Galapagos sea lions head for warm Peru waters BBC (hat tip reader Steven L)
Pratap Chatterjee, Destabilizing Pakistan TomDispatch
Secret summit of top bankers News.com.au
Europe needs to show it has a crisis endgame Wolfgang Munchau Financial Times
Employers set to keep squeezing pay Independent
Irked, Wall St. Hedges Its Bet on Democrats New York Times. Some one needs to break these guys.
The SWIFT Battle Heats Up FireDogLake (hat tip reader Michael T)
Let’s Atomize Wall Street Martin Hutchinson, Prudent Bear
Super-wealthy investors move billions out of Greece Guardian
Flatlhead Matt Taibbi (hat tip reader John L). Old but fun.
‘Tidal wave’ of business failure feared as tax help scheme ends Independent
America Is Not Yet Lost Paul Krugman
Europeans want to tough it out Eurointelligence
My Sunday Media Nightmare Billy Blog (hat tip reader Joe B). Today’s must read.
Antidote du jour (hat tip reader DoctoRx):
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L’il Guy: “Ahh, Christ on the Cross, if evolution is _y’all_ what have we got to look forward to?”
Alright Yves!!!!
A link to the “billy blog”!! Good stuff. You need to make it a regular “thang”. The guy has a lot of good stuff fro us to hear.
Here’s more fun with Friedman:
http://exiledonline.com/thomas-friedman-the-empires-useful-idiot-an-exile-classic/
The Billy Blog tells it like it is about the globalization scam. “EU”? More like FU. (Sorry, I guess I’m being juvenile.)
Most of all he’s right that we have to tear up the lawns and grow vegetables. What they really are is Victory Gardens.
Not just any vegetable, but Diocletian cabbage. It’s very delicious and nutritional too…if it’s organic.
I’m still deciding what to grow this year. I want to do something different from last year. I’ll look into the Diocletian cabbage (if that can grow in NJ).
It appears that Wall Street, like many voters, is facing a unilemma of going with the Democrats or the Republicans.
Greece stock market slid almost 5% last night. I believe that we should bless Greece with a military takeover as a solution, a la Niel Ferguson, to restore order.
Colonial domination, despite the carnage, led to investment in the colonies that made these countries what they are today.
How about a Fallujah style leveling of Wall Street?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah,_The_Hidden_Massacre
Defeating fascist Hitler, despite the carnage, led to a freer world.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
Yes, yes, by all means.
When, to quote Carlos Fuentes, the “highly privileged local minority” that “serve as intermediaries” for the neo-colonialists can’t control their helots, or if they get uppity, a throwback to the traditional colonial paradigm of conquest and rule is most definitely in order.
We can all see how beautifully that worked out in Iraq.
While we are witnessing a Greek fire, there is also, in Spain, an inquisition going on.
Been done before in Greece. Many times.
Lead on General!
I’ll volunteer for duty if it involves laying around on beaches drinking Ouzo like St. John of Patmos seeing Holy visions in the clouds.
The pa-lace nees to collapse from it’s own dereliction and softness. Yes, we need private prisons and nannies to lead the economic charge. We need more greed. That’s right Captain!
You can’t take GNP for granted. No sir. Commanding officers must be made of stern stuff. Yes sir. And you need the men to eat nails every once and a while. yes sir. And the women too. No lillys in our field. No sir. Give them an instruction manual and a blackberry. nail chewing is hard to master. YOu need determination.
And then you’ll need a dentist. yes sir. And that will be more GNP, including the novacaine. Yes sir. Yes sir. yes sir.
and by the way, smile while Pentheus fux you up the ass, Captain. while you think he’s your friend i bet, pieces of you everywhere, everywhere, trying to collect themselves in branches blow up in trenches of tranches in your blind triumph, eyes like a statue, dead and white staring into your equations. blown up in your own atom bombs of math madness, blown up all you saturdays and sundays and Mars days and Mondays, yours and everyones, Captain. blown up into digital seconds of tick tick tick. Yeah, let’s bring all that benediction to Greece. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. We must be Saints! Dragging along our prisons behind us like a cross to Golgatha.
Ahab’s calling you Captain out to the sea. out to the angry sea to hold hands with an angry Christ. And he’ll put a harpoon in the chest of your Moby Dick, of your big white dick hard like a harpoon church steeple, angry like your barbed wire, like your barbed wire thorn of crowns suffering, your money saint suffering, handing out your pennies to children with your big white Moby Dick. Kill Kill Kill Kill. Kill Kill Kill. Anima Mundi. and Cut her breasts into tranches and sell her like a whore.
your truly,
St. John of the Ouzo Hangover Puke
“Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.” says Matt Taibbi. Wolves. Lions. That’s two. The fact that the herd is called a “pack” or “pride” doesn’t matter – it’s just a peculiarity of English. Weasels, there’s a third. What an odd fellow he must be.
Ah, language. Ah, semantics.
Yes, let’s continue…birds, seals, whales (all cetaceans for that matter).
Of course, it’s clear from the context that Taibbi is using the term “herd animal” to mean an animal that is “herded” by humans (see the use of “herded” in the Friedman quote) rather than an animal that lives in part of a “herd.”
