate the violent overthrow of the US Government or any other lawfully constituted government...yet."

So goes the disclaimer at the blog Rebellion University .

Phew.

I was even more relieved to read the post from a few days ago, Pulse of the Rebellion:

"We all have at least one neighborhood kid that we thought was a little off, then he went to college and learned all about how the rich white man is evil. We wanted to kill that kid earlier, but were constrained by law. If that kid comes back to town waving a sign and throwing Molotovs, I'm going to cap him and then get a high five from the police. There is no down side to this.

Lots of reasonable people have been preparing for the bad times and hoping to not have to shoot law enforcement officers and good, honest, young military men. This is completely different. No one will lose any sleep about killing hippies."

The other good news is that the prices of firearms and ammunition in the US are falling, so it's a beaut time to stock up.

Happy times!

Don't forget the many other community services hand delivered to you by this very blog, such as a link to the Survival Blog (over on the right there, in the alphabetically arranged list), without which you would be perpetually under-prepared for the end of the world as we know it.

For example, have you been practicing going about your everyday business wearing your protective mask?

"In my experience, it takes time to acclimate to wearing a respirator mask. There is no substitute for hours in a mask. Particularly for a full-face military mask, and even more so for a full MOPP suit, limited field of vision, dehydration, claustrophobia and sensory deprivation are well-known effects, but heat build-up up is also an issue, particularly in summer weather. In full-face masks, being deprived of prescription lenses is also an issue, unless you have a prescription lens inserts. (BTW, these hard-to-find inserts are available from JRH Enterprises.) Also be particularly wary of dehydration. Even with masks that include a drinking tube, most wearers have a tendency to drink less than usual.

The bottom line: Practice wearing a mask regularly, in a variety of activities."

Indeed.

You can never have too many guns and you can never be too prepared for the end of the world.


(Via the lurverly Kath, who drew my attention to Rebellion University.)

Mysoginist visitatons?

American Catholic nuns are being investigated. The Vatican wants to know if they're "living in fidelity" to the religious life.

They might try asking that of a priest or three or five hundred.

No other nuns in any other country are being investigated.

One is tempted to exclaim: "we'll have nun of that!".

But the pontiff and his merry band of men have other ideas.

Perplexing and perturbing, and most likely we'll never know why, nor the outcome, but we'll keep a beady eye out as the visitations unearth US nunnery habits.

What the sisters are up to

U.S nuns facing Vatican scrutiny

Confused, much?

Ever wondered if the stock market is just a pile of hooey, the value of which is 90% irrational exuberance, 10% tangible value?

Yeah.

Much proof abounds, but none better than the little example of US General Motors shares that inexplicably and ludicrously increased in value by around $200M in a day (up in value by 37%), forcing GM to issue a statement telling investors not to buy the shares, which are destined to become worthless.

"Nearly 75 million shares traded hands until the securities industry’s self-regulator, Finra, halted trading at 2:09 p.m., citing “extraordinary events.”

Extraordinary exercise of stupidity, even on human scales.

As the old General Motors winds up its way to worthlessness, the new GM will be a privately held company.

Share trading is not for dummies. Truly folks, some of you really, really, really, shouldn't be trying this stuff at home.

A stock with bounce: Investors stick to G.M

Woot!

Ward Churchill won't get his job back at UC, despite the UC lawyers pretty well sucking and blowing their side of the case in several dozen different ways.

Fυςќing fantastic!

Woot!

Now for Churchill's ex post facto mythologizing endeavors, all of which he will no doubt attempt to monetize.

Arh, who the fυςќ cares!

Woot!

Coverage over at John's place - The Drunkablog

Or less colorfully, at the NYTs - Court upholds dismissal of Colorado professor

Madoff's Beneficiaries

With Bernie Madoff safely in the big house for 150 years and his wife barred from having her blonde foils done at her local hairdresser, all would seem to be right with the world, aside from the little matter of his financial victims divying up the left over spoils, which will be small bickies relative to their original profit-taking expectations.

The MSM has covered the 'world's biggest ever ponzi scheme' in a slyly muted manner. So many victims, oh dear, oh handwring, oh my - even charities, oh golly, oh gosh! One evil man and one evil man's greed!

A few token shakes of the head or eyebrows raises in the direction of the fund feeders, but beyond that, you'd think every turkey had been taken for a ride, gullible, innocent babes, all losing billions or millions or hundreds of thousands.

Of course, a scheme that large, run over decades, can't possibly have resulted in everyone losing, otherwise the gig would have been up, oh, around 15 years ago. Nor can it possibly be true that everyone was blindly stupid, believing in the promises of ludicrous returns conjoured by one man.

