Dave Rants - Technology, Politics, and Dogs

Michael Steele, the Republican Hudsucker Proxy

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 01:26:00 +0000

Today the sad, embarrassing career of Michael Steele came to its predictable end. From his ridiculously lame attempts to 'reach out to the suburban, urban hip-hop community' to the made-up financial and expense scandals, he has clearly been designated the fall guy from day one, the lynchpin of the Republican plan to regain their manifest destiny as ruling party and finally destroy the monster that is Obama (or whatever other Democrat is convenient at the time).

Let's review the predictable career trajectory of this prop, er man.

Michael Steele, who disappeared after being Maryland governor, is suddenly revived as a response to Obama's election 2 months earlier. Tactic #43 in the 'pathetically predictable Karl Rove reads 'the prince'' playbook is to take away any positive attribute the opponent might have. They try to steal some thunder by electing the first black chairman of the RNC, and to give white people cover so they can hate Obama and not feel racist. This is the last time the Republicans will benefit from Steele doing something actively.
Since 2007, the tea party movement has been fomenting. Here is an early post from one of the louder voices condemning wall street greed and government lies:
That is the fact that the housing mess, and the coming severe economic pain that we are going to take in this country, is, if you live in a "bubble" area and bought, refinanced, or HELOC/MEWd out money in the last four or five years - YOUR FAULT.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2137351

The post is quite a good example of the mind behind the tea party, in its pure form. Before Fox News co-opted the entire movement into whatever the hell they wanted it to be, there was a genuine movement of real people who were angry for a good reason. Post after post, year after year, Denninger rants against the Fed and George Bush, about the criminals whose fraud caused the entire economic debacle, who still today live careless lives of the super rich.

But there's a hysterical quality to it... He predicts a crash in the dollar if we spent a ton of money bailing people out, and the exact opposite happened. The dollar got much stronger while Obama was president, bouncing all the way back from years of sliding value under Bush. This wasn't so much due to either president, but to the rest of the world going into the shitter with us, making our debt unbelievably attractive. The entire would would lend us more money than God for zero precent interest. This is primarily due to the fact that the USA has never defaulted on its debt, making us a safe bet in a scary world. Of course now, moron Republicans are threatening to force us to default, because getting rid of our AAA credit rating and destroying our reputation forever would somehow help. Fucking assholes.
Back to the fresh, hip-hop chairman. He embarks on an endless campaign of gaffes and ridiculous behavior. Hilarious quotes that get passed around come out of his mouth as only a true buffoon could. Before he even starts, the funding for the GOP dries up and goes elsewhere. Karl Rove starts a new organization that can focus completely on telling white people what to be scared of, without any of that pesky 'oversight' or 'transparency' or 'obeying laws'. This is where the money is flowing to now, and every Republican knows it. In the coming years Steele will take the fall for that drop in funding, although it's obvious to anyone capable of basic math that he had nothing to do with it. People stopped giving the GOP money because everyone hates them, and that kinda started before Steele was chairman.
Scandals are manufactured. An expense was paid for an evening at a gentleman's club, and somehow it becomes news. Not only that, but it's somehow the chairman's fault, as if he personally reviews every expense report. Ridiculous and idiotic, but everyone takes it seriously. The right-wing media is on the inside, and has begun their campaign against him. They are the instrument of the leak, they stoke the fire until legitimate (or at least less openly corrupt) news picks it up and runs with it. The CNN and NBC news of the world simply loves drama of any kind, and they do nothing but fan the flames of idiocy.
The reality is that the chairman of the RNC doesn't have much power. No one kisses his ass because he can't vote on anything. Can you name who was chairman of the DNC under Bush? No one can. They aren't important or powerful, they are more worker bees. For the record it was Howard Dean, and he had little influence or power.
While Steele is making a fool of himself, the media is having a multi-year orgasm over a tiny, well-off, extremely white section of the population. The tea party, brewing for years, suddenly becomes the apple of Fox's eye once Obama was elected. They are seen as the obvious savior of the Republican party, and any idiot in a 3-corner hat is given air time.

Fox organizes & promotes rallies that are thinly disguised Obama hate-fests. Any inkling of the original intent, or any hint of the disgusting crimes that created the movement are gone. Replaced with idiotic rhetoric like 'down with taxes' at a time when taxes are the lowest in 40 years. Anger over bailouts is directed at Obama, who most Fox viewers believe signed TARP. And now that a Democrat is in office, conservatives who cheered Cheney when he said 'Reagan proved deficits don't matter' now suddenly care that the country is saddled with debt. And whose fault is it? The new guy!
The ultimate irony of his life, his career, and everything he's done for the last 2 years is that he's the tool of racists, bigots and power mongers. He was hired solely because he's black, and to have a darkie around when they wanted to play the race card. His ultimate failure, manufactured or not, was because he simply wasn't smart enough to successfully weild power. He was too dumb to use the power of his chairmanship to save his own job, and it's no surprise because he was hired because he was black, not smart. He is living proof that competence suffers when factors like race are the most important. He is a walking argument against quotas in spite of himself, and he's too dumb to know it. He is also the opposite of Obama, who succeeded because of competence and skill and not race.

And so we come to his final chapter, except for his book which will no doubt come out next year (in addition to the surprise book he put out during his tenure, a purely idiotic way of violating the rules, making people hate him, and making himself appear unaware of even the most basic rules of his job). Michael, you were a patsy and a stooge. You were hired to run the ship into the reef and you did it gleefully, swinging around on ropes and wooping like an idiot. Of course now you appear surprised to see things end this way, but my guess is you spend a lot of your life being befuddled at what life does to you.

I love soccer, but FIFA and the world cup COMPLETELY SUCKS

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 23:16:00 +0000

I've played soccer since I was 5, and love the sport. Scoring a goal can be a transcendent experience, much better than hitting a grand slam or dunking or really anything similar from another sport. When everything lines up just right and it goes in the back of the net, well there's just no better sport to play. That doesn't necessarily translate to a great sport to watch on TV, and FIFA has a lot of work to do if they want to build a real American audience. I don't really care if the rest of the world likes soccer just as it is - I want it better and here's how:

1. More goals. I don't care what you do, just make it happen. It's ridiculous how often the better team loses or ties. The defense in soccer at that level has all the advantages. Think about how often a possession turns into a goal in soccer. Pretty much never. Makes it damn boring and the score often doesn't match the real performance on the field. They could make the goal bigger, or make it illegal to have more than 8 players on the defensive side of the half, or test out a bunch of ideas and see what happens. For the love of God make more goals happen!

2. Offsides. This is the most boring rule in all of sports. It kills breakaways, is understood by only the most hardcore soccer fans, and makes for boring, lame, shitty to watch goals when it breaks down. Watching teams battle it out by depending on the linesman to get the right call every time is not fun to watch.

3. Fix the fucking ball. Instead of being sell-out whores, why not just use a ball that isn't a piece of shit? Other tournaments have no problem finding a fucking work-able soccer ball, what a shame that they can't.

4. Instant replay. FIFA: Seriously, step into the goddamn previous century and use all those expensive-ass cameras. Instead of letting fuck-ups by referees decide games, why don't you pretend like it's not 1905 anymore and make the right call happen. Inexcusably stupid.

5. Camera work. I usually don't have any complaints about the way other sports are shot, but clearly no one has figured out how to film a soccer game even half-decently. You have to be zoomed in so the dudes fill the frame in order to see all the skill involved, but with no warning the ball could be flying 50+ yards away. It's obvious that you should just stop showing it truly live and build in enough buffer so the camera work zooms in for all the skill work and cuts away at the exact right moment. It would also be nice to see all of the field and how the off-ball players are moving. Maybe make a split screen with a close-up next to a wide angle shot. You've got HD widescreen tvs out there - act like it.

6. The announcers. I'm sorry but the announcers suck and are mostly boring. I know it must be very hard to find anyone who can ID all the players on both teams on sight and who know anything about them, or for that matter have anything to say. Try harder. The NBA finals have some great talent doing the call.

