This piece in National Journal reminds me of the moment when I decided we were done for as a country. I was still in my salad days when a man is supposed to be full of optimism. Instead, I was oosing doom and gloom. Well, maybe it was not that bad. Still, watching Newt Gingrich waddle on stage as the next Speaker of the House and, presumably, the leader of the loyal opposition, I knew we were done for as a country. If that’s the best we could muster, it was time to reconsider the whole experiment. Two decades of rot have confirmed what I suspected.

It’s not that Gingrich is a festering carbuncle of man or that he is a moral nullity. Politics, going back to the Alcibiades, has been populated with loathsome parasites. If the country could weather the Kennedy family it could handle another degenerate in a powerful office. The thing that was the clincher for me was how Gingrich was talked about as some sort of deep thinker. That absurdity is right here in the piece.

Within a year, nine out of 10 Americans could be dead. And whatever causes the national apocalypse—be it North Korean malice or the whims of the sun—the downfall will ultimately be our own fault.

That’s the fear of Newt Gingrich and other members of a high-profile coalition who are convinced that our fragile electrical grid could be wiped out at any moment.

Their concern? Electromagnetic pulses, the short bursts of energy—caused by anything from a nuclear blast to a solar flare—that can wreak havoc on electrical systems on a massive scale. And the coalition believes it’s coming soon.

“I think we’re running out of time,” said Peter Pry, a former CIA officer and head of a congressional advisory board on national security. And if the worst happens? “This gets translated into mass fatalities, because our modern civilization can’t feed, transport, or provide law and order without electricity,” he said.

While some see the coalition as alarmist—and others dismiss them as out-and-out quacks—the coalition boasts some prominent and influential names. Pry and Gingrich are joined by former CIA Director James Woolsey.

“It wasn’t difficult persuading them” to join the coalition, Pry said. Gingrich “has known about EMP and cared about it for many years.”

Last year, Gingrich told members of Congress that an EMP attack “could be the kind of catastrophe that ends civilization—and that’s not an exaggeration.”

What does Gingrich know about physics? The answer is nothing. He was a history instructor at strip mall college and he liked dinosaurs. I love history, but it is not science and everyone knows it. Many not-so-bright people skate though college as history majors, English majors and so forth. Even if you dispute my opinion here, you cannot dispute that history is not science. Gingrich is no more qualified to discuss the electric grid and EMP attacks than my cat.

The fact that the nation takes seriously a guy like Gingrich on anything, much less issues he is uniquely unqualified to discuss is far more worrisome than solar flares or an EMP attack. Gingrich is a crank and not the funny entertaining type either. He is the weird guy who lives at the end of the lane type of crank. The guy parents warned their kids to avoid. His ideas are mostly nonsense, but he believes them with the intensity of a fanatic. This is a guy who thought we could put sunglasses on the globe to “address global warming.”

I tend to like fringe guys, even when they hold very weird opinions. The reason is they make watching this stuff fun. Jerry Brown is entertaining as all get out, until he gets power. Then he becomes a dangerous lunatic. Gingrich has always been at the center of the “conservative movement.” His weird social engineering ideas should never get a purchase in a movement that makes claims to liberty and small government. His central role in conservative politics over the last two decades says “conservatism” has been nothing but a fraud. That’s why we are doomed. Without an alternative to the Cult of Modern Liberalism, they are free to do as they please for as long as they please.

As a rule, I’m skeptical of any claims that require as their solution greater access by the nation’s busy-bodies to the lives of Americans. The busy-body is a type of fanatic. The object of their fanaticism is the mucking about in the life of another person. Europeans are natural busy-bodies. That is, the folks on the Continent. It is why socialism is so natural for them. In America, the Democratic Party has been the natural home for the American busy-body. Their entire platform is based on nosy jerks poking around in your affairs, telling you what to do.

As with Global Warming, my reaction to the anti-obesity movement is skepticism. I just assumed they were up to no good. That has proven to be the case. The government has been squandering billions on this crusade and Americans are fatter. Part of it is they preach nonsense, like avoiding meat and eating grains. The whole food pyramid bit was utter nonsense. The irrationalism that grew up on the Left in  the 1960’s,  starting with Thomas Kuhn is mostly to blame. Relativism allows people to believe that gibberish is as valid as observable fact.

