Frankennanny

Man, when I was kid I wanted a nanny. One with big boobs. My dreams went unanswered. Instead, I outgrew my need for a nanny. But the morons found me one anyway. Frankenstein on steroids. Lucky me. This is how they think.

The Rise of Parentalism

In a recent paper published in the journal Public Choice, "Afraid to be Free: Dependency as Desideratum," Nobel Prize–winning economist James Buchanan composes a new taxonomy of socialist threats to liberty. Buchanan argues that the conventional threats to freedom from managerial socialism (central planning) and distributionist socialism (the welfare state) are today joined by paternalistic socialism and "parental socialism," which Buchanan describes as the willingness among many to allow the government to take control of their lives.

The emerging threat to American liberty today, then, is a combination of these latter two forms of socialism—the desire among some in government to interfere in nearly every aspect of our lives, and the lack of concern on the part of many Americans that this is happening. And while conventional critics of capitalism came primarily from the left, the parentalist-paternalist movement isn't as easily marginalized.

No where is this more evident than in my little home town in Idaho. Nanny government has spawned a class of citizens that seemingly never wean themselves, cradle to grave. They pass prohibitive tree cutting ordinances on private property, dog poop ordinances, car idling ordinances, dark sky ordinances. Hell, if you can dream up anything to bitch about at all, light your torches and march on city hall. Next week, they'll pass another 60 million school district levy-thinking perhaps, all this money will turn their kids into geniuses. They love Frankennanny.

Or maybe they are just a bunch of spoiled, whiny ass, and deluded parents willing to spend everyone's money. In Frankennanny we trust. Can't rule that out.

I'd like to introduce this Nobel prize winning economist to the folks in my home town. They'd set him straight. Hell, Buchanan might just take his kids and move there.

I Am Here For All of Your "Givernment" Insanity Needs

Remember that 700 billion TARP package that Hank Paulson jammed thru Congress? All that money he gave to his friends at Goldman Sachs?

This is what the General Accounting Office has to say about it:

One year later, however, a little-noted report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office questions whether the bailout -- known officially as the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- saved anything other than the jobs of greedy Wall Street executives and the political hides of their protectors in government.

"Measuring the effectiveness of TARP's programs has been an ongoing challenge," the GAO report said, adding that "any changes attributed to TARP could well be changes that would have occurred anyway" -- due to policy interventions, the actions of financial regulators or even natural market corrections. In other words, a year after Congress burdened present and future taxpayers with a debt of immense magnitude, government auditors still can't say for sure that TARP accomplished anything toward preventing a financial collapse.

At the height of the bailout hysteria, Paulson appeared on "Face the Nation," saying he hoped the federal government would be able to recoup most of the TARP funds. But today, both the GAO's auditors and TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky say nobody should hold their breath waiting for that repayment.

In his 256-page report to Congress, Barofsky notes that the Treasury Department's failure to implement anti-fraud measures, or even to require TARP recipients to report how they used the billions Congress and the Treasury Department gave them, makes it highly unlikely that the $317 billion outstanding -- nearly half the TARP total -- will ever be returned to taxpayers. Barofsky also threatened to subpoena documents relating to the Treasury Department's "less-than-accurate statements ... concerning TARP's first investments in nine large financial institutions," as well as its subsequent refusal to report what hundreds of other TARP recipients did with the funds.

So there you have it: Treasury officials lied to Congress and the public, and refused to demand even a basic level of accountability from TARP recipients while borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars that taxpayers will eventually have to pay back, plus billions in interest. Incredibly, just Wednesday, President Obama announced a new TARP-like program for small businesses and community banks. The madness in Washington won't stop until the people completely clean house at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

This is absolute thievery and fraud. Everyone participating in this should be indicted and charged. It is a fiasco with no oversight and no accountability. Geezus, I think I got a migraine.

Hurry Up Barack, The Public is Gaining On You

Ben Stein in the American Spectator. Undressing the Won.

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/09/14/thank-you-barack-obama

Ben Stein had the courage to apologize to Peter Schiff. Schiff as you might recall, was the poor guy who foretold the housing market and banking collapse while people laughed at him on network television. Stein was one of those laughing back then. After financial markets collapsed, along with his investments, Stein quit laughing.

Stein is becoming a quick study.

Every Once in Awhile, You Gotta Chop Someone's Head Off in the Square

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8321435.stm

I read this story on the BBC and it kind of left me speechless.

When did it ever, I mean ever, become government's role or job description to determine the salary of people working in the private sector? Did we pass some amendment that I never heard about?

And just what is a "Pay Czar?" Did we get that term from communist Russia, comrades?

Now Frankenstein has apparently determined that in addition to stealing tax payer dollars and delivering it to bankers, that somehow that bestows additional rights to determine what any given executives' salary should be. Two wrongs make it right- kind of thinking.