7. Fuck those vuvzelas. I'm sure it's fun for the fans to honk that shit at games. It's clearly fun. It's fun the same way it's fun to walk onto the subway and start acting out scenes from the Waterboy - fun for you, but not for anyone else. The filters don't do shit, it's still annoying as fuck. It drowns out any hope of the players talking, you can't even hear the fucking crowd screaming. It's constant and retarded. Make them 10x quieter or make em take 5x as much air to blow, I don't care. Hell I'd rather the announcers be in a soundproof box than hear that constant beehive drone.

8. Professional fouls & flopping. End that shit with extreme prejudice. As a fan, I don't want to see stupid injuries caused by malicious fouls. I don't want to see every piece of skill punished with an obvious foul, even if the douche who did it gets a yellow card. Players should get thrown out for flopping and that idiotic performance piece, where they act like they are hurt by covering their faces because they don't even know what body part should hurt. If there were more goals, players wouldn't be so willing to risk a card in a desperate attempt to draw a foul and get a shot on goal.

Fix that stuff, and soccer would become much more popular in the US. Who wouldn't like it more?

Tea-baggers are racist-leaning hypocrits who mostly just hate Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Sat, 01 May 2010 18:34:00 +0000

While I agree with many of the complaints of the tea party people, I don’t want to be associated with what they have made themselves into. There’s plenty of polls out there that try to figure out what the tea party people are like:

http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/new-tea-party-poll-they-hate-poor-live

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002529-503544.html

They are basically richer, primarily republican, anti-obama, ¾ of them are self-described conservative, and 89% white. According to this:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002536-503544.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody

88% of them disapprove of Obama. They are pissed they lost an election, and have been convinced that they can blame many of their problems on illegals (gee blaming society’s ills on the outcasts, where have I heard that before?)

As a contrast, here is some coverage of the recent massive protest on wall street, which was completely ignored by the mainstream media (even though many more showed up than at many of the tea party protests that got massive coverage):

http://www.midhudsonnews.com/News/2010/April/30/MarchWallSt-30Apr10.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk37plzE1wA&feature=player_embedded

See all the black people? That is a true cross-section of America, pissed off for the right reasons. I will never associate with an organization that is 89% white. We can argue about whether they are a bunch of racists or not, but the undeniable fact is that there are no black people in the tea parties, and if their motives & ideals were as pure as they like to tell themselves, there would be plenty of other ethnic backgrounds right alongside them.

I don’t think the tea partiers are a bunch of good old Americans who just want a better/smaller government. I think they are a pissy bunch of racist-leaning babies who lost an election and want to tell themselves that Obama invented deficits. Anglo-saxons who are afraid of ‘losing their country to the foreigns’, which I find simply pathetic. Like any white person can claim America is theirs. We are all immigrants, even the native Americans who came across the beiring strait. They obviously don’t care about facts or they would have complained when Bush massively grew the size of the government (hello department of homeland security, 180k employees and a $28B budget). Where were the protests about small government then? Do they care that Bush spied on Americans? Nope. Only the left protested Bush or anything he did. They are hypocrites – they want a big republican government that demands ‘papers, please’ of illegals, but the day a democrat gets elected, it’s back to protesting how big the government is.

They are intellectually bankrupt. They want lower taxes, smaller government, and zero cuts to any social services like medicare. Oh and no deficit. They are willfully ignorant of the impossibility of their demands, because they are primarily just pissed that they lost and the other party won. Bush grew the deficit more than every president combined, but none of them cared then. Cheyney even said ‘reagan proved that deficits don’t matter’. I have no time for people who lie to themselves so they can be righteously angry.

I don’t want to be associated with the left, either. They are 75% as shitty as the conservatives in this country. The left isn’t protesting Obama’s continuation of Bush’s ridiculous policies, or escalating the wars, or the insurance industry hand-out that was the bullshit health care bill. Sure some of us are complaining, but the few pretend-liberal media outlets (NY times, msnbc) ignore and belittle anyone who doesn’t toe the party line. There is only one party in this country, the party that takes bribes and makes up bullshit to pacify the masses. That’s the point the tea partiers would be making, if they were intellectually honest.

Bored by Justice - my time as jury foreman in federal district court

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:01:00 +0000

My time in the jury box

I was surprised to get a jury summons this year, after going to Multnomah county jury duty a few years ago (I didn't have to actually serve then). Turns out it was for the federal district court this time, and they don't care if you served county jury duty lately. I could have gotten out of it by claiming financial hardship since I own my own business, but I've never actually been on a jury and I wanted to see what it was like, and do my part blah blah.

The case, in a nutshell

Basically, a company that sells brakes and parts to truck manufacturers and such are based on the east coast, and their one sales rep for the west coast is based in Seattle. One of his benefits was a company car, which he paid taxes on for his personal miles. It's a rental, so really it's his car during off-work hours. One friday night he gets drunk with some friends, naps on the couch and gets up at 4am to drive home. He is still wasted, and somehow drives up the paved MAX lightrail tracks until it goes into a tunnel, which he follows for over a mile until his car is wedged and he's ordered via bullhorn to get out. They arrest him for DUI and a couple other things, and release him. Total damages were around 60k. He leaves a message for his HR rep at the company on Saturday, and they talk on the phone Monday morning. He tells her he got high-centered on a lightrail track, that no one was hurt, and that he got a DUI.

The local news had a field day, covering it in detail and playing the security cam footage with relish:
http://www.katu.com/news/15801882.html
He failed to mention any of this to the company, obviously hoping they wouldn't find out. To his credit, he immediately sought out alcohol treatment and claimed to be sober a year during the trial. The company discovered the video on their own, and were so pissed about being lied to and embarrassed like that that they fired him in a knee-jerk decision.

It was our job to decide if they were discriminating against a disabled person when they did this, but the legal language truly had its head up its own ass. More on that later.

Jury Selection

We showed up at 8:30 because they wanted us at 9. This is how your government works. Pathetic, and yet sort of necessary since people can't be depended upon to act like adults. Of course I didn't see anyone show up late, so we all wasted a half hour. Next they took us to the courtroom where they picked half of us (12) to go sit in the jury box and get asked questions. The other half sat in the back as reserves should the judge excuse people.

First we got the chance to try to beg out of jury duty, and a couple people tried, complaining that they had business or work to do, etc... The judge didn't let anyone off the hook. Then ee were basically asked if any of the following would affect our ability to render an impartial verdict, only one at a time and tediously slowly:

Knowing an alcoholic
Knowing someone with a DUII (almost everyone raised their hands for both, but I didn't)
Being fired

Then he asked if who had experience with insurance companies, hiring & firing, that sort of thing. Once he was done, each of the attorneys got like 10 minutes to ask questions of people. There was one guy who was a rabbi and had a bachelor's degree, no one else had a degree. Both attorneys focused on him for some reason, and he was dismissed. This was done at the end of the q&a, and each side got to pick 3 jurors to excuse for no stated reason. They each picked 3, so 6 left, and then there were 8. Apparently this is the number for civil trials. We then took our oaths (after earlier swearing to some other oath).

Off we go

Then the plantiff started with their opening argument... no instructions, nothing from the judge about what we should be listening for or the point of law it was our job to decide, just dive right in. The entire trial was an exercise in spoon-fed BS. The openers were tediously long, written for a 5 year-old who had never seen law & order. I guess you have to explain certain facts, but it would be nice to be talked to like an adult.

What I found most surprising is how much irrelevant garbage was forced upon us. Every witness spent between 5 and 15 minutes answering the most ridiculous questions, like what their job is, what their work experience was... and then the other lawyer would get up and ask many of the same opening questions. At one point the plantiff called an expert witness, another lawyer who specializes in 'best practices' for HR departments and labor laws, etc. They spent at least half an hour talking about his credentials, work experience, blah blah all to show what an expert he is. What a waste of time.

Three full days of testimony. Roughly 6 hours/day of sitting in a rather comfortable chair having to pay attention, drinking coffee to stay awake at times. All the time going nuts because I have no idea what I'm supposed to be paying attention to. Does it matter if the company thought he was an alcoholic or just an asshole? Does it matter that they failed to follow best practices? Is an alcoholic disabled? Is it OK for a company to fire someone for off-hours behavior? Not a word on any of this until right before closing arguments.

