pettyfoggery

“Within the year, he’ll start complaining ’bout his back;
And shortly thereafter, he’s investing in Iraq”
- copyright 2008, Pettyfog

From Soros’ wiki:

There have been suggestions that Soros’s political gifts may have served his own interests. In late 2006, Soros bought about 2 million shares of Halliburton, which had been a major target of criticism (for war profiteering) by MoveOn and the Center for American Progress. Soros’s critics allege that these organizations suddenly stopped criticism of Halliburton after Soros purchased the stock, and subsequently the stock values appreciated significantly, netting substantial profits for Soros.

Also see: Gladwell{dot}com: Blowing Up
I’m not going to excerpt for you, just point out This little gem:

My father {Soros} will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that. But I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking, Jesus Christ, at least half of this is bullshit. I mean, you know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. It has nothing to do with reason. He literally goes into a spasm, and it?s this early warning sign.

It sometimes amuses me how I can go thru my jeans pockets before I throw them in the washer and surmise from the results what I was doing when I wore them.

Our hope and change candidate should try it.. he’ll come up with a lot of interesting stuff. Not the least interesting is his indirect ‘lint’ from Illinois Super Corp: Archer Daniels Midland, ADM. If Obama wants change, maybe he’ll go against the grain {heh} and denounce corn ethanol as the fraud and waste it truly is.

I’m sure even my liberal friends will acknowledge I’ve been posting against grain ethanol for years.. and not because I’m an expert, because no one with any rudimentary common sense knowledge of the agricultural process can fail to see it. In other words, no MBA needed!

If conservatives, even Investors Business Daily point this out, where is the outrage from the left?

I dont think McCain is totally on point, either. Certainly, though, he is not as deeply in ADM’s pocket.

Hope.. always, no matter what. Change.. not so much.
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As far as Cane and Switch Grass/ ‘agricultural waste’ ethanol though… I say again: there is NO SUCH THING as ‘agricultural waste’. Any kid who grew up on a family farm and paid the least attention knows that.
Any such use of crop growing land, no matter how poor for other crops, and no matter what residue is used for growing fuel is absurd and ultimately unsound for the environment the lefties claim to be protecting!

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Update on Teflon Obama and Methanol:

heh.. Even the Guardian has seen the light.  There’s always good reason for putting up with Liberal Publishing idiocies.. and Protein Wisdom points out that reason.

If you dont want to read a ‘Conservative Blog’, just consider that a Lib will only listen to his own choir.

Well, kids.. today we have a surplus of idiocies to share:

Juan Cole repeats Ahmadinejad’s ridiculous claim that the US planned to kidnap or assassinate him on his recent trip to Baghdad.

Even Cole’s commenters found that to be just a little too far out.

Pat Buchanan claims the Holocaust was preventable.

If Britain had only not guaranteed Poland’s safety, of course. Because then there would have been no larger war. Never mind he had started terrorizing Jews from the outset.

Finally Rep Hinchey retracted what he said here:

Link: sevenload.com

- sorry, I dont buy the retraction. First Maxine Waters threatened it, now Hinchey. When under stress you say what you really mean. I do, dont you?

Thanks to ‘fulhamag’ on the FulhamUSA non-soccer subforums, we get to see this little gem of a PowerPoint presentation on the state of our country’s economy and dire warnings on the future, if something is not done about curbing entitlement legislation.

Suicidal Spending

- Perot’s foreword is here: Perotcharts{dot}com

Watch the entire thing… and please think about what you are seeing there, before you grab onto a single kernel of truth. Consider it in its entirety; The truth is not always able to slap you in the face.
I fully expect some to use that presentation selectively as fodder for their views on particular administrations, but the presentations do not reflect the true states of the economies, should changes not have been enacted.

Example: The late nineties budget surpluses.

This has been used to show that the Clinton Administration with the Republican fiscal conservative congress produced what we all want. True.. and False. Dont forget that a large part of the economy at that point in time was based on speculative gross product…i.e; the Internet Boom which fueled huge growth in the IT and Commercial Real Estate sectors. In the end much of the ‘Product’ was vaporware, much of the taxable income based on jobs which were a result of that boom.

