EdCone.com

Artifacts from a sophisticated European culture older than the pyramids. More here.

Golf, a big business that takes itself too seriously and the press not seriously enough, has a problem: "The traditionally conservative golf media and Tour are, not surprisingly, skittish about reporting this story...Golf Digest, one of the largest golf publications in the world, has only posted AP articles and no personal opinions from their columnists on their website — for good reason, considering they are one of Tiger's sponsors."

The legitimate question of the day is, "Is a 0% funds rate creating the next financial bubble, and if so, will the Fed and other central banks raise rates proactively – even in the face of double-digit unemployment?"

No, replies Bill Gross to his own question.

"We will need another 12 months of 4-5% nominal GDP growth before Bernanke and company dare lift their heads out of the 0% foxhole – mini-bubbles or not."

Why?

The Fed is trying to reflate the U.S. economy. The process of reflation involves lowering short-term rates to such a painful level that investors are forced or enticed to term out their short-term cash into higher-risk bonds or stocks. Once your cash has recapitalized and revitalized corporate America and homeowners, well, then the Fed will start to be concerned about inflation – not until.

If you apply the famous Kübler-Ross model (aka the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) to public perceptions of the economy, where are we now? 

I still see a fair amount of denial, at least about the magnitude of the problem. People want to pretend that this was just another recession.

Anger is very much alive, although often misdirected.

There's plenty of bargaining under way, too. If only we buy enough stuff on a magical Friday, then the gods will be appeased...

I'm hoping Depression is a metaphorical term in this case.

Accepting the reality that market worship is a failed religion, and moving past the fantasy of a post-regulatory culture, can't happen soon enough.

"The cracks in Dubai’s property sector were showing long before last week...The most conservative estimates put the supply of new houses coming onto the market over the next two years at 40,000. According to other estimates, up to 25 per cent of residential units are already empty." At least they've still got the indoor ski mountain.

Nicholson Baker reviewing a Ken Auletta book about Google?

That's like chocolate sauce on ice cream on top of a brownie, but not fattening.

OB. Bad lie. Scratch golfer.

The puns, they write themselves.

Something I learned while reading the chart in the preceding post: there is a Wade Hampton County in Alaska.

Growing up in North Carolina, I've known people and places named for the Confederate general, but Alaska?

I know you're all like, duh, it was named by his son-in-law, the Woodrow Wilson appointee John Randolph Tucker, and includes Alakanuk and Nunam Iqua (formerly Sheldon Point), but it was news to me.

I'm sure the deep thinkers at the Cato Locke Heartland Enterprise Institute are picking apart these numbers even as you read this post, and writing policy papers pointing out that many of those implicated deserve to be poor anyhow, but still, damn, we are one broke-ass country.

How long until we start hearing that the Dubai meltdown was caused by the Community Reinvestment Act?

NYT follows yesterday's article on the ethanol glut with an op-ed against raising ethanol mandates:

Allowing a higher percentage of ethanol in gasoline will not make us less dependent on such foreign energy sources. It will not help the environment. It will not lower consumer prices. And it will result in the poor of the world having less to eat. Instead of raising federal mandates on ethanol, Congress and the Obama administration should end them entirely.

Somebody remind me...which state kicks off the presidential primary season, and which state is Obama from?

"This is what is commonly referred to as default."

Overhyped, overbuilt...who woulda thunk it? This guy, who adds: "This is not a garden-variety recession and recovery. It is a recession within a longer-term depression. And while we are in a technical recovery, I believe much of the fundamental problems which triggered this downturn are still there, lurking. The debt troubles at Dubai World bring this point home."

"The City of Pittsburgh has agreed to pay $50,000 to a man who sued after being issued a disorderly conduct citation for gesturing offensively at a police officer."

More: "[C]itizens of a free country are not required by law to automatically treat government officials with deference and respect --- and the culture that says they are is an authoritarian one."

Previously: "Americans just don't seem to be as libertarian as I expected them to be on this subject."

Lisa Scheer took this pic last month near Beijing's Ya Show market.

Who's eating what, where, on Thanksgiving.

We have a squash casserole so good that small children eat squash.

Lisa Scheer took this pic quite recently in Reidsville.

Allegedly concerned about the deficit, but unwilling to do something about it: "Most have not been aggressively pushing cost containment proposals."

More:

A cynic may suggest they were never as fiscally conservative as they let on. Some have preferred repeating bromides about fiscal conservatism to engaging in the details of cost-cutting. Others, like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and many Blue Dog Democrats in the House, have seemed mainly interested in securing Medicare dollars for rural areas. Still others — including Joe Lieberman, who represents a state, Connecticut, that is home to many insurance executives — have seemed obsessed with the so-called public insurance option. None of these positions will fix the health care system.

"SECURE OUR U.S. BOARDERS," shouts the George Hutchins Meetup page.

Regardless of your stance on other issues, surely we can agree that Americans who abide by the terms of rental agreements deserve a measure of security.

Hutchins is featured prominently on the web page of the National Independents Movement, which shares an aesthetic with his own site. "George Hutchins has been an N.I.M. Crown Government Officer since the year 1989."

Much discussion here, including some close reading of the site and speculation on the realness of it all.

Despite repeated claims to that effect, I'm guessing that George Hutchins is not the Republican who can beat David Price in 2010.

Atrios: "Geocities called. They want their website from 1997 back."

That design critique, while accurate, doesn't begin to capture the magic of the site, with its call for "Spanish" voters to join him in opposing the "Gay Male Homosexuals" who brought down the British Empire, and its comparison of the Obamas to characters on Sanford and Son, and, well, you really must see it for yourself.