Closing Arguments

Finally the judge tells us what the hell we're doing there. He says that alcoholism is considered a disability under the ADA, and that it's our job to decide if the firing company believed the plaintiff to be 'significantly limited in the major life activity of caring for himself'. When I heard that, I thought, "what the fuck have I been listening to the last three days? All that babble about alcoholism doesn't have much to do with his ability to care for himself.."

The closing statements were tediously boring, and had little to do with the letter of the law we were supposed to decide. The plaintiff's lawyers were busy trying to convince us that the firing company held deep bigotry towards alcoholics, although they were all drinkers themselves, and even had company events at wineries. The morons could have done something to actually prove it... They never got any other witnesses to admit the company had events at wineries, nor proved with a receipt the plaintiff's claim that he had shared 2 bottles of wine and multiple mixed drinks with his boss at dinner a few days before his incident.

Sit down and shut up

At several points I had questions, and I asked the clerk about it as he was shuffling us in and out of the courtroom. He said I could put my questions on a note and give it to him, and he would give it to the judge, but that I wouldn't get any answers. Finally I was so pissed I did write some questions down. Here they are:

1. Is there proof (like a receipt) of how much alcohol the guy and his boss had?
2. Can anyone confirm that company events had lots of alcohol?
3. What were the actual damages? All we ever heard were the preliminary estimates.

I can't remember the other 2. It doesn't matter, because the judge got the questions, and they had a sidebar, where they decided do ignore the questions. The judge said the lawyers could address them in their closing arguments, but they didn't do jack shit.

The mushroom jury

This is how our shitty system of justice works. The play is carefully scripted, all testimony was just a repeat of depositions taken more than 18 months prior. Not one question was asked that hadn't been asked long ago. All arguments and evidence had been pre-screened by the system to decide if we were allowed to know those facts or not. Any questions we had were fucking ignored, and resented. The point of law we were forced to decide on was so narrow that we had no choice but to find for the defendant. There was absolutely no way we could punish this company, even though they blatantly lied to us and fired him without giving him his due course, without asking him any questions, or ever even talking to him again after the initial phone call days before he was fired.

In order to find for the plaintiff, we had to say yes to all 3 of these:

1. the firing company believed him to be substantially limited in the major life activity of caring for himself. (note, not a word about alcoholism, although every word in the trial was about it).
2. The guy who was fired was qualified to do his job.
3. The company's beliefs about him (seeing him as unable to care for himself) was a motivating factor in firing him.

The legal system sickens me. It's amazing that any justice is ever done. It's a sign of the ultimate self-destruction of our society that the asshole lawyers make hundreds of dollars an hour for wasting my precious fucking time. Their arguments were transparent and insulting, many of their questions were nothing more than fancy-lawyer-trick-word-parsing, and their powerpoint slides were insulting. The entire trial shouldn't have taken a full day if there was any sense in our system.

Deliberations begin

Finally, we could start talking about the case. It was a huge pain in the ass to have only one thing in common with these 7 other people, and not be able to talk about it for 3 days. It wasn't until this point that we decided on a foreman. Only myself and one other guy wanted to do it, so we did the ol' rock-paper-scissors. I figured he would go with rock because most guys do that, and won with scissors.

Then followed 6 hours of discussion, much of which had nothing to do with the letter of the law we were given to decide. People were spouting off about how this guy deserves nothing because he screwed up in the first place, and how the company was wrong too, and both had lied to us... it was clear that several jurors had made up their minds before the trial even began. Hell one guy was loudly talking to me while the lawyers were giving the judge their list of jurors to excuse that he though the trial was stupid and would be an obvious decision. Amazingly, he made it into the jury.

Some jurors were dead-set on giving the guy nothing. They thought he deserved what he got and worse, and a number of them called him rich for making 80k/year. I didn't mention that 1) that doesn't make him rich and 2) I make twice that. Fact is no one who makes more than about 60k probably EVER serves in a jury, and fuck those assholes. It's you jackasses who are so concerned with your own precious bullshit that you can't take time out of your lives to contribute to the overall justice in our society. It's left only to those who don't think it's so bad making $40/day. That's a third my hourly rate. I had to take a number of PTO days to serve. But I digress.

Other jurors though the company deserved to be punished, but every one of us boggled to look at the language of the verdict form. We had to pick yes or no to 3 very specific questions, which might as well have been for an entirely different trial. The plaintiff spent the trial trying to convince us that the company who fired him was filled with bigots, while the defense was busy pretending it never even OCCURRED to them that this guy who got a DUI (and sent them his recovery plan and went to an alcoholism treatment center and whose doctor called them) was an alcoholic. Even their lawyer and HR head kept up the lies. What a bunch of assholes. They really think people are stupid.

I think we could have been in deliberations for days. We had intractable people on both sides, but I tried to keep people from taking hard positions. Most of us either believed or could be convinced that the company acted hastily, firing him at least in part for being an alcoholic. But at no time did anyone even try to show how that had anything to do with the 'major life activity of caring for himself'. We were saved from possibly days of pointless argument when I noticed the last sentence in one of the jury instructions. It basically said that if the company would have fired him anyway without any alcoholism-related bigotry, then we should find for the defense. We could all agree on that, but then we had to go back to the stupid verdict form. It forced us to say yes or no to the 1st question, and if that was a yes, then to proceed to question 2... Problem was that it was fully possible for the company to believe he was an alcoholic and still have plenty of good reasons for firing him. It took us another hour just to figure out how to fill in the stupid verdict form, since it didn't match up with the line in the instructions that we could all agree on.

Final thoughts

Be afraid. It doesn't matter what you do, there is a jackass somewhere who can find some stupid fine print to sue you on.
50 wrongs made a right. I think justice was done, in spite of the incompetence of both sides' lawyers, the complete bullshit ignorance they forced on the jury, the pathetic lack of responsiveness to our questions, and the constant lies and boring bullshit in the trial. No fucking way should the ADA be used to protect people who are dumbass drinkers. Take responsibility for your fucking life.
Lawyers made our system, they are the judges and they make the rules. They make themselves necessary by filling the law with the piddly bullshit they are trained to deal with. Exactly the same as all the CPAs who bribe congress into inflating the tax code to ridiculous complexity so they can have a job filing tax returns. Fuck all you assholes, you are leeches on the backs of this country. Get a real job.
Thank god I don't live in another country, where the justice system is even MORE fucked.

Confounding Factors for Technical Analysis

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 07:22:00 +0000

One thing I've been struck by technical analysis in stock trading is the attempt to distill something as complex as the combined actions of millions of market participants into easy to handle formulas and mathematical models. This is the history of economics played out again - trying to find 'the right formula' that will explain it all. I think Nassim Taleb does a wonderful job of destroying the idea that there's a single economist on the planet who can forecast out more than a few years, or past the next unexpected event.

I understand that at its best, TA is a way to generate probability-based bets, under the assumption that you'll be right just enough more than you're wrong and make money. I think it's hard to avoid the trap of getting overly confident in these signals, the spike in the SP500 a few days ago is a pretty ringing example.

One of the most popular forms of analysis I've found, especially lately, is to compare the market to past bear markets, and try judge which past pattern it will fit. Tempting, for sure, but isn't it fundamentally flawed? To some degree people haven't changed much in 100 years, but there are many things that have changed that affect the way markets behave. It's these confounding factors I'd like to discuss.

1. One major difference is the technical knowledge of market participants. Almost everyone who invests money now has at least a rudimentary understanding of TA concepts, moving averages, fibbo retracements, etc. Certainly everyone near a trading desk is well aware of even more complicated stuff like Elliot waves and such. I think this has to have an affect on the way the market behaves... to me it seems to move more violently after a technical indicator is breached, and seems to waver a lot when near major support/resistance levels. Lots of people can get fooled when a more obvious technical indicator is wrong, like the spike in the SP500 last Wednesday.