The conclusions I draw are simple:

1. We cannot tax ourselves out of deficit. It LOOKS like we could if you accept one or two charts at face value, but the entirety of the piece shows otherwise.

2. The proposals for a National Health plan must be very carefully considered in the light of what we can see as a result of current limited programs.

In a practical sense, attempts to curb mandatory Health and Retirement spending growth suffer the inevitable backlash from the ‘entitled’, who object to any change which might reduce their expected standards of support.

On this father’s day, my son and I went to my wife’s store to pick her up for lunch. Not finding her, I went to the service desk and had her paged. She didn’t respond.

A few minutes later the girl at the desk went on break and saw my wife in the employee lounge.

“There was a gentleman looking for you to take you to lunch.”

“Oh, what did he look like?”

“He was a fairly tall elderly man…”

The wife just couldn’t wait to tell me about that.

Added:
I should also have noted that the same kid ALSO gave me my own Domain name.. thus this blogspot based rant-fest also appears on ‘Pettyfoggery{dot}com’.

In the future, I’ll probably use the Wordpress module he installed as well, but for now the blogger edition is reflected on the site.

- from BarcePundit, which adds:

Anyway, those guys should be protesting at the Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, UAE embassies, and not create a mess for everybody, not turning the whole country upside down in the hope thatt he government gives them some subsidies. Why don’t they raise their prices, as we all do when our costs raise? Yes, it would hurt the consumer eventually, since the increase would pass along the chain, but it would allow us to either clench our teeth and pony up, or change our habits. Neither of the two possibilities sounds as holding the whole country hostage, does it?

Not very helpful, I’m afraid. Some estimates are that the top thirty percent of the market price per barrel is speculative.

If the Europeans paid attention, they’d recall those taxes were always there and it’s not going to help by shifting net tax revenues over to some other economic sector in order to subsidize transportation fuel costs

What they SHOULD be looking at is the failure of the US to address its part in easing the speculation.

(more…)

Living proof you don’t actually NEED ten thousand monkeys at typewriters. Just one trained as a ’semanticist’ will do.
- pettyfog

That’s a ‘copyright’ statement for me, on that. I haven’t read that anywhere alse, anyway

What brought it to mind was I just read Charon QC’s Blawg Review where he says he found Chomsky’s video lecture on the US election system ‘fascinating’.

Is that some gentle irony poke at ‘quasi-intellectual gibberish’? Dunno.. I’ve never totally mastered British wit.

Fred Dominguez had moved from LA to Northern California to be near his kids, who lived with their mother, Lisa Sams.
He took the three older ones, 12 thru 18, out to cut a christmas tree Sunday, after church, and they had not been heard from since. The worst was feared as a storm had moved in on Sunday and now another was coming and there was little window for an air search.

Lisa Sams said she had faith in Fred as he was a good dad and wouldn’t let anything happen to his kids. Her mother said the same about Fred, but said he had no experience in the wild while the kids did. Nonetheless she was sure they would stick together as a family. A ground search, headed by the local authorities and Fred’s best friend who is also Lisa’s fiance, had found nothing and the situation was grim

They were found just 24 hours ago (Wednesday afternoon) on the last pass of a CHP chopper as the snow began to fall again; they had taken refuge in a culvert and laid out help messages in the snow.

They were checked out and treated for hypothermia and frostbite, at the local clinic and released a few hours later. Alexis, 15, was treated again for frostbite this morning.

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Earlier, Wednesday, it broke that Jamie Lynn Spears, 16 year old sister of Brittany, and a role model for sub-teens, as a star on Nick’s Zoey 101, is pregnant by her HS boyfriend. She has stated that she is moving back to Louisiana to ‘raise her baby in a ‘normal environment’.

In related news, it’s rumored that a parenting book being authored by the girls’ mother has been shelved by the publisher.

UPDATE: The Spears girls’ mom wont miss the revenue from that ‘parenting guide’ as she seems to have sold the story rights on her daughter’s underage pregnancy for $1 Million.

Isnt that interesting.

On the OTHER hand, look at the Dominguez story again, the divorced mother’s faith in, and support of, the childrens’ father. The fact that the divorced mother’s fiance is also the divorced father’s best friend.

You tell me which family is mature and sophisticated.

