The much talked about financial problems out government faces are largely imaginary. What that means is that money created out of thin air can just as easily vanish into thin air once we come to our senses. Where once a hundred-million dollars was considered a lot of money, now we are talking in the tens of trillions, 94% of this just digits stored in computers. Only three percent of the money supply is in the form of bills and coin, and these are in the hands of the people. And it will stay there as a guard against all the gloom and doom predictions of hyperinflation and economic meltdown. As long as we have a currency that represents value, the market forces (laissez faire) that operate on Main Street will see us through. People will sell for less and work for less until they come to their senses and start turning things around. And we will. We can begin by just saying, No.
The depth of the current financial crisis involves derivative financial instruments known as Debt for Credit Swaps. These CDS's are a form of insurance taken out by investors whose holdings appear in danger of losing value. Foremost among these were holders of Collateralized Debt Obligations, another derivative instrument cooked up by Wall Street when the Mortgage Backed Securities that started the whole mess started coming apart.
Banks had been solicited for mortgages by Lehman Brothers that the Wall Street firm packaged into huge concentrations. These enormous inventories and the checks pouring in each month were to be the basis for the Mortgage Backed Securities that Lehman sold to the world's central banks, insurance and retirement funds. The banks wrote mortgages on an ever descending scale of qualification, toward the end lending money to people with no income or assets. The banks did this because they could turn around and sell these mortgages to Lehman and get paid right away. No waiting twenty or thirty years. The further rationalized that the people who bought these mortgages without assets or income could resell their houses in another year, pay of their mortgages, and walk away with a few thousand in profits, as the housing bubble had not yet burst and home prices were rising.
The Mortgage Backed Securities started coming apart, so Wall Street dreamed up the Collateralized Debt Obligation. This piece of poor judgment was an investment on an investment that offered higher interest rates on mortgage packages that involved higher risk. The sole intent here was to raise money to plug the holes in the MBS program, sort of like digging a second hole to fill the first one, then a third to fill the second, and so on. Think musical chairs. Now to the point.
The holders of the Collateralized Debt Obligations began to worry that they would lose their investments when the music stopped, thus the purchases of the Debt for Credit Swaps. It's a sensible move and the cautious investors had been paying premiums to the houses issuing these instruments, most notably AIG. The problem mushroomed to astronomical proportions because the SEC had failed to specify ownership of the securities as a condition of purchase,thus anyone could purchase a DCS whether they owned the securities or not. It's like taking out collision insurance on an automobile; if taken out by the owner then in the event of an accident in which the car is totaled, the insurance company covers the loss; if a thousand people bought the same policy the insurance company would have to pay one-thousand claims on the same car. So the tax payers of this country should not have to be stuck with the bill for this fiasco: AIG should have known better, and the SEC should have plugged the loophole that made this disaster possible. So to the question; should we bail these bums out?
Just say,No.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Zua Buna!
The title of this post is "Good day" in Romanian. I have used this greeting often in the past as I am of Romanian extraction. My family emigrated to this country in 1912 to escape the political upheavals of the time. The nation has never been very stable; it was a kingdom under King Carol, a dictatorship under Chaucescu, and was on the wrong side in World War, Part Two, and took part in Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union at a heavy cost in lives and resources. In 1989 Romania revolted and broke away from the Soviet bloc. Some improvements have been realized in that troubled land but in some respects it still lives in the Dark Ages. This headline appeared on BBC just today;
A Romanian nun has died after being bound to a cross, gagged and left alone for three days in a cold room in a convent, Romanian police have said.
Members of the convent in north-east Romania claim Maricica Irina Cornici was possessed and that the crucifixion had been part of an exorcism ritual.
Cornici was found dead on the cross on Wednesday after fellow nuns called an ambulance, according to police.
A priest and four nuns were charged with imprisonment leading to death.
Orphan
Police say the 23-year-old nun, who was denied food and drink throughout her ordeal, had been tied and chained to the cross and a towel pushed into her mouth to smother any sounds.
A post-mortem is to be carried out, although initial reports say that Cornici died from asphyxiation.
"I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this," said
Father Daniel
Local media reports that the young woman had arrived at the remote convent three months before, having initially gone there to visit a friend and opted to stay.