No mention in the MSM of the tax minimisation services that Madoff facilitated for his clients, via his bogus investment scheme. Only a smattering of musings about the feeder funds, which made squillions from their cut of the take, sending new investors to Madoff. Nary a glance at the many billions in *profits* that investors took out over the life of the scheme.

The perp is locked up, his wife will have to find a new hairdresser or buy dye kits from the supermarket, case closed.

But it's a more nuanced than you've been told by the fourth estate, so before you put the nasty ponzi busines out of mind, think a little deeper, learn a little. The world of finance is never so clearcut and cutting corners is never just one man's burden.

Madoff's secret service

The Madoff victims who came out ahead

Taxing Bono

Apparently charity is better than taxes, period.

Just ask Bono.

Having accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in personal wealth, Bono's bank balance has also benefited from his artistic tax free status in Ireland, until now.

Ireland has sensibly changed it's rules a little, with a threshold introduced for their local artists, being 250,000 Euro per annum. Sucks for Bono, he earns a tad more than that in a bad year.

Not to worry. He pronto moved his financial affairs to the Netherlands.

While he advocates on behalf of the poverty stricken, the starving, the hopeless, while he meets with politicians the world over, demanding (and sometimes succeeding) in bullying them into giving away the tax-payer funds within their domain, Bono himself doesn't pay taxes - anywhere.

It would seem that Bono and his band mates have found what they've been looking for: a tax haven to accommodate their life long commitment to tax avoidance.

"U2’s guitarist, The Edge, protested that the band’s tax affairs were private, adding, “We do business all over the world, we pay taxes all over the world and we are totally tax compliant.”

Indeed. I don't doubt their compliance, don't doubt it at all.

Search results "Bono tax evasion" - Google.

Duck Friday

Shovel ready

France has a tee wee stimulus package, relative to the one announced, but barely distributed let alone spent, by the US.

Much like Australia, the US might, just might, start lifting shovels and doing stuff to support the economy by, well, sometime late this year, but mostly during 2010. A long lag by any reckoning.

Meanwhile, France has rapidly deployed their stimulus cash, with around 100 billion Euros expected to be spent by the end of 2009.

Nice to see that France is investing in sprucing up castles and cathedrals, among other shovel-ready efforts, with art considered an equally worthy area of spending. The French also seem more focused on an immediate boost to employment and aggregate demand, rather than rolling the dice on the chance of long run growth, the later being the Australian and US approach. Of course, no one knows if either strategy will prove successful.

France, unlike US, is deep into stimulus projects

Wednesday Wisdom

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

Neil Gaiman

Burqa on the line in France

Say what you like about the French (go on, you know you want to), but they do take their secularism seriously. Good for them!\

Bless their little silk socks, a French parliamentary committee is underway to decide whether or not the burqa - fashionista garb of choice for devout Muslim women near and far -is a symbol of subjugation rather than faith, and, therefore, a mode of dress with no place in the French republic.

The inquiry, upon which 32 parliamentarians will turn their attentions, won't report for another six months, and when they do, they will announce whether wearing a burqa is incompatible with secularism, and if so, whether the solution to the dissonance is an outright ban on the head to toe covering.

Five years ago France prohibited open displays of religious symbols from state schools, and the same ban is in place for French civil servants. Banning the burqa would be a consistent progression.

In the small cacophony of opinion expressed prior to the announcement of the inquiry, the burqa was variously described, by the French PM and other pollies, as a degrading prison depriving women of identity, dignity and social life, a sign of submission, a garb that undermines women's rights and secular values.

If Aussies find Muslim women's choice of outdoor wear confronting - and for many it is, let's not pretend otherwise - the French, unlike us, eschew political correctness:

"The sight of these imprisoned women is already intolerable to us … It is totally unacceptable on French soil"

On the opposing side of the debate, Irfan Yusuf gets all sentimental about days of ye olde, waxing lyrical about Muslim women who used to lounge about in their burqas, waited on hand and foot by servants, with their primary undertaking in life being regular shopping outings to buy luxuries for themselves.

His little refrain about his maternal (Indian) grandfather's insistence that the women of his household practice a form of traditional aristocratic seclusion known as purdah is so grossly misplaced it's impossible to know what matter of substance he was hoping to contribute to current public discourse. As a defense of the burqa, the intellectual argument - if you can find one in the irrelevant history snippet offered by Yusuf - is, at best, opaque and dishonest.