That does not change the fact we have a lot of fat people. I’m 48 and probably 20 pounds overweight. I exercise regularly, but there’s no beating father time. In my youth, I was a cut 185, but that’s not happening for me at this age, no matter how much I diet and exercise. I weight train four days a week, run three times a week and cycle about 1,000 miles a year. Using myself as a guide here, middle-age should put most men in the range of 20-50 pounds over their fighting weight. I bet most men my age are 50-100 pounds overweight. I say that because it seems everyone I see is much fatter than me.

This morning I stopped for my coffee and saw two women getting out of a car in front of the coffee joint. Both were pushing 400 pounds and maybe more. My ability to judge the weight of people that size is not good. Both waddled into the coffee joint and order food for twenty. The reason people are fat is they eat too much and exercise too little. In a rich, modern country like America, even the poorest of the poor have too much food and too much leisure. The typical ghetto dweller has a flat screen, cable, an XBox and cabinets full of treats. They spend their afternoon smoking blunts, eating Doritos and playing Gears of War.

My solution has two parts. First, food must get more expensive for fat people. Therefore all retail food must be priced by the pound – of the customer. The two fat asses who waddled into the coffee shop would weigh in and their food would be priced accordingly. Their bagel would be twice the price of my bagel, for example. Since I’m only 20 pounds overweight, BMI is probably a better measure. The fatties were at least 200 pounds over limit so their food should cost ten times the price of my food.

The other leg of my plan is to move all parking spaces 100 yards from food establishments. If the fatties had to walk the length of a football field to get their feedbag on, I’m betting they make other choices. On the other hand, if they still had to have handfuls of bacon and bagels, they would have to put some work in before and after. My bet is these tubs of goo would simply stay home. People who get that fat are so lazy even food is not enough to get them exercising. But, it would keep them from the buffet line and that’s the point.

A long time ago I encountered a story about Sikhs in Minnesota. I thought it odd that Sikhs would emigrate to a place that was very white and very cold. It turned out that the US and Canada imported scads of them for some reason. That spawned the image in my head of people walking around Minneapolis saying, “You know what would make this place better? Sikhs! We need a bunch of swarthy looking fellows who wear filthy hats and rarely bath. That will make this place perfect.”

It is a ridiculous image and it is intended to be. The people who decided to import roughly a million Sikhs never expected to live anywhere near them. In Georgetown and Bethesda, you will find no Sikhs. In Chris Mathews’ neighborhood, Chevy Chase Village, you will not find any Sikhs (or blacks or Latinos for that matter). America’s ruling class is insulated from the consequences of their decisions. It’s why they decided to dump a bunch of Somalis into Lewiston Maine. Let the little people deal with them.

Anyway, that came to mind when I saw this story on Drudge. Well, my first thought was “I see the French still hate the Jews.” The French are not the worst Jew-haters on the planet, but they work at it. They are not as bad as the Dutch, but who is?

Then I started reading the story.

A Jewish teacher from Paris told police that three men had assaulted and cursed him in Arabic before drawing a swastika on his chest.

The attack occurred on Thursday night, according to a report by the Drancy-based Bureau for National Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, a watchdog group known as BNVCA.

“They pressed him to the wall and hit his face, around the eyes and on his chest,” the report said. The blows broke his nose and deformed it, according to the report.

“One of the perpetrators opened the victim’s shirt and with a black marker drew a swastika on the man’s bare chest,” BNVCA president Sammy Ghozlan wrote in the BNVCA report.

The victim, who was wearing a kippah at the time of the attack, was identified as K. Richard. He was treated for a broken nose and lacerations on his face on Thursday night.

He told police that the three men whoa attacked him appeared to be of North African descent and were in their twenties. They cornered him as he was exiting a kosher restaurant on Manin Street in Paris’ 19th arrondissement, near the Gare du Nord train station.

The shouted “death to the Jews” and called him “dirty Jew” in French and also shouted insults in Arabic which Richard did not understand, the BNVCA report said.