She grew up in an orphanage in Arad, in the west of Romania.
Mediafax news agency said Cornici suffered from schizophrenia and the symptoms of her condition caused the priest at the convent and other nuns to believe she was possessed by the devil.
"They all said she was possessed and they were trying to cast out the evil spirits," police spokeswoman Michaela Straub said.
Father Daniel who is accused of orchestrating the crime is said to be unrepentant.
"God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil," AFP quoted the priest as saying.
"I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this. Exorcism is a common practice in the heart of the Romanian Orthodox church and my methods are not at all unknown to other priests," Father Daniel added.
If found guilty of killing Cornici, Father Daniel and the accused nuns could face 20 years in jail.
Another disgusting example of the evil of organized religion.
A Romanian nun has died after being bound to a cross, gagged and left alone for three days in a cold room in a convent, Romanian police have said.
Members of the convent in north-east Romania claim Maricica Irina Cornici was possessed and that the crucifixion had been part of an exorcism ritual.
Cornici was found dead on the cross on Wednesday after fellow nuns called an ambulance, according to police.
A priest and four nuns were charged with imprisonment leading to death.
Orphan
Police say the 23-year-old nun, who was denied food and drink throughout her ordeal, had been tied and chained to the cross and a towel pushed into her mouth to smother any sounds.
A post-mortem is to be carried out, although initial reports say that Cornici died from asphyxiation.
"I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this," said
Father Daniel
Local media reports that the young woman had arrived at the remote convent three months before, having initially gone there to visit a friend and opted to stay.
She grew up in an orphanage in Arad, in the west of Romania.
Mediafax news agency said Cornici suffered from schizophrenia and the symptoms of her condition caused the priest at the convent and other nuns to believe she was possessed by the devil.
"They all said she was possessed and they were trying to cast out the evil spirits," police spokeswoman Michaela Straub said.
Father Daniel who is accused of orchestrating the crime is said to be unrepentant.
"God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil," AFP quoted the priest as saying.
"I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this. Exorcism is a common practice in the heart of the Romanian Orthodox church and my methods are not at all unknown to other priests," Father Daniel added.
If found guilty of killing Cornici, Father Daniel and the accused nuns could face 20 years in jail.
Another disgusting example of the evil of organized religion.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
A Smoker's Rebuttal
It's happened again. The nation's smokers have been subject to more tax increases, causing already high prices to triple in some instances. A pound of tobacco that used to sell for $10.81 is now $36.95 and that should be enough to stir up the one-third of the people who enjoy smoking to taking action. It would be one thing if there were any evidence that smoking is harmful in any demonstrable way. There isn't. The Surgeon General's report that started this witch hunt is inconclusive on that score, based as it was on eleven equally inconclusive reports.
The first Surgeon General's report was published in 1964 and it was subsequently required that all cigarette packages carry a warning about the health hazards of smoking. That should have been enough, but then the lunatic fringe of the American population took over and escalated the hysteria to stratospheric heights. It proved to be another way for intrinsically unpleasant people to demonstrate their unpleasant natures. Well, I for one have had enough of this nonsense. Here are the facts about smoking for anyone not too stupid or bigoted to understand.
The United States leads the world in obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes; we are the world's sickest people. Our food is laced with chemicals too numerous to mention here, some guesses number into the thousands; our water is chemically treated with fluoride, a waste product from the manufacture of fertilizer; the air we breathe is polluted by automobile exhaust, coal fired power plants, and sulpherous smoke from various manufacturing plants. In view of all this, how can any data with respect to cigarette smoking be separated out from these other causes? The short answer is; they can't. The anti-smoking campaign is rife with unproven, general statements on the dangers of smoking when a rational assessment of the facts tells a different story.
Reader's Digest is one of the print media's most incessant and hypocritical advocates in the effort to get people to stop smoking. A few years ago they printed an article purportedly by a young woman whose father had died a smoking-related death. On the title page of the article was a photo of the complaining party, a pretty blond who appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties. This innocent-looking girl's story was designed to elicit sympathy and outrage against the filthy habit that took this girl's father out of her life. Boo hoo. But wait! Further along in the body of the story was the information that the girl's father had quit smoking eighteen years before his death! Smell something? I do. It's the rank odor hypocrisy; a publication that has probably contributed to more health problems by marketing prescription drugs to their readers than any other source - they've been doing this for decades, no doubt being generously compensated by Big Pharma - bleating their crippled agenda in the name of "public service" when the only ones they truly serve are themselves. The outrage over marketing prescription drugs to the general public only took form when pharmaceutical companies started sponsoring television commercials, a relatively recent development compared to Reader's Digest's long standing practice.