If his is the best effort anyone can present in favor of contemporary burqa-wearing, then long live a ban on the burqa, not just in France, but everywhere. Of course, such bravery will not come to pass; the French will stick their naked arse into the breeze on behalf of the rest of us, as only the French are wont to do.

French may outlaw burqa

The fuss over the burqra is out of kilter

Jaunty environmental book

Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air, by Cambridge Professor David J.C. MacKay, is described as being:

"surprisingly playful, sidestepping the oughts, musts and shoulds of most eco-guides in favour of breezy sums. MacKay favours “numbers, not adjectives” and he presents them with a jaunty mix of photos, diagrams, maps, cartoons, timelines, bar charts, algebraic equations, pull-out quotes, tiny URL links, chummy headings (“gadgets that really suck”, “the war on leakiness”) and a generous dollop of exclamation marks."

More impressive than the jaunty tone, cartoons, and chummy headings, the book can be purchased - £45 hardback, £19.99 paperback - or save your dollars and just download the PDF for free. Noice.

Learn unsurprising things like this:

"The energy you save by switching off your phone charger for a whole day is used up in one second driving a car. To focus on the phone charger is like “bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon”.

Or this:

“Europe needs nuclear power, or solar power in other people’s deserts, or both.” For Britain, that area in someone else’s desert would have to be the size of Wales."

Now try to imagine how much land would be needed to provide solar power for even 50% of global power needs. It's all about energy density folks, and nothing comes close to that most dense of energies: oil.

At least MacKay's book looks like a sensible read in a sea of hyperbole and feel good "every little bit helps" dogma.

Review here ...

Ink versus bubbly

So, here's the dilemma:

- printer has run out of ink

- printer ink costs between $40 to $80 an ounce

- Dom Pérignon Champagne costs about $5 an ounce.

What should I buy?

Vanity, all is vanity

Commentary on the commission into the Victorian bush fires, but really, it could be commentary on any fuck-up, and ain't it the awful truth.

"The vast body of evidence suggests a great deal of loss and destruction could have been avoided if local knowledge, experience and commitment had been respected and used. Instead, the politicians and their bureaucrats shared a motivation to exert close and uncompromised control. An aggressive resistance to contestable advice allowed policy-makers to deny the existence of culpable knowledge.

The mandarins eventually succumbed to their own intoxicating publicity and stared down the risk of their knowledge deficit.

Dysfunctionality bred like a virus in a hotbed of intellectual conceit.

The implications are sobering for every aspect of government policy."

Self-serving know-alls fuelled fires

Duck Friday

Wednesday Wisdom

I think laughter may be a form of courage. As humans we sometimes stand tall and look into the sun and laugh, and I think we are never more brave than when we do that.

Linda Ellerbee

The dry, the bitter, the characterless

I envisage John Weymouth, of Ringwood East, as a dried-up bitter Gen-Xer. He harbors an exalted pride in what he probably believes to be his down to earth, forthright manner, qualities he also probably believes point to his under-valued and rarely acknowledge cleverness.

The Age, scraping the barrel's bottom to stir the pot, published Mr Weymouth's letter to the editor in today's paper, under the heading Keeping things in perspective.

Mr Weymouth didn't think much of Michael Jackson. Which is fine. Child prodigies aren't everyone's glass of bubbly. And as far as eccentric, androgynous, gyrating singers go, I'm sure there are many whose choice of black pop god would be Prince, not that the letter writer had any interest in such matters.

This is what John Weymouth had to say:

"Before the adulation of the life of Michael Jackson gets out of hand, it needs to be asked, in what way did he actually leave the world a better place? How does what he did stack up against the contributions of the many brilliant medical researchers and scientists, and of the many outstanding engineers responsible for our safe water supplies and sewage treatment and safe and efficient transport?

To help get things into perspective, who can name one metallurgist or materials engineer who has made possible the modern durable, efficient and safe motor car, aeroplane, and even the implements used in surgery? These are only a few of the incredibly talented people in the world whose contributions to us are valuable beyond measure and yet go largely unrecognised.

Why are entertainers and sports stars more valued? Why are these people made incredibly rich when so few contribute anything of real lasting value? How is it that so many people today rely on the exploits of these so-called stars for their own sense of worth and wellbeing? How much better the world would be if people got on with their own real-life relationships, and became doers instead of sycophants.

Michael Jackson was obviously successful as an entertainer, but his life was far from exemplary and his music largely repetitious nonsense. Remember who paid for the extravagant productions and effects, and stop being conned. Live your own lives."

Sure, but not the soulless , dried up, brittle, joyless life, such as implied by Mr Weymouth, who, I further imagine, considers that Caravaggio was a nasty little sod whose modern canvases were a nonesense and should never have been hoarded by the ignorant swine of ye old.