Of course. it was Arabs. Why would an otherwise sensible nation invite millions of inbred savages to settle in their lands? Were Frenchmen wandering around Paris saying to one another, “This city really need some inbred Muslim savages!”??

Of course not. The French are the most chauvinistic people on the continent. They hate pretty much everyone that is not French. Heck, they are not terribly fond of a lot of people that are French. There’s nothing wrong with it. I wish my country was a bit more chauvinistic. Instead of inviting the world and invading the world, maybe we would mind our own business a bit more. That’s what makes the madness so stunning. The Cult that grew out of Jacobinism eventually poisoned the minds of Western elites to the point where even the French want to murder themselves with immigration.

Somewhere, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi is laughing.

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My chief complaint against modern economics is they don’t know anything about accounting. It has become a form of alchemy. Instead of turning lead into gold, they make the trade-offs in public policy disappear. The phrase “all upside” somehow oozed over from the sharpies in the money game into what was a branch of practical arithmetic.

A good example is the bank bailouts. The argument was this. The cost of letting them fail was too high. They were too big to fail, which really meant too big to let fail. The claim was the cost of letting them fail was higher than the cost of bailing them out with money stolen from janitors and plumbers.

Here we are and the most egregious offender is no better off today than when they were saved by their friends in government.

Citigroup Inc.’s capital plan was among five that failed Federal Reserve stress tests, while Bank of America Corp. won approval for its first dividend increase since the financial crisis.

Lenders announced more than $60 billion of dividends and stock buybacks after the Fed approved capital plans for 25 of the 30 banks in its annual exam. Citigroup, as well as U.S. units of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, HSBC Holdings Plc and Banco Santander SA, failed because of concerns about the quality of their processes, the central bank said yesterday in a statement. Zions Bancorporation failed after its capital fell below Fed minimums in a simulation of a severe economic slump.

Why is this bank still in business? The first mistake, bailing out what was nothing more than a bust-out operation, can be forgiven. Politicians are stupid and when panicked, they can be outlandishly stupid. Here we are in the cool calm of recovery and we’re still letting this sham of a bank stagger on? it should be broken up starting tomorrow. The senior leaders as well as the board should be thrown in jail and perhaps hung.

That sounds rough, but sometimes the point of a life is to be a warning to others.

The central bank found defects in Citigroup’s planning practices that included areas the Fed flagged before. The regulator expressed concern with the New York-based company’s ability to project losses in “material parts of its global operations” and to reflect all business exposures in its internal stress test.

“Taken in isolation, each of the deficiencies would not have been deemed critical enough to warrant an objection, but when viewed together, they raise sufficient concerns regarding the overall reliability of Citigroup’s capital planning process,” the Fed said of the third-largest U.S. bank.

Mike Corbat, the bank’s chief executive officer, said in a statement that Citigroup is “deeply disappointed” by the rejection and will “work closely with the Fed to better understand their concerns so that we can bring our capital planning process in line with their expectations.” The timing of any resubmission hasn’t been decided, he said.

If Mikey had issued his statement from the gallows, I bet it would have more resonance to the rest of them.

The point here is the cost of bailing out these banks could not be lower than letting them fail. That is a mathematical impossibility. It is the logical equivalent of saying a pound of feathers is lighter than a pound of lead. What was really going on is the cost of bailing out Citi was lower to the politicians and their friends at Citi in 2008, than leaving a bigger mess for whoever was in charge down the line. What they did was book the benefit in 2008 and push the corresponding costs off into the future. At some point, every accrual reverses out.

Axiomatically, that was true of all the bank bailouts. If I borrow a million dollars today so I can live like a king for a year, I will have to repay the loan in future years. That means I will be correspondingly poorer. Precisely, I will be one million dollars poorer in future years plus the interest. That’s what happened with these bank bailouts. Our politicians opted to impoverish future share holders, customers and citizens so they and their banker buddies could live in the moment.

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This post on a legal blog feeds into something I’ve been reading lately.