Another result of the hysteria over smoking and the misleading propaganda against it is that many people believe that cigarette smoking causes heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer. The fact is that cigarette smoking causes none of these afflictions or any other, for that matter. That is not to say that smoking cannot aggravate an existing condition: it most certainly can, and people with respiratory or cardio-vascular problems should definitely not smoke. Alcoholics should not drink alcoholic beverages but I don't see anyone militating against drinking. Yet drunk drivers are a much greater threat to public health than smoking could ever be. Here there is no doubt about the causal relationship to highway deaths and serious injury. Why aren't heavier taxes imposed on alcohol to the extent that they have been for cigarette smoking. Don't medical costs of alcohol consumption for both drinkers and victims of drunk driving incidents rival those falsely alleged for smokers?
Then there's the matter of "second hand smoke". I had close friend who quit smoking some twenty-five years ago. I haven't seen the man in almost eight years, and that was when I visited him in East Texas after a lengthy hiatus: before that it had been ten years since our last personal contact though we did speak on the telephone occasionally. During one of the conversation he got on a rant about smoking and at one point he shouted, "You're killing me with your second hand smoke!" Over the telephone? At that time I hadn't seen the man in three years.
The man is two years younger than I but on my last visit I didn't recognize him when he came to pick me up at the bus terminal. He looked ninety! Over the past twenty years he has had brain surgery, diabetes, suffers from manic depression, and a few months ago, the last time I spoke to him on the telephone it was clear that his mind was going. I smoke, he hasn't for twenty-five years; I am in peak health, often taken for fifteen or twenty years younger, have never been physically stronger (I work out at a gym) and still ride a bicycle 15 or 20 miles an outing.
I spend a lot of time outdoors even during the many "air pollution" days when people with respiratory problems are encouraged to remain indoors and people are urged to car pool. That leads to another argument that the anti-smoking fanatics don't like to think about. It's all in the numbers.
The normal breathing rate is fourteen breaths a minute, in an hour that's 840 breaths and the air in the lungs is complete;y changed every seven breaths. I smoke an average of thirty cigarettes a day; they are filterless, regular size cigarettes that I make myself using organically grown, additive-free tobacco. I average about two cigarettes an hour, sometimes more and sometimes I don't smoke for three hours at a stretch. At the rate of two cigarettes an hour, ten puffs each, that's twenty out of 840 respirations an hour; one out of 42 breaths. The rest of that hour I am taking in 820 breaths of something else, on "air pollution" days, especially during an inversion, I am breathing bad air. If I happen to be on foot with heavy traffic all around (seldom) I am breathing heavy doses of carbon monoxide with every breath, not just 1 in 42 but every breath - all 840 for every hour I am out there.
There was a time, fifty or sixty years ago, when folks were healthier. The air was cleaner, tap water fit to drink, and food was purer. Men worked in factories, machine shops, and construction, and were able to earn enough money that wives could stay at home, take care of the home, and raise the children. Oh, there were problems alright; alcoholism, some drug use, and crime, but not to the degree we experience today. And people smoked cigarettes without the social stigma that prevails today. There were people who didn't smoke and some of these had unpleasant effects, but they didn't organize into militant factions reminiscent of Medieval mobs; smokers then as now, if asked not to smoke, didn't smoke if it would cause potential harm to anyone. But in the main people just didn't mind much. In 1950 the chances of contracting cancer were 1 in 27; today they are 1 in 4. We are a sicker society today; did cigarette smoking contribute to this in any way?