2. The prevalence of automated trading platforms, trailing stops, and other trading tools. Any shmoe can get a think or swim account and have access to complex trades that weren't possible not too long ago, and hedge funds/brokers have computer-driven trading algorithms that make their own trading decisions. We've seen huge moves in the last 30 or even 10 minutes of the trading day thanks to all those computer traders moving in unison.

3. Which brings me to education - most traders (and economists for that matter) share a disturbing groupthink pattern. They are all educated the same way, with the same theories, and as a result tend to reach the same conclusions at the same time. This, I think, is responsible for a good % of the sickening volatility the market has had since summer 07.

4. The rise of mutual funds driving the market. Not too long ago, a much larger % of the market was directly controlled by individual investors. Now their presence is almost nothing more than margin of error. The entire market is driven by a tiny group of fund managers controlling shitloads of dough, and who reflect points 2 & 3.

5. Speed of info transmission. Never in our history has information traveled so fast. Rumors spawned via crackberry move markets in seconds and in major ways. I think this also contributes to volatility, as there is massive mental pressure to decide which way to bet within seconds of some new piece of news, and/or people are much more likely to follow a blip up or down if it happens at the right time.

6. The global pool of wealth. There's just shitloads of money out there that needs investing. Our tax policies don't exactly punish investors and reward entrepreneurs, so there's little reason to take one's money anywhere else than the markets. Why sweat and work starting a business when you can kick back and earn shitloads through tax-free munis? Add to that the US-fueled kings, princes and Chinese rulers who are sitting on metric ASSTONS of us$, who couldn't give a fuck about their dying and ignorant people, and would rather have even more money. If these unbelievable fucktards were to invest in their shitty states, they wouldn't have had so much to invest, which was one of the major underlying causes of the housing bubble. No matter how many shitty CDOs Godlman came up with, there was an unending line of folks wanting to buy more. That's called demand.

7. The corporatization of America. There used to be many independent newspapers in NY, now there are none of any note. Instead of a company started by a newsman and ran for journalism, all major news & media outlets are now nothing more than profit centers for massive trans-global corporations, who couldn't give a fuck what country they started out in. Even Google gets 60% of its revenues overseas, and most of HP's workforce isn't in America. This article has some great examples of how this is affecting the information that most people use to make their investing decisions:
http://www.minyanville.com/articles/inde....

Not to get too tinfoiled, but I don't believe there is any other rational way to view things. Media outlets who are subsidiaries of a company will serve that company's interests first. Duh.

8. The endless corruption at the highest levels. Justice seems to work like a pendulum, and we're about as far down the shitty side as I think it's possible to get without the common folk rising up in violent revolt (which may still happen). Bernanke issuing a surprise rate cut the morning before options expiration, the endless bullshit Karl has been pointing out for years... This probably affects the market more than anything else. Not only is it impossible to know where and how much the corruption is having an effect, but now all market participants are well aware of it. So people now trade like the market is rigged, which is only going to bring on more unforeseen consequences (at the least, more volatility and a higher likelihood of people saying 'fuck this' and buying t-bills).

9. The act of observing affects the observed. Few things are more dangerous than trying to apply quantum physics to the real world, but this is a definite human phenomenon. In practical terms, to me it seems like a game of paper/rock/scissors. Everyone is expecting a bad GDP report so the market tanks, and it comes out and it's bad, but not as bad as it could be, so the market rallies. The next time people are expecting this, and for some reason the market tanks instead in the same situation.

I personally believe there are enough factors that are unique in the history of our markets that we will find it behaving in ways that don't fit any historical pattern. I fully expect that in 5 years, when someone posts those charts of bear markets against this one, that it won't look like the others. If only I could figure out how, I'd be out making cash instead of posting on the internets.

We're not allowed to be pissed that we were lied to?

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:10:00 +0000

This is a response to the following post by a respected author/blogger at Clusterfuck Nation.
In short he makes a few points:

It's a meme that people believe we were lied to about the run up to the Iraq war, and anger over it is unjustified.
That attacking Iraq was a legitimate response to 9/11, and simply going after Al-Queda in Afganistan wasn't enough, because Afgans aren't Arabs.
Something had to be done as a response to the litany of terrorist attacks on American targets over the years
The UN weapons inspectors' findings were inconclusive, and Saddam might have had WMDs someplace, and the only way to know was to invade and look around ourselves.
The true objectives of the action were... to punish an Arab nation for 9/11, to establish a military presence between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and to "secure" a large reserve of oil (not to steal it, but to assure access to buying it).
By blaming lying leaders instead of looking at our own culpability, we tell ourselves a pretty story so we don't have to face the energy or other crises.

. I agree that the responsibility for the clusterfuck that is America can be laid at only one doorstep – the lazy, stupid, gullible American people.

However, your post that somehow the rage people feel over the lies that dragged this country into the war is somehow invalid disregards the facts of the matter. The Iraq war is the only war in history to be protested before it started. Millions of people demanded that we not attack a sovereign nation that has never attacked us, and were ignored. From day one, the war was treated as a story to sell, and not because GW thought it was the right thing to do.

The argument that somehow the bush administration was surprised by the outcome of the war is fallacious. Cheyney knew exactly what would happen in 94:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I

We purposefully bombed the shit out of the infrastructure so Bush’s friends could rip off America by pretending to rebuild it. They still don’t have power more than a few hours/day, and Saddam restored it in 45 days after the first gulf war. This is just another treasonous war crime that demands impeachment.

You certainly can’t use any argument that involves the success (or lack thereof) of the war in Afghanistan, since Rumsfeld and the rest were targeting Iraq from day 1.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/24/freedomofinformation.september11

For all Bush knew, they would capture and kill UBL in a matter of months, but still from the first day they were completely focused on selling a war in Iraq. They didn’t know they would be such complete failures at bringing Al-Queda to justice (although the Bushes had all the Bin Laden family flown out of the US in the days after 9/11, so they clearly were unwilling to go after UBL through his rich-ass high level Saudi family). In short, they didn’t know they would need Iraq to provide for the emotional demand for revenge that Iraq so conveniently provided for.

Any argument involving WMDs as a case for war is fallacious. As is any argument involving the bad things SH did to his own people (like the gassings which occurred in the 80s). There are countless examples around the world of bad dictators doing bad things to their own people who are CONFIRMED to have nukes or nuke material, and we don’t go after them. Obviously that was nothing more than a cover. SH has never once attacked America and it’s idiotic to suggest that there was any legitimate fear that he would do so. That was nothing more than fear-mongering, and pathetically transparent.

Invariably on the world stage, when something bad is done, you can find out who and why by following the money. The endless stream of money flowing out of the US and in to the hands of Haliburtion and many others who have completely failed to provide even the most basic services in Iraq tells the entire story. Iraq was nothing more than a convenient way to rob America, just like the housing bubble, the tech bubble, and the state of our health care system.

The inevitable laws of human nature dictate that power corrupts. As our business and health care systems grew less and less regulated, clever people found new ways to rip off America. Our campaign system ensures that the richest people and corporations decide who we get to vote for, that is until the massive groundswell of actual people demanded that Obama be president. Connecting the power > money > corruption dots is pretty easy.

Yes all wars involve plenty of lies. But let’s not forget we haven’t declared war on Iraq, and we won’t. The authorization was yet another back-room pressure-filled bullshit lie that was sold to the congress as a ‘leverage tool’ to bargain with SH, and that we’d never actually attack them. And of course the spun, twisted or outright fabricated ‘intelligence’ that went along with it. I’ve read a bunch of Tom Clancy novels about the CIA, and the one thing they never do is draw conclusions without enough evidence. Bush said ‘make the case for Iraq’ and Tenet complied.

Sure 9/11 was bad. It was a devastating attack, and people demanded revenge. We should be able to expect more from our leaders, we should be able to expect them to vote their conscience and not blow with the wind – in short to do the right thing. Everything you blame Americans for is correct. We as a country failed to expect anything more from our leaders than cynical fear-mongering and manipulation.

Also, the idea that attacking Iraq was a good idea in that it would somehow teach the terrorists a lesson, is silly. The truth is the Iraq war has been nothing more than the best recruiting poster ever for terrorists. We disbanded their army, destroyed their infrastructure, and gave plenty of young angry men no other option. Al-Queda never existed in Iraq before, and now they are firmly entrenched.