Just coincidentally, I was thinking about this earlier today. I don’t want to get all Clintonian and delve into the definition of “is,” but what about the definition of “we?” “We were evacuated” literally means something quite different than “the building was evacuated.” But does the speaker of that phrase really mean that “each of us” was “evacuated” (which would be gross), or does the speaker rather mean “we” as a sort of a meta-organism that is really just the “building” itself? And I thought I knew what “we” meant!
Yes, but the world is simple, and we understand it!
Animals hunt in a pack, they graze in a herd.
Humans. Chimpanzees.
I like the article about Greece. Made me think about Glyfada in the summer. Not all Greeks there of course, but a serious display of opulence on par with many other high end areas of the world.
Crisis there is following the same old, same old pattern. See, e.g., Mexico, Argentina, Latvia, etc. Outside forces come in to temporarily stabilize country and currency, wealthy withdraw as many assets from country and currency as possible, country and currency are then allowed to sink and austerity measures are put upon the working class. Yes, this one’s a little different because most of us think they’re staying with the Euro. As the trinket hawkers say in southeast Asia, “same same…but different.”
The article on the ‘secret’ summit of the bankers is intriguing, not only in its secrecy but in the apparent abruptness which it has come about. What can this be about?
Since its hidden and proprietary information, I see no reason not to add my unsupported guesswork to the steaming pile of mystery.
The summit’s task will be the organizational beginning of a -new- series of soon to be announced coordinated fixes to World economic woes. This may surprise some in that it implies the last series of solutions have fallen short of the mark. Will it work this time? Without knowing what’s up, but knowing somewhat the problem, and given history, that these devices will or can precipitate a counter tsunami of fiscal wellbeing would strikes me as fodder for the extremely credulous, or those with cleverly placed shorts on World financial future(s).
Second, I can imagine Asian bankers, investors, et al. are tiring of the dead weight necessitated by Western models of political discussion and objectives directing fiscal policy and may be leaning toward a gradual process of de-linkage of Eastern and Western affairs, or at least making the best of the worst to further each owns sovereign advantage; a leverage of debts owed.
Third, while each country has their own unique variation of economic ailing, the problem is (and may have always been to some extent) one of global dimension. No one can afford to have the weakest link fail for fear of precipitating future widespread international calamity. While ‘things’ may be solved in one market, it matters little in that the tentacles of oblivion are not easily severed and another maybe your undoing. What happens in Greece, or Latvia or unemployment in the U.S. has consequences beyond the publics directly affected to a true understanding of World interdependence, and the flip side of Globalism, that breakfast of champions, that failure is infectious.
Since this is occurring in Australia, that might give the meeting as something to the nature of an East-West Détente. Maybe someone down there can keep an eye on what’s going on. Not seeing it on the front page in this country.
In the link, Europeans Want To Tough It Out, it mentioned two hedge funds and one investment being responsible for the latest movement in Southern European bonds. What were they, just curious?
Reading through Mr. Bill Blog’s Blog it struck me, forcefully, what the basic problem is with economics.
In ‘Interpretation of Dreams” Freud wrote that “Words are the nodal points of numerous ideas, and are therefore predistined to ambiguity.’ Yes, that’s a favorite quote of ours at the Institute.
And so essays about economics, and economic concepts themselves (prior, even, to the attempt to codify these concepts in mathematics) are built on WORDS. In the beginning was the WORD and the WORD was God. The Word preceeds the quantification, just as the category precedes the instance. Even though the category is built on the perception of instances of things unrecognized.
And so economics is, by definition, destined to ambiguity. This is why economists can disagree about even the basic facts of their profession.
Therein is the intractable problem we face. Economics, as it is conceived, is like Victorian physics built on the notion of the Ether Wind. The entire body of thought is, in fact, built on a foundation of sand. And so it needs to be built around notions of non Gausian indeterminism and spiritual holography.
The link to Mr. Bills Blog was my first time to his site. Spent a couple hours reading there and came away thoughtful and impressed. Thanks for that.
I have to give Yves a lot of credit for the links she chooses, always many gems to be found
mg
Yeah billy has some good stuff. Found him about 3 months ago and cant get enough. The commenters like Mr Hickey and Scott Fullwiler add almost as much. Spend some time there and the fog will clear.
I’ll second that emotion on NC links, they rawk!
Got a kick out of this via LAT on china china china hack hack hack.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-china-hackers9-2010feb09,0,3184950.story
Police actually shut down the network in November, two months before Google made international headlines when it said it might leave China after it was hit by a series of cyber attacks originating there.
To some, the announcement now suggests that the Chinese government could be getting more serious about cracking down.
…
But critics say the arrests might be little more than a propaganda ploy in the midst of the Google scandal.
“It seems aimed at bolstering the Foreign Ministry’s claim that China is getting tough on hackers. This is meant for an international audience, not for domestic criminal prosecution,” said James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc., based in Washington.
…
One of the difficulties in cracking down on hackers is their level of acceptance in society. Top Chinese hackers hold a yearly conference in Beijing under the name Xcon.
…
Black Hawk and other academies, says Mulvenon, have not been implicated in the major attacks.
“These academies like Black Hawk are primarily moneymaking ventures…” said Mulvenon.
…
Although Black Hawk’s original website was taken down, it appears that a new one has been set up under a different address. And memberssay they don’t believe the bust will make a dent in China’s hacking culture.