Can an employer make his employees foot the bill for his religious beliefs? Merely to ask this question is to answer it. “Religious liberty” does not and cannot include the right to impose the costs of observing one’s religion on someone else, especially in the for­-profit workplace. Until Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius, this was a basic and unquestioned aspect of the law of freedom of religion. The Establishment Clause forbids accommodations of religion in the for-profit workplace that impose significant burdens on identifiable and discrete third parties. In Hobby Lobby, a group of employers are demanding the right to refuse health insurance coverage of contraception needed by women who do not share the employers’ religious beliefs.  Upholding the exemption would shift the cost of accommodating Hobby Lobby’s religious beliefs about contraception to those women. Such cost-shifting violates the Establishment Clause.

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I’m fond of calling our ruling class Pod People. They look like us and make sounds that seem human, but they are nothing like us. Here’s a good example from Hairy Reed.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) said the fault of struggling to sign up on the Obamacare exchanges didn’t lie with the faulty website, but with the people who weren’t “educated on how to use the Internet.”Explaining the reasoning behind the latest Obamacare delay, Reid said too many people just didn’t know to use their computer properly and needed more time. Apparently, it had nothing to do with the well-documented failings of the website that have embarrassed the White House for months.

“We have hundreds of thousands of people who tried to sign up who didn’t get through,” he said. “There are some people who are not like my grandchildren who can handle everything so easily on the Internet, and these people need a little extra time. It’s not — the example they gave us is a 63-year-old woman came into the store and said, ‘I almost got it. Every time I just about got there, it would cut me off.’ We have a lot of people just like this through no fault of the Internet, but because people are not educated on how to use the Internet.”

It’s just the latest strange moment for the embattled Reid, who’s facing an increasingly uphill battle to keep a majority of Democrats in the Senate. Reid also recently implied all Americans telling their stories of Obamacare’s harmful effects were liars, and he has incessantly bashed the Koch Brothers as “un-American” and “against everything that’s good for America.”

Unfortunately for Reid, he has a far higher negative rating with the public than the Kochs.

Back in the 1990’s I used to get a kick out of reading legacy media talk about the Internet. Watching them fumble on TV with the basics was great theater. The strange thing about our elites is they are always late to the game, but then pretend to be experts long after most people take the “new thing” for granted. The Internet is a good example. Most politicians struggle with sending and reading e-mail, a skill small children master by kindergarten.

I’m sure to Harry this bizarre explanation sounds reasonable. After all, he has no idea how any of this works. Why would the little people understand it? To the rest of us it sounds like this classic from Ted Stevens:

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Twinkie has a post up today on the Hobby lobby case.

Regarding the cases argued in the Supreme Court yesterday, which includes Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., I remind you once again that the Supreme Court takes a very broad view of the powers of Congress to regulate businesses. I find it unlikely that Hobby Lobby will win.

Maybe the two most heavily Catholic judges, Scalia and Thomas, will side with Hobby Lobby, not because of consistent jurisprudence but because these normally hyper-rational justices become irrational when Christianity is at issue. The rest of the court will probably fall in line based on the slippery slope argument (where would these types of exemptions end?), because the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act didn’t was intended to protect individuals from discrimination and not to allow corporations from avoiding general business regulations, because the law isn’t forcing anyone to use contraceptives, etc. The Court has previously held that the RFPA doesn’t allow a religious person to get out of paying taxes, and paying for health insurance plans is like paying a tax.

Taxes go to pay for public schools, where there are art classes where the children are instructed to draw pictures of animals, which violates the Islamic religion. Does that mean Muslims don’t have to pay taxes? I don’t think so.

His batshit crazy ideas about religion aside, I think he is right that the court will let Congress force just about anything on the public. The reason has nothing to do with precedent or current law. The court has three lesbian fanatics, two of whom went bonkers during the hearing. The court is notoriously congenial. Even stalwarts like Scalia and Thomas will struggle in the face of ululating lunatics in their midst. The fact that Sotomayor  and Kagen are usually amiable, if dimwitted, will put pressure on the rest to accommodate them.

More important, Roberts was bought the first time and he has to stay bought. Whatever it is the administration used to turn him did not go away. On a court with four ideologues, turning one vote ensures favorable decisions for the Cult. Roberts, having called the mandate a tax once is not going to change his mind now and call it what it is, a mandate. That’s absurd. There’s nothing in it for him.