Yes. But it wasn't the cigarettes themselves. In the early 1950's cigarette companies started producing filtered cigarettes and as these became more widespread public health started its long, gradual decline. The first popular cigarette brand to come out with filters was Kent; the filters were so dense that it was hard to draw on them and to make matters worse, asbestos was the filtering medium. Even without asbestos filters are harmful to smokers. When a smoker inhales smoke through a filter some tiny bits of the filter material also enters the lungs. Filters are made of silicates and this fine residue settles on the lungs - and stays there: the body cannot metabolize it, just as coal miners' lungs couldn't, and over time both groups developed silicosis, also known as "coal miners disease" or ""black lung". Filters, not tobacco or nicotine, are the problem with cigarettes.
I'll close with another example of the ignorance of the FDA when it pronounced nicotine as an addictive substance. There is no such thing; there are addictive personalities but not substances. People satisfy their cravings with many substances, including food. I am a recovering alcoholic with over 28 years of freedom from alcohol. Drugs didn't appeal to me; I took amphetamines to get through college while working full time and carrying a full load at school. When I started hallucinating I stopped taking them. I didn't have a drinking problem; I had a living problem and drinking was my solution to life's problems - until the problems mounted to near fatal proportions. Today I wouldn't trade my worst day sober for my best day drinking; my life works, I have many good, true friends, I am physically fit and mentally acute - and I smoke non-filtered cigarettes. So do me a favor.
Leave me the hell alone! Deal with your own personality problems and stop playing the Blame Game. I don't need you to tell me how to live when you obviously don't know how to live yourself: if you did then you wouldn't find it necessary to meddle in other peoples' business.
The first Surgeon General's report was published in 1964 and it was subsequently required that all cigarette packages carry a warning about the health hazards of smoking. That should have been enough, but then the lunatic fringe of the American population took over and escalated the hysteria to stratospheric heights. It proved to be another way for intrinsically unpleasant people to demonstrate their unpleasant natures. Well, I for one have had enough of this nonsense. Here are the facts about smoking for anyone not too stupid or bigoted to understand.
The United States leads the world in obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes; we are the world's sickest people. Our food is laced with chemicals too numerous to mention here, some guesses number into the thousands; our water is chemically treated with fluoride, a waste product from the manufacture of fertilizer; the air we breathe is polluted by automobile exhaust, coal fired power plants, and sulpherous smoke from various manufacturing plants. In view of all this, how can any data with respect to cigarette smoking be separated out from these other causes? The short answer is; they can't. The anti-smoking campaign is rife with unproven, general statements on the dangers of smoking when a rational assessment of the facts tells a different story.
Reader's Digest is one of the print media's most incessant and hypocritical advocates in the effort to get people to stop smoking. A few years ago they printed an article purportedly by a young woman whose father had died a smoking-related death. On the title page of the article was a photo of the complaining party, a pretty blond who appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties. This innocent-looking girl's story was designed to elicit sympathy and outrage against the filthy habit that took this girl's father out of her life. Boo hoo. But wait! Further along in the body of the story was the information that the girl's father had quit smoking eighteen years before his death! Smell something? I do. It's the rank odor hypocrisy; a publication that has probably contributed to more health problems by marketing prescription drugs to their readers than any other source - they've been doing this for decades, no doubt being generously compensated by Big Pharma - bleating their crippled agenda in the name of "public service" when the only ones they truly serve are themselves. The outrage over marketing prescription drugs to the general public only took form when pharmaceutical companies started sponsoring television commercials, a relatively recent development compared to Reader's Digest's long standing practice.
Another result of the hysteria over smoking and the misleading propaganda against it is that many people believe that cigarette smoking causes heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer. The fact is that cigarette smoking causes none of these afflictions or any other, for that matter. That is not to say that smoking cannot aggravate an existing condition: it most certainly can, and people with respiratory or cardio-vascular problems should definitely not smoke. Alcoholics should not drink alcoholic beverages but I don't see anyone militating against drinking. Yet drunk drivers are a much greater threat to public health than smoking could ever be. Here there is no doubt about the causal relationship to highway deaths and serious injury. Why aren't heavier taxes imposed on alcohol to the extent that they have been for cigarette smoking. Don't medical costs of alcohol consumption for both drinkers and victims of drunk driving incidents rival those falsely alleged for smokers?
