atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,
atomic_fungus
atomic_fungus

#3091: Finally, a day with nothng scheduled!

No choir practice, Bible study, therapy appointments, special events, or long drives. Nothin'!

What an amazing feeling it is, that I don't have to be somewhere at a certain time today.

...yeah, I know, "Shut up and get a job, already!"

* * *

Mexico is enacting marriage contracts. This is highly similar to a concept I first came across while reading Heinlein.

It makes sense, from a certain point of view. I don't know how I feel about it vis a vis my religion, but WTF.

* * *

If there is anything I hate, it is telling someone something and then later saying they "misunderstood".

...like my nephew "misunderstood" my sister when she said she was taking his dog to the vet. Yeah. Just because you convince yourself that you didn't lie, it doesn't mean that you didn't lie.

* * *

Two from Karl Denninger:

Europe is going to come apart. Reason: no one wants to give up the credit card. No government wants to be forced into spending only the money it receives in revenue.

There are two basic ways to toe that line, and neither one is palatable to elected officials.

1) Reduce spending to reflect the current revenues of taxation. They don't like this because it keeps you from buying as many votes as you need to remain in office. Spending money is power and no one wants his power reduced.

2) Increase taxes to the levels required to fund the desired spending. They don't like this either because the people would vote them all out of office and elect new representatives who would cut spending, and no one wants his power taken away.

But if you can pay for 2/3 of your spending with taxes and borrow the rest, you get the best of both worlds: you can buy all the votes you want without losing any to high taxation. Oh, that little thing about "totally unsustainable, eventually causing incredible hardship for all and sundry"? Bah. That'll happen years after you've retired! Who cares? It won't affect you anyway since your wealth will be secreted somewhere safe and you can always run to the Bahamas or something.

The problem is, the entire paradigm is unsustainable. "Sooner or later you run out of other peoples' money." You run out of ways to hide the economic effects of the huge deficits, and after a while even if you admit to them you also begin to run out of ways to stave them off.

Yet the Dow is up since the media is spinning the "deal" as a win despite the fact that Britain, Ireland, Finland, and the Netherlands aren't on board.

What they mean by "deal" is something approximating "Germany and France have decided". Should this turn out to be a non-solution, expect the markets to tank.

*

"Listen to the sirens of the world," goes one line in ELO's "Time After Time". Here, Denninger predicts the economic collapse is near at hand. "As such consider your positions carefully if you're long the market -- the wild gyrations are a warning -- overall 'bullish' markets don't behave this way, but ones that are about to fall apart sure as hell do."

Denninger is prone to predicting doom in the near term rather than the far or even medium term, but I'm not entirely sure he's wrong, either. Look: no one person controls the market but the big banks and the governments have the ability to influence them.

Well, until they don't, that is. The problem is no one knows exactly where that precipice is. The market is a chaotic system and generally responds with Y when X is input...but not always and (as Denninger points out) recently it's as likely to respond with Q as with Y. A chaotic system will usually respond in a linear fashion--until it doesn't.

The sudden "step function" changes in the Dow are not indicative of a system that is operating in a stable regime; and the more instability you see, the more likely there is going to be more. Since the Laws of Thermodynamics preclude it jumping wildly higher and staying there you can expect that a crash is a-comin'.

There's no way to tell exactly when, not before it happens.

Denninger's prediction that the markets will go bust before the elections next year seems safe to me. His predictions for January seem less so, but my sentiment is predicated only on the fact that the man has made several similar short-term predictions which have not come to pass.

Still, I can't argue his point; a serious correction (if not a crash) is coming. It can't be otherwise; there are far too many problems which aren't even being looked at much less addressed or corrected. (Rampant corruption being one. Total disregard for "rule of law" being another.)

Gadzooks, I need to get my FOID card and shootin' irons back.

* * *

All three of the "Jobs Brothers" are liberals. Just thought I'd point that out.

* * *

We got enough snow last night to cover the grass, mostly. It barely stuck to the pavement and light traffic was enough to erase that.

Apparently this was nonetheless enough snow to freak all the morons right the fuck out. "HOLY SHIT, IT'S WINTER! I THOUGHT IT WAS STILL SUMMER BUT UNSEASONABLY COLD! I FORGOT WHAT HAPPENS TO WATER WHEN IT GETS TOO COLD! AAAIIIGHH!!!"

*sigh*
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