It goes to the nature of democracy and why it always ends in a bloodbath. A piece of paper is not going to stop a mob or the mob’s “duly elected” representatives. That’s all the court has is a piece of paper. They have to play nice with Congress and that means going along with what Congress passes. Currently, there’s no reason to think Congress has any interest in repealing this comically bad law or reigning in the Executive branch. The court therefore will just keep rubber stamping this thing no matter how silly it makes them look.

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One of the ways to spot a fanatic is the old line about their inability to change their mind or change the subject. The first part is the key. No amount of evidence can get them to question their beliefs. This is something you see it with Bitcoin. The believers, despite the mountain of bad news, are still hoping and praying their Utopian fantasy will come true. This latest set back could, however, make the fantasy more expensive.

The Internal Revenue Service may have just taken some of the fun out of Bitcoin. But that may mean that the virtual currency is growing up.

The I.R.S. announced on Tuesday that it would treat Bitcoin, the computer-driven online money system, as property rather than currency for tax purposes, a move that forces users who have grown accustomed to operating under the government’s radar to deal with new tax issues and reporting requirements.

While that may seem like an expensive headache, some financial experts view the move as a way to push Bitcoin further away from the fringes and into the mainstream financial system.

“It’s getting legitimacy, which it didn’t have previously,” said Ajay Vinze, the associate dean at at Arizona State University‘s business school. The ruling, he said, “puts Bitcoin on a track to becoming a true financial asset.”

This was always going to be a problem for Bitcoin. No government on earth is going to treat it as a currency. It will always be property. That means the guys who bought ten grand in Bitcoin when it was trading at $50 will now owe taxes on their windfall. If you go into a pawn shop and sell a million dollars in gold coin the pawn shop is reporting the sale to the IRS and you have to report the gain or loss on your taxes.

In most states, gold is not hit with sales tax, but that is not the case with Bitcoin or any other digital currency. That means Bitcoin dealers will now be hit with sales tax audits, assuming states are savvy enough to do it. That’s the real story of Bitcoin. To this point, government have not had a need or desire to address it, so Bitcoin and other digital schemes have been able to flourish. When that stops, the flourishing stops.

The flaw in the Bitcoin plan has always been obvious to anyone familiar with how countries work. To be a country, you must control your borders, your currency and your central authority. Puerto Rico is not a country. It has a defined border, but Washington runs its currency and most of its government. Puerto Ricans can be as proud of their people as they like, but the remain a property of America.

The US government guards the dollar better than it guards the border. They know the key to keeping the American ruling elite in power is the dollar. If the world went to different money, say backed by energy, the current arrangements in Washington would unravel quickly. When you can no longer print away your mistakes, thus transferring the cost to some other place in the world economy, you have to act differently.

Often, what turns up on the mainstream media reads like a parody of what is in the mainstream media. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking. Of course, this is, in part. the result of being in a bubble, insulated from the rest of us. Even so, it seems that someone inside the bubble should notice that stories like this strike people outside the bubble as a bit bizarre. Apparently, no such person exists.

The super-low mortgage rates that tens of millions of Americans locked in during the refinancing boom are now discouraging many of these borrowers from buying another home and giving up those loans.

The multiyear refinancing craze, which included some of the lowest rates ever recorded, freed up cash for borrowers to sink into the economy. But refinancing activity began receding last spring, and rates have been rising since. The average rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage hit 4.32 percent this week, up from 3.54 percent a year ago, according to mortgage-finance firm Freddie Mac, based in McLean, Va.

The higher rates, soaring home prices and a tight inventory have kept potential buyers on the sidelines, hurting the sales of previously owned homes and undermining the recovery of the housing market, a huge contributor to economic growth. Homeowners who are reluctant to move and lose their low rates — a phenomenon that economists call interest rate “lock-in” — could slow the churn of home sales across the country.