Then there's the matter of "second hand smoke". I had close friend who quit smoking some twenty-five years ago. I haven't seen the man in almost eight years, and that was when I visited him in East Texas after a lengthy hiatus: before that it had been ten years since our last personal contact though we did speak on the telephone occasionally. During one of the conversation he got on a rant about smoking and at one point he shouted, "You're killing me with your second hand smoke!" Over the telephone? At that time I hadn't seen the man in three years.
The man is two years younger than I but on my last visit I didn't recognize him when he came to pick me up at the bus terminal. He looked ninety! Over the past twenty years he has had brain surgery, diabetes, suffers from manic depression, and a few months ago, the last time I spoke to him on the telephone it was clear that his mind was going. I smoke, he hasn't for twenty-five years; I am in peak health, often taken for fifteen or twenty years younger, have never been physically stronger (I work out at a gym) and still ride a bicycle 15 or 20 miles an outing.
I spend a lot of time outdoors even during the many "air pollution" days when people with respiratory problems are encouraged to remain indoors and people are urged to car pool. That leads to another argument that the anti-smoking fanatics don't like to think about. It's all in the numbers.
The normal breathing rate is fourteen breaths a minute, in an hour that's 840 breaths and the air in the lungs is complete;y changed every seven breaths. I smoke an average of thirty cigarettes a day; they are filterless, regular size cigarettes that I make myself using organically grown, additive-free tobacco. I average about two cigarettes an hour, sometimes more and sometimes I don't smoke for three hours at a stretch. At the rate of two cigarettes an hour, ten puffs each, that's twenty out of 840 respirations an hour; one out of 42 breaths. The rest of that hour I am taking in 820 breaths of something else, on "air pollution" days, especially during an inversion, I am breathing bad air. If I happen to be on foot with heavy traffic all around (seldom) I am breathing heavy doses of carbon monoxide with every breath, not just 1 in 42 but every breath - all 840 for every hour I am out there.
There was a time, fifty or sixty years ago, when folks were healthier. The air was cleaner, tap water fit to drink, and food was purer. Men worked in factories, machine shops, and construction, and were able to earn enough money that wives could stay at home, take care of the home, and raise the children. Oh, there were problems alright; alcoholism, some drug use, and crime, but not to the degree we experience today. And people smoked cigarettes without the social stigma that prevails today. There were people who didn't smoke and some of these had unpleasant effects, but they didn't organize into militant factions reminiscent of Medieval mobs; smokers then as now, if asked not to smoke, didn't smoke if it would cause potential harm to anyone. But in the main people just didn't mind much. In 1950 the chances of contracting cancer were 1 in 27; today they are 1 in 4. We are a sicker society today; did cigarette smoking contribute to this in any way?
Yes. But it wasn't the cigarettes themselves. In the early 1950's cigarette companies started producing filtered cigarettes and as these became more widespread public health started its long, gradual decline. The first popular cigarette brand to come out with filters was Kent; the filters were so dense that it was hard to draw on them and to make matters worse, asbestos was the filtering medium. Even without asbestos filters are harmful to smokers. When a smoker inhales smoke through a filter some tiny bits of the filter material also enters the lungs. Filters are made of silicates and this fine residue settles on the lungs - and stays there: the body cannot metabolize it, just as coal miners' lungs couldn't, and over time both groups developed silicosis, also known as "coal miners disease" or ""black lung". Filters, not tobacco or nicotine, are the problem with cigarettes.
I'll close with another example of the ignorance of the FDA when it pronounced nicotine as an addictive substance. There is no such thing; there are addictive personalities but not substances. People satisfy their cravings with many substances, including food. I am a recovering alcoholic with over 28 years of freedom from alcohol. Drugs didn't appeal to me; I took amphetamines to get through college while working full time and carrying a full load at school. When I started hallucinating I stopped taking them. I didn't have a drinking problem; I had a living problem and drinking was my solution to life's problems - until the problems mounted to near fatal proportions. Today I wouldn't trade my worst day sober for my best day drinking; my life works, I have many good, true friends, I am physically fit and mentally acute - and I smoke non-filtered cigarettes. So do me a favor.
Leave me the hell alone! Deal with your own personality problems and stop playing the Blame Game. I don't need you to tell me how to live when you obviously don't know how to live yourself: if you did then you wouldn't find it necessary to meddle in other peoples' business.