If our government were interested in reducing, rather than aggravating, terrorism, they would address the cause of it. Our 30B/year support for Israel is one of the cornerstones of hatred for America, and let’s not forget our cia-led coup of Iran last century, and the countless other dirty acts that went unreported as we abused our power to rob and fuck over 3^rd world countries.

The fact is that totalitarian leader types like Bush need a big scary enemy, and tragically there aren’t any good ones left. China owns our ass so we can’t go pissing them off, and we prefer targets that can’t defend themselves (that’s why we never hear about invading North Korea). It’s so 1984 that it’s funny. In the 20^th it was the red scare, a completely trumped up bullshit reason to spend our country into bankruptcy, again following the money to the defense industry. It is in Bush’s interests to increase terrorism and not decrease it, which is exactly what they’ve done.

The only response that would have scared the terrorists would have been to go after Bin Laden’s entire family and kill/round em up, and use them against him. To hunt and catch him instead of fucking around and hardly trying. There are countless sociological studies that say the only true deterrent to a crime is the likelihood of getting caught – this is why there are no kidnap/ransom demands anymore. No one gets away with it, so no one tries. Any attempt to curb bad behavior that doesn’t either attack the cause of the behavior (like the US fucking over other counties) or increases the likelihood of getting caught is bullshit.

And let’s not forget that it’s a free country, and unless we change that there is nothing we can do to guarantee no more attacks. It’s only a matter of time until the next one. We should be more like the British. When their subway was bombed (granted a much smaller scale attack than 9/11), they went right about their business. Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.

The truth about 9/11 was it was nothing more than cover for the Bush administration to do what it already wanted to do. To force the passage of the patriot act and gain more power for himself. To start an endless, undeclared war to rob this country and create a 1984-esque ready-made excuse for him to do whatever he wanted – spy on Americans, record every bit of traffic on the Internet, and twist the government and its offices (like say prosecutors) to do his partisan bidding.

I’ve never heard a convincing argument that in any way justifies what Bush did in Iraq. It was nothing more than yet another way to rob this country while pushing his other agendas, and that’s why people like me feel such rage over it.

The complete lack of critical thought in American life

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Sat, 31 May 2008 18:04:00 +0000

You know what I can’t believe? That people can be suckered into believing any kind of BS just by slapping together an email and hitting send. You know who’s responsible for the current state of our country? For

Our massive deficit (60+ trillion compared to 13 trillion gdp)
Our stupid, pointless, self-destructive war
The redistribution of untold wealth from the poor to the rich
Systemic government corruption
An election system that requires many millions of dollars to get elected
Our decades of ignoring the looming energy crisis
Our moronic neglect of our own environment
And let’s not forget the erosion of our most basic rights

The same rights you were all brought up to believe represent the highest ideals a country could aspire to, the rights great men & women died to preserve. And you shit on their memory but allowing ‘patriot’ acts to make it ok to spy on Americans without a court order, to hold prisoners without a trial or lawyer, and let’s not forget the pride and joy of the Bush wars, torture! All of these problems can be laid at the feet of you, the American public. It’s your damn fault.

You can’t be bothered to think for yourself. You get your news from whatever’s on TV and accept it as Truth, in spite of non-stop examples of manipulation, lies, and spin. You have access to the single most democratizing force in the world, the Internet, but do you use google news to read articles on the same topic from (up to) hundreds of other sources? Do you take 30 seconds to look up ridiculous claims you get in email, or do you just think to yourself ‘damn that Clinton” and hit forward?

Let me pause from my rant to spend 30 seconds destroying this piece of garbage email.

Claim 1: Oliver North, admitted traitor and one of the men directly responsible for selling arms to Iran (which I’m sure you all agree was a brilliant idea), telling Al Gore that we should kill Bin Laden. A quick Google of ‘video al gore north bin laden’ gives me this:

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/north.asp

“The terrorist North mentioned in his testimony was not Osama bin Laden, however. To the extent that bin Laden was known to the western world in 1987, it was not as a "terrorist" but as one of the U.S.-backed "freedom fighters" participating in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden's hatred of the U.S. and conversion to "terrorist" status is not believed to have come about until the Gulf War of 1990-91, when he was outspokenly critical of Saudi Arabian dependence upon the U.S. military and denounced U.S. support of a "corrupt, materialist, and irreligious" Saudi monarchy. (The Saudi Arabian government stripped bin Laden of his citizenship in 1994 for his funding of militant fundamentalist Islamic groups.)

Oliver North did not testify about or mention the name Osama bin Laden during the Iran-Contra hearings. He claimed that threats against his life had been made by terrorist Abu Nidal,”

Next claim: Clinton insisted Mohamed Atta be released from prison so he could lead 9/11. Another stupid lie. One glance at Atta’s wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Atta

“Initially, Mohamed Atta's identity was confused with that of a native Jordanian, Mahmoud Mahmoud Atta, who bombed a bus in 1986 on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, killing one and severely injuring three. Mahmoud Mahmoud Atta, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was subsequently deported from Venezuela to the United States, extradited to Israel, tried and sentenced to life in prison. The Israeli Supreme Court later overturned his extradition and set him free;”

It sure is easy to tell truth from lies with the slightest bit of effort. And how many of you bothered? Who will bother to think for themselves the next time some crazy claim is made without evidence?

Some friendly email tips:

If the content is true, it will have a link to a verifiable source. If there is no link, either look it up or delete it.
For all other questions, see rule #1.

This country stands on a precipice. Extraordinary action must be taken right now just to preserve our economy. We must invest huge sums of money in other forms of energy or face the destruction of our way of life. We have to force our government to stop spending $500B a year more than it makes in taxes, and we have to demand the criminals responsible for the housing swindle be prosecuted. Our leaders are replaying the great depression step by step, only this time we have massive inflation and a national debt equivalent to someone making $100,000 a year owing half a million in debt. We have allowed our leaders to put us in the position where we NEED foreign governments to buy 2 BILLION dollars a DAY in our debt just so we can pay the light bill. I’d say that’s a much bigger national security issue than some dirt farmers squatting around a fire in the middle east.

Millions of people are starving to death from the price of food’s meteoric inflation (and fuel somewhat, which makes everything more expensive). Our Fed directly contributed to this by giving investment banks an extra $250B in slosh to go spend on what is always the last bull market before a global collapse, commodities. Just like any bubble, tons of speculative cash piles in on corn, wheat, rice, etc and drives up the price, making money for the speculators and starving out the poor. And our government has the balls to lie to us and say inflation is low. 2% inflation? A barrel of oil was $60 a year ago.

The combination of stupid or speculative home buyers, dishonest mortgage brokers giving loans to anyone and then packaging them up and selling them off to unsuspecting investors (like your retirement fund), a complete lack of policing by our government, and the collusion of ratings agencies who rated these garbage loans AAA are all responsible for the current housing crisis. I’ve not seen a single indictment on any of them, and all our reps talk about is how to stop house prices from declining. Even though it’s impossible for the price of an asset to grow faster than the incomes of the people buying it over a long period of time, and even though it’s a bubble that no one can stop from bursting. The only way the government can make things worse is to try to bail everyone out and just pile it on our already staggering debt, which is exactly what they’re doing.

Our currency is being destroyed. Investors are (by the day) less interested in buying T bills. Thanks to compound interest, even a slight rise in the cost of government debt has a huge effect on how much we owe. China & India have actual economic growth, and we can’t force investors to buy our debt when they can make more money investing elsewhere. It is no longer a time when you can afford to be ignorant of our economic situation.

In a few years, when your house is worth another 10-20% less than it is right now, when you’re unable to declare bankruptcy or renegotiate your mortgage thanks to Bush’s bankruptcy ‘reform’, as the country sinks further into the worst recession any of you have lived through, think back to this time. And slap yourself silly for being to goddamn lazy to do anything about it when you had the chance.

I don’t care what your politics are, this is a moral and economic issue. We must demand our government stop selling off tomorrow for an easier today. We must harass our representatives daily because that’s what gets results.