Just let that roll around in your head for a bit. If home prices are soaring, that must mean buyers are bidding up prices. Otherwise, the houses would remain unsold, forcing sellers to lower prices eventually. That’s how markets work, when left alone. On the other hand, if rates are discouraging buyers, the banks will eventually have to lower rates to attract new borrowers.

A healthy turnover of homes is critical to a robust housing sector, enabling critical first-time home buyers to enter the market and existing homeowners to move or trade up. But housing experts worry that interest rates, which are expected to gradually rise to nearly 6 percent by late next year, will chill enthusiasm for home purchases. They say they’re already seeing signs of that, most recently among existing homeowners.

This is he problem of libertarian economics. They never see the other side of the balance sheet. Artificially suppressing interest rates today has consequences. There’s another side of the entry and it will make itself know eventually. In this case, pulling forward demand for housing with cheap credit means demand will be below average at some point in the future. Cheap credit is eating your cake before you bake it.

It’s too early to quantify the impact of the lock-in phenomenon. But it’s happened before and could happen again, say researchers who have studied the effects of rising rates on housing turnover. Statements by Federal Reserve Chair Janet L. Yellen this week sparked investor fears that the agency could soon begin allowing a key interest rate to rise, helping push mortgage rates even higher.

Ella Lore said she and her husband are fence-sitting. Now that their daughter is studying abroad, they would like to sell their D.C. home, buy a two-
bedroom condominium and rid themselves of the hassles and costs of maintaining a large home.

But when they did the math, they discovered that they would be paying about the same amount each month for considerably less space partly because of rising mortgage rates, Lore said. The couple refinanced into a loan with a 2.8 percent rate in 2012. Now, with a new loan, they’d get a 4.25 percent rate.

For two decades, people ave been planning and building their lives in a world of artificially cheap credit. When that cheap credit begins to unwind, suddenly everyone, even the prudent, have unanticipated problems. Think of it this way. If tomorrow the poles reversed and north was now south and south was now north, what would have to change in your life? The answer is everything.

Most of what you depend on, at some level, relies on the long held assumptions about the earth’s magnetic field. Money is just about as important. Credit is our money now, so when it gets more dear, money becomes more dear. That changes every financial relationship on earth. That either happens gradually or it happens all of a sudden, which is more likely as the gradual approach is delayed.

Karl Denninger likes to pick on Best Buy. The reason is Best Buy is a big nationwide chain like Home Depot or Walmart , except they lose money.The reason for that is not price or on-line competition. The reason is Best Buy offers no added value. There’s no reason to go into a best Buy, other than shoplifting and killing time. Why would anyone pay even a small premium for a product from Best Buy? Karl’s answer is they won’t and they don’t, which is why Best Buy is a dead man walking.

That’s a fine argument, but what explains Home Depot? When I need something for a project, I’ll stop there for supplies. They never fail to disappoint. Yesterday I stopped for some solvent to degrease a bike chain. Cleaning a bike chain is not a black art, but you don’t just soak it is gasoline either. I ride a Specialized carbon fiber bike so that means taking care when tuning it up for the season. Instead of spending fifty bucks at the bike shop, I thought I’d get something for half the price.

I asked three different people where they keep solvents. No luck. After walking up and down the store twice, I gave up. Like Best Buy, the help runs from you if you look like you are about to ask a question. You just about have to tackle them. As I was leaving, I walked past half a dozen employees bullshitting with one another, totally disinterested in why I was leaving empty handed. Home Depot may be cheap, but it sucks. How in the hell do they prosper and Best Buy fails?

I stopped at some little auto parts shop I never knew existed and found what I wanted right away. The guy at the counter knew exactly what I was looking for and he also sold me some space age spray lubricant I figure I can use on my brake cables. I paid twelve bucks. Maybe Home Depot would be cheaper, but I don’t want to spend all day finding something just to save a few bucks. Time is money too.

Maybe people like spending hours browsing Home Depot. That certainly seems true of garden customers. I always see some poor guy with his wife in the garden center. She’s looking for plants and he is looking for some way to hang himself. The shopping carts shaped like race cars, so the kids can come along says Home Depot is not targeting just men. There’s something I’m missing, as the fact remains that Home depot exists, while Best Buy is headed to bankruptcy.