It's the triumphant return of DOOM, my groovy babies! Feel the burn! The rumors that the band broke up are a tissue of lies. This won't be a daily gig any more, but I'll try to deliver a dose of gloom, pessimism, and snide commentary once or twice a week.

Dear Grandkids: you are screwed, and it's largely our fault. Sorry about that. We'd send money, but we're vacationing in Cabo and need the cash for the condo and resort fees, and Gramp's new hip didn't come cheap. Love and kisses! Sincerely, Grammy and Grampy.

Fiscal prudence at last!

Snot, phlegm, and night-sweats are going to cost the US economy around $10 billion this year.

I just wouldn't be me if I didn't take the opportunity to give Social Security a kick in the nuts, so here's a high-stepping boot to the nads from the guys at ZeroHedge. With lots of ginchy chart-fu.

Michael Barone adds his voice to the chorus: the era of entitlements is almost over. (And not just in the U.S., but in other nations as well.) Barone, one of the sharpest political observers and historians of his generation, notes that history tends to move in epicycles, and this particular epicycle is about to end. We don't know what will come next, but the road between here and there is going to be rough.

Greece: the agony goes on. Apparently the Greeks didn't get the news that the Eurozone problem was solved. Maybe it's because they're preoccupied with trying to find a way to heat their homes.

You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. A product or service is only worth what people are willing to pay. Your labor is a product you sell to your employer, and it's as prone to market pressures as any other good.

His Majesty the King may believe that we do not have a spending problem, but America's public spending -- from the municipal level all the way up to the federal -- simply cannot be sustained.

Will we see annualized investment-return rates in the 10% range again, on a sustained basis? The demographics argue against it. From the article:

Noting the financial pressures on programs like Social Security and Medicare, the authors conclude that the need to forecast government policies may be one of the most difficult challenges facing retirement-age households.

Retiring Boomers are going to be selling into the markets, not buying, and younger adults aren't going to have as much investment capital to throw around. Investment returns are likely to suck for a long, long time to come...and that has some grim implications not just for individual investors, but for public entities that incur pension obligations and the like. Most state and municipal pension actuaries still estimate an aggregate yearly return in the 7-8% percent range, while reality suggests that the real number might be more in the 4-5% range. That translates into tens of billions of dollars -- maybe hundreds of billions -- in unfunded pension and other benefit obligations over the next couple of decades.

By the way, China is not going to bail us out. They've got even an even bigger retirement problem than we do.

Generalized S&P 500 returns for the last decade? Between zero and two percent or so, if you adjust for inflation and depending on how you calculate. If you invested money into the market in 1999, chances are that money returned between jack and squat between 1999 and 2011. It's likely to be even worse in the next decade or two. And the sad part? Stocks are still the smart play if you're an investor, because bonds are even worse. The take-away from this is that there's no substitute for saving your own money: you can't count on investment returns to make up any shortfall in saving. (But I guess you can take the optimist's position that in the long run we're all dead, so the best course of action is to live for the moment.)

For all the (fully justified) angst about federal spending, some of the worst public-finance disasters are at the state and municipal level. California is, as I have noted on many occasions, boned. Very, very boned. Illinois, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey are likewise very boned. This is the real calamity: federal debt, serious as it is, is rather attenuated in terms of how it affects your daily life. But when your city or state goes broke, you feel it very directly. Streets go unrepaired, streetlights burn out and remain dark, trash doesn't get picked up, crime spirals out of control. Just see how things are playing out in San Bernardino or Detroit these days.

And to those states who think they can tax themselves out of the hole they've dug for themselves: people won't just stand around like sheep waiting to be sheared. In fact, what happens is that the very people an economy needs the most (young, dynamic, industrious) leave while the most expensive and unproductive (the old, the poor, and the sick) stay.

Somebody alert Teh Krugman! Regarding the national debt, the notion that "we owe the money to ourselves" is bullshit. Furthermore, it has been known to be bullshit for a good long while. Yet somehow the canard never dies. Remember, kids: "money" and "wealth" are not the same thing.