Here is the original email without the pictures, complete with huge font:

Do you Remember 1987 ?

Thought you might be interested in this forgotten bit of information.......
It was 1987! At a lecture the other day they were playing an old news video of Lt.Col. Oliver North testifying at the Iran-Contra hearings during the Reagan Administration.

There was Ollie in front of God and country getting the third degree, but wha t he said was stunning!

He was being drilled by a senator; 'Did you not recently spend close to $60,000 for a home security system?'

Ollie replied, 'Yes, I did, Sir.'

The senator continued, trying to get a laugh out of the audience, 'Isn't that just a little excessive?'

'No, sir,' continued Ollie.

'No? And why not?' the senator asked.

'Because the lives of my family and I were threatened, sir.'

'Threatened? By whom?' the senator questioned.

'By a terrorist, sir' Ollie answered.

'Terrorist? What terrorist could possibly scare you that much?'

'His name is Osama bin Laden, sir' Ollie replied.

At this point the senator tried to repeat the name, but couldn't pronounce it, which most people back then probably couldn't. A couple of people laughed at the attempt. Then the senator continued. Why are you so afraid of this man?' the senator asked.

'Because, sir, he is the most evil person alive tha t I know of', Ollie answered.

'And what do you recommend we do about him?' asked the senator.

'Well, sir, if it was up to me, I would recommend that an assassin team be formed to eliminate him and his men from the face of the earth.'

The senator disagreed with this approach, and that was all that was shown of the clip.

By the way, that senator was Al Gore!

Also:

Terrorist pilot Mohammad Atta blew up a bus in Israel in 1986. The Israelis captured, tried and imprisoned him. As part of the Oslo agreement with the Palestinians in 1993, Israel had to agree to release so-called 'political prisoners.'

However, the Israelis would not release any with blood on their hands, The American President at the time, Bill Clinton, and his Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, 'insisted' that all prisoners be released.

Thus Mohammad Atta was freed and eventually thanked us by flying an airplane into Tower One of the World Trade Center .. This was reported by many of the American TV networks at the time that the terrorists were first identified.
It was censored in the US from all later reports.

If you agree that the American public should be made aware of this fact, pass this on.

Do Not Break - it is 6 years strong

This is why I always say I love YOU....

The truth about our burgening economic collapse

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:23:00 +0000

The Chinese have a curse: ‘may you live in interesting times’. Humans seem very bad at recognizing historic events at the time, only seeing it in retrospect. If you don't already know, let me tell you: we are living in interesting times. Here's a quick hit list of problems we get to live through:

The government lies to us about inflation. The CPI (headline inflation) doesn't include housing, energy or food. That's why they can claim low inflation when the cost of living (e.g. gas prices doubling in 6 years) is soaring. Inflation eats savings and destroys purchasing power – it’s the hidden tax.
http://www.shadowstats.com/article/56
The media is now so consolidated that everything you see on network or cable news has been approved by a tiny group of mega-corporations. It has and will continue to fail its crucial job in a democratic state.
Let’s be honest. The government lies to cover its own ass. You can’t sit back and take everything they say like gospel.
By cutting interest rates to a level below the inflation rate, the Fed spurs more inflation and allows investment banks to make money out of thin air.
http://moneynews.newsmax.com/money/archives/articles/2007/9/24/173009.cfm
http://www.dailyfx.com/story/topheadline/Fed_Cuts_Rates_by_75bp__1205864962139.html
http://elainemeinelsupkis.typepad.com/money_matters/2008/04/httpwwwohwycomh.html
The dollar is also destroyed by these artificially low rates, going from being worth $.90 to $.72 in less than 2 years. Luckily it only makes imports more expensive, it’s a good thing we don’t buy any of those! You can watch the horror show unfold yourself:
http://quotes.ino.com/chart/?s=NYBOT_DX&v=d12
We are, right now, in a recession. The only question is whether it turns into a full-on depression.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aZi6pAy35zW4&refer=home (note the date on the article – 12/3/07) the recession is old news.
This is a housing-led recession, as unavoidable as all the other recessions that have followed housing downturns in America. How far do house prices have to fall? This graph isn’t comforting:
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/uploaded_images/schiller-house-index-746493.png
By allowing Enron-style off-balance sheet BS and other games, our government has completely failed in their role as cops. There is no way for an investor to tell if Citibank or any other publically traded bank is even solvent. That’s why every quarter banks write off more and more – there is no transparency.
Oil is pegged to the dollar. When the dollar falls, oil costs more. The price of oil in gold hasn’t changed in 6 years. The soaring prices of both are signs of inflation and a falling dollar.
Global demand is ramping up. Usually in a recession demand drops and so do prices. Oil and other commodities are traded on a global market, and our demand for them is ever-shrinking compared with India, China and others. The prices for food & oil will not be getting cheaper just because we’re in a recession. Welcome to stagflation.
Trillions of dollars of ‘wealth’ was created during the housing bubble, and it’s being destroyed now. Those responsible for this whole mess have siphoned off hundreds of billions through fees, moving the money offshore to tax havens and leaving investors holding the bag. By bundling mortgages and selling them off, the loan writers had no incentive to make good loans, the only incentive was to make as many as possible. The ratings agencies all shared in the lies, by rating the garbage AAA, or just as safe as government bonds, which have never defaulted.
The US savings rate is now negative for the first time since 1933.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11098797/
Our government is $9 trillion in debt and piling on billions every month.
We are permanently quagmired in Iraq. It will be a drain on our lives & money for decades at best.
Governments print tons of paper to pay off wars when they’re over. Read up on the 70’s and good ol’ stagflation if you want to see into the future.
Americans are fat, dumb and lazy. They have been taught they are entitled to big screen tvs and McMansions, regardless of little details like being able to pay for it. Personal debt is skyrocketing in this country, as people roll their credit cards into home equity loans then run them up again.
Our democracy is dominated by extremists. Only 40% even voted last election. As long as the majority of Americans are apathetic about a system that depends on participation, corruption and crime will run rampant. If more people voted, the small & vocal minorities wouldn’t wield so much influence.
Most people have no clue what is happening in our country or economy, or why.

So what can be done? How about acting like there’s some democracy in this country?

Campaign finance is the root of all evil. As long as it costs tens of millions to get elected, the people with the most money to donate will make all the decisions for our government. Only a fool would expect otherwise.
Every one of the post-depression safeguards have been removed from our financial system. Transparency, reserve requirements and market manipulation rules are either gone or not enforced.
Above all else, make your opinions known to your reps. Don’t wait for an election, call/write/visit them and raise some hell.
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
By being personally involved in a government bailout of a non-bank, Bush has violated the constitution (is that even news anymore?). He must be impeached
http://financialpetition.org/petition-impeach.shtml
Educate yourself. Here are some of the sites I follow:

If you have any money in the stock market, please read this:
http://ticker-classics.denninger.net/2008/03/long-term-investment-timing-signal-that.html
It’s the only investment advice you need, if you are long-term. Turns out it’s pretty easy to spot bear & bull markets, in spite of all cnbc would have you believe (hint: it’s a bear market).

Now I’m not a total gloomy gus. Here’s what we have going for us:

The Internet is free, and is now too big to be regulated. All attempts to control it have failed (except in China). You can pick any news topic you want, go to news.google.com and see hundreds of articles on it from around the world. The lies and convenient omissions of big media are constantly being exposed for anyone who cares to look – like http://www.crooksandliars.com/
Technology creates wealth by increasing efficiency, and no matter what happens to our ethereal paper money, real stuff will keep being made and sold. Times will be tough but humans are resilient when pressed.
Congress does what they’re told. Right now they’re doing the bidding of their campaign donors. With enough public outcry, we can count on these spineless people to do what we demand. The only way it will happen will be if they are flooded with calls, emails and letters.

If you disagree with anything I say, please feel free to write me and discuss.

Bush lied us into the war - is this even news anymore

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 01:03:00 +0000

What is that term reserved for megalomaniacal fundamentalist heads of state who are impervious to rational debate or facts? What about for leaders who, with full and complete knowledge, tell absolute lies to their country to trick them into laying waste to a sovereign country that has *never* attacked them, and implements long-term occupation? Call him a greedy psycho, call him a war criminal, call him the worst president we've ever had - we just call him dubya.