Hey Franky, while you're at, why don't you adjust the entire payroll of the NY Yankees? They have been overpaid and under performing for years. Or the NFL or NBA? Some of those players make eight figures. And don't forget Tiger Woods, that dude has been making 100 mill a year. Or what about that Oprah-eviscerating men and hawking books on TV?

Sic that pay czar on 'em. That ridiculous kind of pay offends my sense of values yet nothing ever seems to get done.

And just who are these "anonymous people" with offended values? Did they sign a petition or something?

So let me explain what this really is. This is cowardly and political expediency. I saw our fearless leader dispose of GM's CEO, Rick Wagoner. I saw Obama dispose of an Inspector General who caught Sac Town Mayor and loyal supporter Kevin Johnson stealing taxpayer money and offed him when he tried to expose it. And now, you greedy bankers, its your turn.

This is what happens when your leader is dropping like a rock in the polls. A narcissist that attacks anyone and anything that doesn't agree with his un-communicated belief system. Preying on easy targets and chopping their heads off to make the minions happy. This country has so many problems yet here we are, worrying about this nonsensical shit. Like it's new or something.

If this is the kind of stuff Frankenstein is focused on, man we are in a lot of trouble. Jimmy Carter, your prayers have been answered. We may have found a worthy successor for your place in the annals of history.

The Dark Lord

In my house, in uniformed regalia, there is a picture of me shaking Dick Cheney's hand. The Dark Lord. Although stricken with a painful and terminal illness, I was suddenly and inexplicably cured shortly after that brief encounter. Here then are similar tales of the most sinister man that ever buried a man in the rose garden. My thanks to AceofSpades HQ and some of the wittiest bastards around. Just as funny the second time...


While on a sex-spree in a Tijuana whorehouse, Dick Cheney used a live cougar as a condom.

The bodycount was fourteen Mexican whores and one cougar.

In Tijuana, they refer to this as "The Night of the Sodomizing Cougar-Man."
Dick Cheney refers to it as "last Thursday."

Dick Cheney's dark powers, when not being harnessed and channeled by their master (i.e. sneers and hobo murder), manifest in the corporeal world through a phenomenon described by one noted scholar as "loose shit." It's not known if this result is explicitly tied to the temporal continuity of Dick Cheney. One proposed theory states the existence of Dick Cheney at any point in the timeline may explain everything from the Big Bang, to the Heat-Death of the Universe, and even beyond to blackhole evaporation and the very existence of entropy. Another noted scholar known only as "Joe" disappeared promptly after beginning an investigation into the Cheney-Entropy theory.

Once, a protestor yelled at Dick Cheney while he was walking through Washington.

Dick Cheney smiled, then ripped the man's heart from his chest and ate it raw in front of the guy's kid. When the kid cried, Dick Cheney said, "Oh, don't be such a fucking pussy," and spit blood on the sidewalk.

The Stock Market Has A Promising Future Behind It

Every once in awhile, I'll get some anonymous comment or email wherein a reader labels me a "pessimist" or "angry" apparently assuming that somehow I must have overlooked those qualities while examining myself in the mirror that morning. Feeling vastly perceptive or superior, they point this stuff out to me (and I am assuming this) because clearly they have my better interests at heart. Being the loving creatures that they are, they are clearly concerned for my welfare thinking perhaps that I am so unconscious that I might stumble into a speeding train.

Now, I have been scratching my head trying to figure out this seven month bull market rally that Wall St. has been throwing. Oh sure, I know the basics. Uncommitted funds on the sidelines, better quarter over quarter comparisons, and an absolute dearth of competing investments that can bring a yield above 3%. Mutual fund managers are paid to invest. Yada, yada, yada. I am also aware of the "B" line rally which occurred on Wall St. the year after the great market collapse and depression. (1930)

Apparently most people on Wall St. don't understand that there is a complete disconnect between what Wall St. is doing and what Main St. is enduring. And in the end, Main St. is going to seize the day.

You see on Main St., 17% of the workers are unemployed. They have lost their homes and their 401ks. If they have managed to keep their homes, the bank has chopped all of the equity or available credit out of it. And consumers drive recoveries.

The other problem is a mountain of debt, oil hovering at 80 bucks, more bailouts, banks not fully disclosing liabilities, a collapsing dollar (good for a lot of companies, bad for others) and a Frankenstein Government poised to steal as much in taxes as they can. Maybe throw in socialized medicine to boot. Worry about wars, social security and medicare later.

Now I don't know if any of you have heard of the "Curse of Dow 10000" which is real. In the past, every time the market hit 10,000-it suffered a pullback. That happened just days ago. I saw a sweet article about that very curse and I swiped a great quote which I am gonna paste in here shortly.

You see public companies sell you paper. You buy their paper (stock certificates) with your paper (money) hoping some other sucker will pay more for that paper (stock certificates) than you did. The game ends when they run out of suckers. They have just about run out of suckers. Seventeen percent of them are sidelined, trying to scrape together enough money for rent.

A beautiful description, purloined as promised...