James Buchanan on Keynes and the end of the Victorian economic sensibility.

[...]Keynes totally failed to recognize that the long-standing rules for fiscal-monetary prudence were required to hold the tribal instincts in check, and that, once the Victorian precepts were eroded, the tribal instincts would emerge with force sufficient to overwhelm all rationally derived argument.

It's hard out there for a chimp. more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:32 AM | Comments (258)
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"I've got a lot of problems with you people, and now you're gonna hear about it" ~ Frank Costanza

Colin Powell's obviously an adherent of the sect, but he missed the holiday. It didn't stop him from airing his grievances with the GOP today, though. And man, are there a lot of them.

"There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party ... What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities."

...

"When I see a former governor say that the president is 'shuckin' and jivin'.' That's a racial-era slave term," [Andy -- he's referring to Sarah Palin, who he didn't have the stones to name]

...

"He didn't say [Obama] was slow, he was tired, he didn't do well; he said he was 'lazy,' ... Now, it may not mean anything to most Americans, but to those of us who are African Americans, the second word is "shiftless," and then there's a third word that goes along with it." [Andy -- ditto for John Sununu]

...

"The whole birther movement: Why do senior Republican leaders tolerate this kind of discussion within the party? ... I think the party has to take a look at itself."

It sure seems Colin Powell, self-proclaimed "moderate Republican" and two-time Obama voter, has a lot of problems with the GOP. Here, let him sum it up.

"In recent years, there's been a significant shift to the right, and we have seen what that shift has produced: two losing presidential campaigns," Powell said. "I think what the Republican Party needs to do now is take a very hard look at itself and understand that the country has changed. The country is changing demographically. And if the Republican Party does not change along with that demographic, they're going to be in trouble."

Powell said the Republican Party in addition to being the party of lower taxes, has become cast at the party of the rich. He said that Republicans need to take up education, immigration and climate change policy before the next election.

Education, immigration and climate change policy? Are there cue cards that get held up in front of every Sunday show-appearing "moderate Republican", because that's what all these guys say. And I'm sure it's racist to point that out.

According to Powell, everything is apparently racist. Referring to a white guy as "lazy" means he's lazy. Referring to a black guy as "lazy" means The N-Word™. Does someone have a diagram of how this works, because I swear I can't keep it straight.

But it sure seems like if you default to "all criticism of Obama is racist" you'll be right 99 times out of 100.

I found the "lazy" example particularly interesting coming from Powell, though. If you'll remember back to the campaign (sorry ... open wound there), John Sununu, the target of Powell's anonymous swipe this morning, said the only reason Powell voted for Obama was because he was black. I guess Powell's been carrying that little chip around on his shoulder for a while. (yeah, yeah, chip ... shoulder ... racist!)

Funny, but you know who else said Colin Powell voted for Obama because he was black? Colin effing Powell, that's who.

... And at the end, I cannot say I was totally colorblind. ...

As a moderate Republican, Powell clearly came to the conclusion that the policies Obama supported were more in line with his own than those advocated by the firebreathing, far right-wing candidates we've nominated in the last two elections ... John McCain and Mitt Romney. So the non-colorblindness didn't really put it over the top, you see.

The funniest part of the whole thing to me though, was Powell's complaint about the birthers being allowed to voice their opinions and his desire that the GOP shut them up. If they had that power, I'd much rather they apply it to "Republicans" who only get invited to the Sunday shows to trash the party.

The cringeworthy interview with unindicted gun criminal David Gregory appears below the fold. more...

Posted by: andy at 11:50 AM | Comments (191)
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Dayum, what a game in Atlanta.

Ok, Houston Texans at the Patriots.

Given Houston's recent performances I don't hold out much hope for them. But I do love their cheerleaders.

Actually, I like the Patriot cheerleaders too.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 12:15 PM | Comments (426)
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Seattle and Atlanta.

This fight. I have no dog in it.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:55 AM | Comments (214)
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Look at the pointy elbows on these guys! I'll bet one of them is a tranny.

Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to this week's socially inept, emotionally clueless, yet kind-of-appealing-in-a-weird-sort-of-way Sunday Morning Book Thread.