Have the republicans so completely taken over every form of media that it’s not even news that everything Bush said to get us to go to war against a pathetic country full of people who felt nothing about America and were more concerned with things like power, food and water, only to completely decimate their infrastructure to ‘take out’ a leader we installed decades ago, was a complete lie and he knew it? We had fucking impeachment hearings over a goddamn blowjob, but apparently the Democrats are so spineless that they will let this ridiculous fool of a president finish off his term like he isn’t the biggest disgrace to America since slavery.

Where is the fucking outrage!? Why the fuck aren’t people demanding his impeachment from every direction? Why is this country so full of fucking thoughtless mewing sheep that they will allow their government to blow hundreds of billions of dollars fattening up Haliburton under the pretense of ‘rebuilding’ a country that we destroyed in the first place? Get the fuck out of my country you morons, you’ve had it too good for too fucking long and it’s turned you, the American people, into simpering fools.

Blogs: Curmudgeonly old coots in training

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 09:59:00 +0000

Now maybe it's just my type of blog that this applies to, but it occurs to me that I'm doing pretty much the equivalent of sitting on the front porch with a lemonade in one hand and a cane in the other, glaring at the young whipper-snappers running around like idiots and bitching about the way things used to be, in that unreachable realm of idealized history.

I have a hard time arguing against the comparison; I am after all rather a curmudgeon, and there’s no end to the list of crap that pisses me off. And it’s hard to argue with a domain name like mine. And I regularly go off ranting to my dogs about dubya or the media or the price of doggie treats… so given that, is this my destiny? To be old as hell dictating to my pc a new rant while auto-driving down to the dealer to ask why the auto-drive works just like cruise control? Naaahhh….

And another thing! What’s with these shit-tastic Japanimation fads? I can’t turn around without seeing some sexually indeterminate, large headed, alien-eyed cartoon in every other video game, cartoon show or movie. Why do American morons feel the need to obsess over a culture as fucked up as Japan’s? They sell girls’ panties in vending machines there ffs. Give me an episode of that epileptic seizure inducing cartoon over that anime shit anytime.

Washington, where voting along party lines trumps your conscience!

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 10:39:00 +0000

American politcs has gone completely down the drain ever since the entire country (check that, the media) got obsessed with Cliton getting a bj and fibbing about it. Yeah it was a stinkhole before, but it somehow manages to reach new lows. Let's look at the recent news:

Morons in the senate and white house look at some video and decide Terry Schiavo is alive because she twitched, and get mad when the rule of law prevents them from deciding her fate for nothing more than political pandering. Tom Delay himself allowed a family member to die by removing a feeding tube, yet I don't remember anyone calling him a murderer.
Bush decides to nominate three rediculously right-wing judges (well, two judges and an administrative assistant) for the supreme court, simply because he can. Everyone knows that no republican would dare vote their conscience against him, no matter how much of an anti-abortion nut they are.
Carl Rove manages to convince a bunch of idiots that John Kerry, a certified war *hero*, somehow wasn't because some guys who once saw a boat said so. And let's not forget how the media played up the story without the slightest background checking. Did you see any special reports about how GW was a cowardly fuck? Yeah me neither. Good thing he's in charge of a war, to him it's a video game.

Oh wait, I was ranting about voting your conscience. One of the coolest things I remember as a kid was hearing some adult friend of the family talk about how elected officals are elected to vote their conscience, and not follow public opinion or anything else. Even if the entire country is roiled in a fury over flag burning, we can count on our senators to vote against a ban because it's wrong. Well, that guy was either really old or naive.

It's all part of a brilliant plan - turn politics into a disgusting bs-fest and sicken most of the country. Lie and pretend to love the baby jesus, decry science, evolution and abortion and wrap yourself in the flag to pander to the most manipulable sector of the population, white middle class christian families. Those without a rabid religious ferver forcing them to vote abstain out of disgust, and the sheep turn out in droves to vote in the liar of the week.

And now, thanks to idiots who care more about whether gays can marry (someone for the love of god explain that to me) and occupying a country that has never once attacked America than little things like health care and the economy, we're stuck with someone so full of shit, so completely sold on his own lie, that a billionare president actually goes to Texas to clear brush off his ranch just to prove how much of his own bullshit he's swallowed.

George Orwell is laughing his ass off

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:50:00 +0000

What the fuck, America? Are you all such a bunch of simpering pussies that you would trade all the liberties bought in blood for the appearance of security from terrorists, child pornogrophers, communists or whatever politically created fear of the week the asswipes in our government & media want you to run screaming from this week? I'm fucking sick to death of seeing rights trampled in the 'save the children' cause of the week.

You know what the problem is? There hasn't been a war on American soil in way too long. Everyone has turned into a giant wuss, scared of their own shadow. Why is it that America leads the world in homicides? Plenty of other countries allow guns, hell every Canadian and his dog has a gun but they aren't shooting each other. Britain gets their subways bombed and what do they do? They thumb their noses at the fuckwads whose only goal is to create fear, and go right about their business. No closed subways for days on end. No constant drumbeat of fear and pathos over the dead. There's a big ass difference between mouring the dead and hyping the fuck out of it for 24 hour news ratings. Other countries, countries that can point out Bulgaria on a map and have seen a war or two, aren't chock-full of fear-driven morons.

Listen to this bullshit:

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.
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The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google.

MSN, Yahoo, Ask - you are all pussies. Thank god someone has some fucking balls left to stand up to this retarded shit or we'd never even *hear* about it. Just another illusion of privacy, eroded for the appearance of security.

I wouldn't let Dubya near my liquor cabinet, why would I trust him with his self-appointed ability to decide when to obey the constitution?

Merry Christmas Bender!

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 05:29:00 +0000

Yes, nothing says it's Christmas quite like getting wasted off your ass and playing video games all night. I picked up a few more xbox 360 games in the xmas haul this year, and have been doing little else lately. I beat Call of Duty 2 in 2 days, with breaks for turkey and pie. Who says America has lost the true spirit of Christmas?

Xbox 360 Reviewed
Overall, I'd say Microsoft did a damn good job on their 2nd xbox. The DRM crap is as retarded as one would expect, you can only copy music to the hard drive if it's on an audio cd (although burned audio cds work fine, negating any type of copy protection they were attempting). It's just silly to think you can keep people from copying music or anything else. Remember mix tapes? Did you hear of any teenagers getting sued by the RIAA for making mix tapes in the 80's? It's a real shame to see such a craptacular implementation of a 'media center' like the 360 has. It's pathetic. My modified xbox 1 is 10 times anything the 360 could ever be. If you want to be able to play movies, images, music, whatever from your pc, fuck the 360. Buy a modified xbox and play anything you want, xvids, vcds, hell it'll even play .iso image files.

So besides the worthless media crap options, what else does the 360 have? Well, the dashboard is pretty nice - it's always running on its own processor in the background, so you can switch music, check on your friends, send/receive messages within games at any time. The online play really depends a lot on the game developers - Microsoft has provided a nice foundation, but the quality of the implementation varies a lot. PGR3 is pretty good, although I have to believe the matching system sucks. With thousands of people online, I can sit in an empty race for minutes on end, even picking 'random race', which should just put me in a game that's about to start.

The wireless controller/headset combo is perfect. The controller fits very well, and having 4 triggers is better than having 6 right thumb buttons. The quality of the voice over the infobahn varies quite a bit, and apparently the voice disguiser thing just makes everyone sound like Stephen Hawkings, which is its own kind of comedy. I never though I would hear him say, "eat my shit, you ass spelunker!".

I guess any console really comes down to the games you can get for it, and the launch titles are a lot better than I expected (which wasn't much). I expect much better games to come along, hopefully a fun driving game (pgr3 is great for a simulation, but sims aren't that much fun... more like work, and nfsmw just sucks. A crappy port of a stale 'nfsv20') and of course the new spliter cell game looks ass-kick-aholic. Call of Duty 2 is simply awesome in single player - incredibly immersive and chaotic, especially in HD with digital 6.1 audio. The campaign was too short though, I shouldn't have been able to beat it so fast. The multiplayer is pretty weak, with very few options on how to set up a game and you can't even play with just your friends.