John Cassidy explained this kind of market behavior very well in his recent article on “rational irrationality” in the New Yorker: Keynes’s jaundiced view of finance reflected his own experience as an investor and as a director of an insurance company. Every morning, in his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, he spent about half an hour in bed studying the financial pages and various brokerage reports. He compared investing to newspaper competitions in which “the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view.” If you want to win such a contest, you’d better try to select the outcome on which others will converge, whatever your personal opinion might be. “It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest,” Keynes explained. “We have reached the third degree, where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.”

Right after the Great Depression's B line rally, deflation set in because government and the Fed hadn't figured out how to manipulate the money supply which they have henceforth figured out.
Japan's market collapse was followed by the lost decade as all that credit had to unwind. What banks did in Japan was eerily similar to what occurred here last year.

The stock market has a promising future behind it. Never have I wanted to short or put a market as badly as this one. But ya know what, I'm just going to sit this one out. Greed and money just don't matter that much to me and I simply can't afford to gamble-trying to figure out which chick is the ugliest. But what matters even less to me is some brainiac trying to tell me that I am a pessimist. An optimist would be buying put options.

When You Kill Them, They Just Might Kill You Back

When I was kid, we had this bully that lived a few blocks away. Dude was mean. Parents fed him with a slingshot-which of course was one of those family traditions that never ends.

Now a lot of us were scared to death of that bully and I couldn't even convince the neighborhood kids to give this halfwit a blanket party.

Necessity really is the mother of invention. So I found the toughest kid I knew and paid him 20 bucks to beat the shit out of that kid and warn him to leave us alone. A lot of dough in 1970. It worked. Some of the best money I ever spent.

You see, that's how it was for me at age 10. The bully was 13. I never thought about killing this kid. That was insane. As I grew older, I learned that killing people is acceptable as long as you have a good reason. Or you can invent one. Killing people without getting killed yourself....well that's just good business.

So two things happened to me. I discovered that I had more sanity at age 10 than I did at 40. I also learned that inventing the next kick ass weapon and having the capacity and where with all to use it scared the hell out of everyone else. At age 10, my weapon of choice was named Garth G, age 15.

Now nearly 40 years later, the newest weapon for killing is called "Metal Storm." In fact, you don't even have to man it. It just starts leveling anything that moves. Great stuff as long as you invent it first-not so great when someone else invents it first and remembers that you were the kid that had Garth G. kick your ass. Karma will come this way.

"Hey Honey...Would You Hand Me a Roll of Dollar Bills, Quickly Please...

http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/19/news/economy/low_rates_savings.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009102010

The above article details how prudent savers are getting hosed by the government and the Federal Reserve. Deflation is an absolute windfall for savers with low debt. Your dollars, in short supply, go much further.

Inflation is an absolute windfall for those who failed to save and have high debt levels. They are servicing their debt with essentially free money. That is what the bankers are doing now.

The government/politicians hate deflation. People with debt whine. Debt laden bankers don't make campaign contributions or offer interest free loans. They love inflation. Fiat currency. Backed by nothing. Paper.

In fact, as I stood in a local grocery store the other day, eyeing the cheapest sandpaper style toilet paper at 3.99 for a package of four rolls, I asked a man doing the same, "when did toilet paper get so expensive?" He looked at me and said that it may soon become cheaper to wipe your backside with dollar bills.

I got a visual. Paper cuts. That sort of thing.

Now a couple of days ago, I stumbled onto a very interesting thing. A guy saving pre 2006 nickels and pre 1982 pennies. You see as it turns out, a penny is worth two cents in melt price. A nickel may soon be worth 7 cents. As it turns out, 100% and 40% respectively are pretty good returns.

It costs more to produce and replace copper and nickel than it does paper. Frankenstein figured this out in 2006 and passed laws preventing the hoarding and melting of coins. Frankenstein is telling me what I can do with my money. Fascinating. He says it's his money.

Copper and nickel are commodities. They have value. Paper, except that used for personal hygiene, has very little value.

Frankenstein artificially devalued my paper by printing, flooding, and giving it away. But it can't do this with metals. All it can do is mint coins out of the most worthless pot metal it can find which of course- it will do soon.

And pass laws that prevent me from hoarding and recapturing the lost value of MY dollars by melting down MY coins. Frankenstein of course maintains that they are his coins. Imagine sitting in some federal joint-telling your murdering cell mate that you are in for melting nickels. That will undoubtedly get you all kinds of respect. Grow an eye in the back of your head, wear pants in the shower.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/2006-12-14-melting-ban-usat_x.htm

Make sure you read the part where the Mint guy says hoarders are robbing taxpayers. That part brought tears to my eyes.

Hey Franky I got an idea. Just pass a law requiring all countries to use our dollar as the reserve currency even if it completely collapses. If those countries don't comply and insist on using a currency with value, we'll pass some more laws and give them a fair trial. Stick them in prison. If that doesn't scare them, or they resist, hell... we can always start a war with them.