I’ve been reading Karl Denninger for years. He used to turn up on a radio program I liked and he was always very good. Denninger is right about a lot of things. He’s also a very weird man. Listening to him on the radio, I got the sense it took a maximum effort to will himself into a zone within striking distance of normal. At any moment, the string could snap and he would spiral into lunacy.

I know, I know. That’s mean spirited of me, but what can I say? I’m an asshole that way.

I looked at his site over my eggs this morning, as is my habit, and I was puzzled by this post.

I’ve posted a handful of locked-comment Tickers lately (yes, I still do add features once in a while to the software, and this is one of the recent additions — the ability to pre-lock a submission so it’s read-only.  Fancy that.) and have had a couple of people ask via an invite-only BBM channel I set up “what’s dat.”

The software he uses is awful. I rarely look at the comments, so I did not notice he was blocking comments. Denninger is terribly thin skinned so the comments are heavily regulated and salted with his rantings about comments he does not like. His obsessing over it is very weird to me. The fact that he has an invite-only Blackberry channel is hilarious. It’s like grown men building a tree house.

The rest of the post has nothing to do with the first graph so maybe his meds kicked in at that point. Anyway, I wonder if his crankiness has something to do with over compensating. If you look at his bio on Wikipedia, there is a summary of his business career. Like Mark Cuban, Denninger got rich from the free money era, without ever creating much of any value. Further, his company could only exist because he got a government contract. Now he is a retired guy ranting about the excesses of government and the excesses of money creation. The word hypocrite comes to mind.

Denninger would not be the first person driven mad by the realities of his own life. Not that it troubles me. Security firms often employ criminals who use their expertise in crime to help build better security systems. I once worked with a former car thief. Our job was to repossess cars. Jose was an expert on finding the cars and, of course, boosting them before the bad guys found out what was happening. Denninger knows how government awards contracts and he knows how fake money works. His insights, therefore, are useful.