Condemned is one scary-ass immersive game - quite fun. I'm disappointed that this seems to be the limit of 'thinking' games nowadays - which is to say there's none involved. You just walk along what you always know is a linear path, do your little thing when it tells you to and watch the cutscenes... I miss games that actually involved thought - I guess that's a relic now.

Portland crippled by 1/2" of snow, xbox 360 owner doesn't notice

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 09:42:00 +0000

Yes, we got our yearly snow/freezing rain visit a bit early this year, paralyzing the city for only about a day before it luckily warmed up. Two years ago we got some snow followed by freezing rain, then 5 days of cold. It shut the city down for 5 full weekdays. It was laughable, they plowed only the biggest roads, leaving 4 foot high hardpacked snowdrifts at every intersection. No one with 2wd had any hope of getting anywhere. It was hilarious.

But not only was the weather nicer, but I wasn't even bothering to look. I finally got a xbox 360 last Friday, the day before I was set to camp out in front of Best Buy for 12-14 hours in the freezing-as-hell weather and 30mph winds for one. Good ol Fred Meyers came through for me. While people are spending 1k for them on ebay and camping out for 15+ hours in the blistering cold, Freds would get them in once in a while and just stack them up behind the electronics counter. I called at 7am and they said they had some in stock, so I sped on down there and jogged across the parking lot, imagining the competition. But no one was there. I got my premium box and picked out some games and other crap, and spent about 15 minutes inside. Wehn I left I hadn't seen a single other person buy one, and I was 20 minutes late.

I have to say I think Microsoft really did a good job - the online stuff is pretty fun and adds a lot of replay value for a lot of games. It doesn't do much for the single player games, but it's a nice low-cost add-on. The games I got are project gotham racing 3, king kong and condemned. Each are excellent and beautiful, nearly photo-realistic in graphics quality. And it has optical sound output so I could plug it into my dts 6.1 receiver and blast some surround sound. Excellent 1080i HD visuals as well, it really makes for a quantum leap in quality.

Maybe I'll post more detailed reviews later, for now I must continue to uh...evaluate the games in detail!

I'm as white as they come, and DNA proves it!

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 10:24:00 +0000

If you haven't heard about this, it's really cool. The National Geographic has a massive project to collect DNA from as many people as they can all over the world and map the genetic markers to their ancient ancestors. One of the sexiest things about humans and other aerobic respiration types (pretty much every animal) is that they all have mitochondria in their cells. And the best thinking today suggests that mitochondria was actually another species altogether that merged with the first living things to form a symbiotic organism - a combination of the two that can't ever be split apart and survive. How cool is that?

Well one of the interesting things about this is that mitochondrial DNA is always passed down through the mother - it doesn't randomly combine the way our normal DNA does. Since entire bloodlines now share an identical property, this makes it possible to backtrack to very long ago. The males also have a set of markers that can be traced paternally - The Y chromosome that makes you a man is always given my the father (women have no influence over the sex of the child) and apparently is also identical. So Robin bought me a kit and I sent in my swab, and here's what I got back:

As you can see, after my ancient ancestors left Africa, they wandered around the seat of civilization and wound up in western europe and britain. Here are some excerpts from the write-up of my haplogroup:

The marker M45 first appeared about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago in a man who became the common ancestor of most Europeans and nearly all Native Americans. This unique individual was part of the M9 lineage, which was moving to the north of the mountainous Hindu Kush and onto the game-rich steppes of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Siberia.
Today, for example, the marker's frequency remains very high in northern France and the British Isles—where it was carried by M173 descendents who had weathered the Ice Age in Spain.

The intelligence that allowed this lineage to adapt and thrive in harsh conditions was critical to human survival in a region where no other hominids are known to have survived.

Members of haplogroup R are descendents of Europe's first large-scale human settlers. The lineage is defined by Y chromosome marker M173, which shows a westward journey of M45-carrying Central Asian steppe hunters.

The descendents of M173 arrived in Europe around 35,000 years ago and immediately began to make their own dramatic mark on the continent. Famous cave paintings, like those of Lascaux and Chauvet, signal the sudden arrival of humans with artistic skill. There are no artistic precedents or precursors to their appearance.

Soon after this lineage's arrival in Europe, the era of the Neandertals came to a close. Genetic evidence proves that these hominids were not human ancestors but an evolutionary dead end. Smarter, more resourceful human descendents of M173 likely outcompeted Neandertals for scarce Ice Age resources and thus heralded their demise.

Members of haplogroup R1b, defined by M343 are the direct descendents of Europe's first modern humans—known as the Cro-Magnon people.

Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe some 35,000 years ago, during a time when Neandertals still lived in the region. M343-carrying peoples made woven clothing and constructed huts to withstand the frigid climes of the Upper Paleolithic era. They used relatively advanced tools of stone, bone, and ivory. Jewelry, carvings, and intricate, colorful cave paintings bear witness to the Cro Magnons' surprisingly advanced culture during the last glacial age.

When the ice retreated genetically homogenous groups recolonized the north, where they are still found in high frequencies. Some 70 percent of men in southern England are R1b. In parts of Spain and Ireland that number exceeds 90 percent.

Pretty cool, huh? I was disappointed that they didn't do my mitochondrial DNA too, but I guess I'll have to have a female family member do it too so I can see where that comes from... Who wants to bet it'll be just as white as mine?

Banhart lesion, anterior instability and impingment oh my!

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 12:24:00 +0000

Time for a surgery update!

In early October I had long-overdue othroscopic shoulder surgery. First, let me say that hospitals are a freakin racket! The bill was over 16k, and another 1500 for the MRI before it. I'll have to scan the bill, there are some funny line items in there. I think I was charged about 300 for post-surgery prescription drugs, which amounted to 3-4 pills in the 8 or so hours I was there post-op.

I hurt it originally about 6 years ago snowboarding on Mt. Hood... It was a beautiful powder day and pretty deserted, and I found a nice steep slope that leveled off then dropped off pretty steeply where someone had built a nice jump. I went over it pretty slowly at first to test it out, and found the landing area to be a massive snowdrift. To snowboarders that's a license to get nuts, so the next time down I bombed over the thing. Well I forgot that landing in powder is very different than hardpack, and was leaning way too far forward. I landed fine, then catapulted forward in an impressive endo display. Being a goofyfoot, my right foot was forward so I landed on my right shoulder pretty hard. What was interesting was at the same instant my left arm then went flying up over my head, and I had to use all my muscle to keep from slapping the top of my head with my forearm. It hurt quite a bit, but I was poor and didn't get too many chances to ride. So I rode the rest of the day, taking it pretty easy. I didn't see anyone about it for a long time, until last year when I tried some PT. It didn't help. Finally I got a MRI and they found some damage, and I was stuck with surgery.

It turns out this was a good idea, because they found a whole lot more damage than they expected. I had 3 marble-sized 'loose bodies' floating around, basically pieces of cartilege that had torn off and was bouncing around the joint. They had to sew the cuff of the joint back to the bone in 8 or 9 places, and ground off part of the knuckle-shaped bone on top to make some room. It was a mess.

So I spent a couple of weeks mostly drugged up and sleeping, but never for more than a few hours at a time. Today was the second time in 6 weeks that I've slept for more than 4-5 hours in a row, and still the pain wakes me up. I can't lay flat without a good deal of pain, so I'm stuck propping myself up on the couch at an angle.

Last week the sling came off though, and today I started physical therapy. It's healing fast relatively speaking, but it will still be another 4-5 months before I can go back to full speed sports. A word of advice: don't injure your shoulder. It's the most complicated joint in your body and it's tough to do anything without using it in some way. Much better to hurt your ankle or even knee. Keep that in mind next time you decide to hurt yourself.

Hey is this thing on?

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Rants) — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 07:39:00 +0000

Well here it is, the first post my my blog. Guess I should say something interesting or important here, you know...get off on the right foot.
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Got 'nothin. Check back later.