In a post on Megan McArdle’s blog, Why is the Gold Standard Crazythere’s plenty of dicussion on the dollar’s woes in the international market and how that might have been addressed if we were on the Gold Standard, as Ron Paul proposes.
An interesting throwaway in the comments section got me steaming.
Gold is God’s money, he created it and all can access it freely. And he is not making any more.
That’s silly. If that’s so, let’s outlaw trading in gold and let God set his own price for it.
The same can, for practical purposes, be said for diamonds. I mean natural diamonds ARE being made, but no one is waiting around for them.
Anyone want to go on a diamond standard? And of course all gold is not yet found.

It seems to me that using any traded commodity as a backstop presents the same problems. Let’s face it, the current PRACTICAL currency backstop is another commodity: OIL.
Everyone who thinks a barrel of oil costs $90 to produce and deliver raise hands. The REAL value is around $25-$30, if I’m not mistaken.

I have a serious question.. when gold and silver were used as currency, what was their actual practical value?
Please name a product that, of necessity, included gold or silver. And no, jewelry and coinage DOESNT COUNT!
I can only think of medical instruments, or containers which needed anticorrosion/antibacterial properties.

The use of those precious metals as actual currency declined at one and the same time as they became necessary in industrial products… in essence, electronics.

Which brings us back to diamonds, considering that world goods production wouldnt suffer a damn bit if all natural diamonds suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke, we could simply fill the void where they were used in production with different processes or replacements that we have manufactured.
Considering DeBeers, Russia and the difficulty in establishing value, no one in their right mind wants to use diamonds as currency.

Yet we are, in effect, using oil as the standard, and letting trading cartels set the price.

Oil is tied to every indicator of productivity and we shun management of it; while, like Russia with its diamonds, we sit on vast reserves.

Or do we shun management of oil?

I sincerely doubt that we would be talking about the currency’s financial distress if oil was trading at its true cost: $35. Which is a propitious number. Because, for the longest time, at the end of the Gold Standard, the set value per oz was…. $35.

But it was a false value. In other countries gold was on the commodities market and the price fluctuated accordingly; which made it REALLY difficult to have a real monetary policy when your currency was based on something with only a virtual value on the one hand but was affected by industrial needs {electronics}on the other.

We have the same problem today. The price of oil is a virtual value.

We could produce and deliver enough oil, from our known reserves, to replace our current imported crude at a cost of $35.

Sure, we ARE managing oil.. only in the wrong direction. The inflated price of oil is being addressed by the proponents of ‘manmade global warming’ theory.
The remedy there is, of course, to make the backstop commodity obsolete, thus reduce price, in favor of increasing “Human Productivity per bbl Used”. Sounds sort of similar to the argument for replacing gold as the standard, doesnt it?

This is a strategy, though, that depends on the demonization of the commodity, sort of like saying “Gold is the instrument of the devil” or gold promotes a deadly disease.
In oil’s case, that relies on the literal temperature of the globe and tying carbon to it. If we enter another tangible ice age or cooling, all is lost, and oil is still going to be artificially overpriced.

If we simply opened up all our oil ranges and started producing and setting the price at ‘cost plus’ in the free market, the price of oil would plummet back down to true value.
And VOILA!!! Suddenly the dollar would regain its ‘health’ and no one is going to be quibbling much about how much of the currency is held in foreign hands.

Sure there would ALWAYS be a hedge built into the value based on perceived future scarcity, but it would be more wisely addressed at maybe ten percent. And, just as in falling sky predictions of 90 years ago, that ‘peak point’ just keeps getting pushed out.

It wouldnt kill TRUE development of alternatives, either. There are technologies which can address replacing $35 oil. Of course grain ethanol isnt one of them. And it just might not be profitable to slash/burn eco-forest to grow ethanol beets, either.

via Instapundit:

Drew Carey, in Reason, on
Eminent Domain used against the poor

I guess you dont have to be all that old to recall being taught that Eminent Domain was for PUBLIC PROJECTS, for use by all the community, not to increase tax revenue.

While you’re on Reason’s Site, check the sidebar for their previous articles on KELO. Especially, read this one.
As suspected, the intellectual liberal elite see nothing wrong with it.