Where's My Pocket Protector?

I think a nerd is someone who enjoys things that non-participants find boring and/or useless. Just being really into something doesn't make you a nerd. For example, Bill Clinton is not a "sex nerd", rather he is a "horndog" or, if you prefer "a serial adulterer" or "rapist". Nerds seem to only be associated with certain hobbies or fields of study. With that in mind, I am a nerd in three fields, and this week I had the opportunity to indulge myself in two of them.

I can already hear you morons snoring already. Shut up.

Modern Ideas in Chess by Richard Réti is one of the game's significant theoretical works. Written in 1992, it established the principles of what become known as the "Hypermodern School", some of which were known earlier, but here gathered into a coherent whole. The principles espoused then by Réti and the other hypermodern proponents are still valid even today.

New chess books tend to be expensive, but this one was on sale, plus I got to use a discount coupon, so I couldn't pass it up. This is the "New 21st Century Edition", which means that the editors converted the move sequences from the old description notation into the more modern algebraic notation. A downloadable file of the book text and games in ChessBase format was included with the hard-copy book.

And for my second foray into the Kingdom of Nerd:

Donald E. Knuth is one of the grand wizards of computer science. He is the equivalent of a 15th level mage with a ginormous staff (heh) and a pointy hat decorated with stars and crescent moons. Way back in ye olden times (late 60s - early 70s), he wrote the seminal multi-volume work entitled The Art Of Computer Programming. I found a pdf copy floating around on bittorrent and I have ordered a used copy of Vol. 1, "Fundamental Algorithms". If you take you time and go slowly enough, it is a surprisingly readable book. Of course the TAOCP series is a well-known unfinished work. After the first two volumes were published, Knuth became dissatisfied with the typesetting, which he considered to be inadequate for this work. So he left off the TAOCP project and devoted his efforts to computer typesetting, and came back a few years later having written the typesetting system TeX. But he did not return to TAOCP and it stood at 3 volumes until recently when the various sections of Vol. 4 began to be published.

So, with what books do the rest of you morons gratify your inner nerd?

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:05 AM | Comments (150)
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ICYMI, they won't be minting that platinum coin.

Posted by: andy at 04:01 AM | Comments (140)
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Gun Safety, Redefined

Put this one on your radar screens. Since "gun control" polls right up there with asking your mother-in-law to move in with you, the left needs a new term. This one must've focus-grouped well.

About to go on @cnnsitroom with @wolfblitzer & @ewerickson to talk gun safety. Is NRA unreasonable to oppose ALL gun safety proposals?

— Paul Begala (@PaulBegala) January 11, 2013

Now that's just asinine. The NRA literally wrote the rules for gun safety, and their Eddie Eagle program has taught gun safety to millions of kids.

They don't oppose gun safety at all. Gun control, OTOH ...

Good Stuff From Bob Owens

Forget bans; where are my Constitutionally-protected suppressed machine guns?

Also, Bob's eBook, So You Want to Own A Gun, is highly recommended for the first-time buyers among you.

And, of course, you should bookmark Bob-Owens.com.

A Brilliant Idea By Frank J. Fleming

This really takes the cake. Sheer brilliance.

Since Something Must Be Done!!11!™, ...

Gun control advocates won't know the difference if we pass laws banning a bunch of made-up things that sound scary.

I could totally lose those magazines that never run out of ammo and suppressors that make that "pew" sound like they have in the movies.

Finally, a Worthwhile Petition

I generally think these White House petition things are pretty stupid. I can get behind this one, though:

Eliminate armed guards for the President, Vice-President, and their families, and establish Gun Free Zones around them

Gun Free Zones are supposed to protect our children, and some politicians wish to strip us of our right to keep and bear arms. Those same politicians and their families are currently under the protection of armed Secret Service agents. If Gun Free Zones are sufficient protection for our children, then Gun Free Zones should be good enough for politicians.

They're 2/3 of the way there, if you want to lend 'em a hand. (h/t Laura W.)