Do you remember the time ...

We all remember the time when Micheal Jackson permanently changed the aural and visual dynamics of the music industry, a time when a young, attractive black man didn't simply sing and dance a little, he performed, in the true meaning, and he did so with an aggressive, perfected grace that was breathtaking.

We do remember.

And for a few minutes we're transported out of the mundane, mesmerized, lifted, emboldened, inspired.

That is art. That is life.

Can't say the same for sewage treatments or a train running on time. Nope. Can't. Won't.

Job criterion

One of the criterion for an "appointment setter" for a "fashion house":

"A clear and persuasive phone manner that commands respect"

Nup.

Can't think of any person I've met in my entire life whose phone manner "commands respect".

Yet another job advertisement supporting the globally enjoyed - yet devilishly difficult - sport of pissing in the wind while wanking.

An experiement bound to fail

Dipping all their limbs and torso in the water of an unknown future, one US newspaper has taken behavioral economics to heart:

"The Daily News will now charge $145 annually to a newspaper subscriber, $245 if a subscriber wants the paper and access to the paper’s web site—and, here’s the key figure, $345 if the subscriber only wants the web site. Yes, you’re reading correctly; this means someone has to pay an extra $100 not to get the newspaper."

Perhaps years ago this would have worked a treat. Back in the day, when the Internet was a novelty and Google was a secret shared only by those 'in the know'. Back when web sites were rudimentary, unsophisticated. Back then, people would have paid to get their news online.

Now, not so much.

There's no compulsion for any of us to pay for breaking news from a particular source, local or multinational, when that same news can be had for free from half a million other sites.

News is no longer exclusive. It might not be deep or investigative, but it's ubiquitous ... and free.

Rupert Murdoch and others are becoming more vocal in their attempts to soften up the public to accepting paying for online news within the next five years or so. A futile endeavor.

The future is already here and traditional behavioral economics won't save them.

News is everywhere. All it takes is two minutes setting up a Twitter account and someone investing one minute to type no more than 140 characters. News is now one of the cheapest commodities in the world. A gross distortion of its true value, for sure, but there it is.

Can behavioral economics save newspapers?

Metamorphasis

1958 - 2009
rest in peace

The complex beggar

Begging is illegal in our fine little city, but members of our community don't take that little hiccup seriously, so a begging they go, often like you and me going off to a normal day job.

I used to encounter one chap, around thirty years old, give or take, a regular outside my office building and surrounds, and, by coinky-dink, a regular around my very own suburb.

Once, within a matter of days, I overheard him explaining to strangers - numerous times in the city street, and then in a very well known street near my home - that he only needed another 10 dollars so that he would have the 25 dollars needed for one night of emergency accommodation.

It's very possible that he wasn't making it up, and that by remarkable chance every time I walked past this man, no matter in the city or in my suburb, he just happened to have whittled down the gap for his 'emergency accommodation' by the exact same amount. Day after day. Every time I walked past. Weekday or weekend. City or suburb. Fυςќing amazing coincidence.

At least there was simplicity to his story. A straight narrative: "I need "x" so that I can pay for "y". I have already achieved "a"of my goal and now I want you to contribute"b" to see me succeed." Good solid stuff. Although, in truth, he did sometimes labor this simple riff, making it something of burden to the listener.

Personally, when a beggar begs, I'm not after bells and whistles.

A complex back-story has lost me long before "oh whoa, don't you feel so much pity for me and my staggeringly bad bad-luck story that you want to empty out your bank account?". Frankly, no.

Take last week, in a busy city street, on the way home from work:

Breathless beggar woman pounces, gushes out her story in a 12 and a half second rush. Okay, points for not wasting my time, that's good, but oh, what a story. "I had an epileptic fit on the train station and was robbed, now I need money to get home."

It could have happened. Sure.

But, she needed to put more thought into her narrative. Firstly too elaborate. Secondly, if she was already on the station concourse, as she claimed, where she allegedly had an epileptic fit and was allegedly robbed, it means she already had a train ticket and would not have been able to retreat to the street to beg. Well, at least not without first being fined for not having a ticket, and, therefore, not being able to get past the barriers to get to the street.

Walking into the McDonald a few minutes after her speedy story had been told and dismissed, there she was, suddenly totting a laden tote bag, purchasing two large drinks at a cost of just under $8 - enough for a couple of train tickets. Possibly not the smartest move if she likes to work the workers at the top end of town.

Clearly it was the end of her working day too and time to catch a train home with the rest of us.