Gun Of The Week

Hint: God created man, Col. _____ made 'em equal.

(answer below)

more...

Posted by: andy at 05:27 AM | Comments (286)
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Ugh, under the weather still. Apologies up front for an abbreviated ONT but I'm sure the horde will somehow manage. more...

Posted by: CDR M at 05:56 PM | Comments (579)
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It puts the lotion on its skin.

Michael Warren, writing in The Weekly Standard:

At the Ritz-Carlton, Reid read his own words in print and made a snap decision. The next day, at a noon press conference in the Capitol, he dropped the bomb. The jobs bill, including the carefully crafted tax deal, was being scrapped, he told reporters. Reid would instead introduce a new “pared-back” bill, without the tax proposals that had enraged the left. This was the first time Baucus had heard his hard-fought agreement was being thrown away. To the finance committee senators and staff, it was weeks of hard work down the drain. To Reid, it was business as usual.

Reid is odd, temperamental, mercurial, obstinate, and rude. He says things that “make you cringe,” as one senator put it. Once, while waiting for President Obama outside the Oval Office, Reid greeted a tall female West Wing staffer by telling her she was his “favorite big woman,” while Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was his “favorite small woman.” Reid quickly “clarified,” telling her he only meant that she was his favorite big woman “at the White House.”

In the Reid regime, the Senate operates more or less at his whim. Members are frequently caught off guard when he decides to bring a bill up for debate. Reid will promise to allow a senator to present an important amendment only to change course at the last minute and claim he never made the promise at all.

(Emphasis mine.) I noticed this a long time ago. He reminds me of a kid who lived nearby when I was six. He had the most wonderful toys, but his greatest delight was in not letting you play with them. Once I wanted to drive his pedal car. He ran over and sat in it, beaming. Then he drove around in circles. I was hurt and said something about not sharing. He loved it. I walked toward a ball on his driveway. He jumped out of the car, ran over, and grabbed the ball, stepping back, cradling it--all the while with that same inward-directed Harry Reid smile.

Reid lacks empathy. That explains his habit of saying asinine things: You're my favorite big woman. Obama is a light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect. Romney hasn't paid taxes in ten years. Gillibrand is the hottest senator. Hurricane Katrina was nothing compared to Sandy. When you objectify people like that, they don't have feelings of their own, so you can't hurt them. You couldn't hurt a rock either, for example.

DrewM noticed the weirdness a few years ago. Reid had called Clarence Thomas an embarrassment, and he had referred to Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd as the greatest living Americans:

Asked to name "a greatest living American" most of us would name a person who is objectively "living" and an "American", the greatness being a bit more open to interpretation. Harry on the other hand goes with two guys who are dead...Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd.

Call me crazy but I don't think a guy who got liquored up and killed a woman or a man who rose up the ranks of the Klu Klux Klan should be on anyone's list of "greatest American", living or dead.

Just remember though...Sharron Angle is an idiot who can't be let near the Senate. And according the Mensa member Harry Reid, Clarence Thomas is "an embarrassment to the Supreme Court".

Drew also pointed out Reid may have enriched himself with insider information about green energy legislation.

You get a sense that Harry Reid thinks he can say or do whatever he wants because he's just that good and nothing else matters. The weird statements, the I-get-to-do-what-I-want capriciousness, and the reckless intransigence? Warren is right: Reid is a small-minded, odd man. He uses his power only to confound others and to please himself. He's that spoiled brat I knew when I was a kid.

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Posted by: rdbrewer at 10:35 AM | Comments (146)
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Aaron Swartz was an internet activist and developer who hung himself on Friday. This talk below that he gave will be a more enduring legacy than any software he ever made, or any of the crimes he's been accused of.

Ignore the hipster douchebag affectations and pay attention to what he's saying. He lays out a process by which irresistible force can be resisted even when the media is NOT on your side. Its not theoretical, it worked.

When the video started, I was groaning for the first 20 seconds or so, which of course was due to my biases and preconceptions about this young man, but then he drew me in...and 20 minutes had elapsed before I knew it.

Video below the fold. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 01:13 PM | Comments (257)
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