This kind of thing would bother me more if I watched CNN.

"It's your birthday!" announces that #34 is to receive a random strip-down and cavity search to be performed by a leering, rotund officer.

Tweets allegedly from imprisoned Pulp Fiction screenwriter Roger Avary.

Has it really come to this?

Your dog is not a person, it is a dog, and that is a good thing. As previously noted, "to anthropomorphize her would be to waste an opportunity."

Your child is a person, but one who must be prepared for life as an independent, productive adult. A measure of discipline is part of the process.

Nothing wrong from learning stuff from teevee but maybe you ought to think about it before you start breeding.

First, do no harm collect fifteen hundred bucks.

A doctor goes VIP, leaving a longtime patient behind.

"Florida real estate" was synonymous with "scam" by the 1920s, I think. We are not always a nation of fast learners.

[N]egative equity "is an outstanding risk hanging over the mortgage market," said Mark Fleming, chief economist of First American Core Logic. "It lowers homeowners' mobility because they can't sell, even if they want to move to get a new job."

What the people who are flipping out about the treatment of Palin should be asking themselves is what it means when it's not just jerks like us but everybody piling on against Palin. For those of you who can't connect the dots, I’ll tell you what it means. It means she’s been cut loose. It means that all five of the families have given the okay to this hit job, including even the mainstream Republican leaders. You teabaggers are in the process of being marginalized by your own ostensible party leaders in exactly the same way the anti-war crowd was abandoned by the Democratic party elders in the earlier part of this decade. Like the antiwar left, you have been deemed a threat to your own party’s "winnability."

The establishment press serves the establishment, duh. There are problems with Taibbi's logic -- the moral equivalence of opposing a bad war and supporting a bad candidate chief among them -- but the part about Dean and Kerry and the herdlike media is important to understand.

"The Online Media Legal Network (OMLN) is a network of law firms, law school clinics, in-house counsel, and individual lawyers throughout the United States willing to provide pro bono legal assistance to qualifying online journalism ventures and other digital media creators."

More here. Thanks to RR for the pointer.

These folks have been helpful to me in the past.

Guy can't even hike the Appalachian Trail without getting in trouble.

Our former governor has serious, if more prosaic, air travel issues of his own. 

Reader M got a rate increase on her latest bill from Time Warner Cable:

As I received no prior notice, I called FCC, who told me they do not regulate Time Warner, I should call the Franchising Authority listed on the bill. I called City of Greensboro, who is listed on the bill as the FA, who told me they are no longer the FA, it is the state.

Time Warner tells me the FCC is who I should call with this concern. They also told me they sent a letter advising of a price increase. They may have sent it, but I never received it, though they are sending a copy at my request. (I only have internet with TW.)

My complaint is not the 12+% price increase, it is with the fact that I got no notification, and subsequently got the run-around, and I think they are required to give a 30 day notice of price increases.

Letters get lost. The real problem this illustrates is the lack of accountability with which Time Warner operates. 

The outgoing City Council vowed action on this issue, but little or nothing seems to have happened. Maybe the new Council will recognize the seriousness of the problem.

Church-state separation is a common metaphor in journalism, where it refers to the wall between editorial and publishing concerns. I wonder how that worked at the Washington Times, which allegedly got more than half its operating budget directly from Rev. Moon's church.

Zynga has created a 'Cash Cow' in FarmVille!

Even viewed through a "may be valued" filter, and with a skeptical eye to the "66,841,884 monthly active users" claim on FB, the growth is pretty startling.

Thnx to alert reader G for the link. Previously.

Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today's low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

The debt is worrisome (and, unfortunately, largely necessary), but is the United State really facing the default risk of an overextended home-buyer? I don't think so.

Maybe the Times should have run a disclaimer about the writer's personal expertise on the subject.

"People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen," says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects.

Hmm. Maybe people who believe in pixie dust, even in its metaphorical form, are not the ones we want analyzing important projects?

Just to clarify after yesterday's cryptic post about disgusting leakage: I am one of the few North Carolinians who does not have syphilis. I just have a cold.

In this episode, Matlocke uses his folksy wisdom to control the federal judiciary.

Hagan had just been elected to the Senate. That Saturday morning, Clifford walked into her living room and told her that the 15-seat 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had just one North Carolina member, a Republican, and that it needed more.

Something I was wondering about, which tells you the theme of my weekend.

My newspaper column continues the occasional Thanksgiving tradition of listing, alphabetically, things and people for which I give thanks.

Hacked emails blow climate debate wide open...or, not.

"I have no interest in belonging to a top-down, good-old boy's club." Progressive Democrats vs NCDP.

I'd set the exemption a little higher than the $2 million proposed here, but the larger ideas work pretty well.

There is a big difference between wealth acquired through hard work and creativity and wealth bestowed as an accident of birth, and Congress should not be afraid to make this distinction. Keep in mind that inherited wealth is completely free of income taxes. Thus, while a person who earns $200,000 by working must contribute more than $50,000 in federal taxes, a person who inherits $200,000, or even $200 million, pays no income taxes at all.

What I actually went to China to do: look serious during the simultaneous translation while waiting to use that mic in my hand. Only conference I've attended where speakers got boutonnières, and my speaker pass read "Distinguished Guest."

"I needed to sort through the lives of these men I loved, to follow the trails of their daily lives."

Joe Killian eulogizes his grandfather and his uncle, fishermen lost at sea.

UPDATED link now open to everyone.

I was grateful for "Damn the Torpedoes" when it came out, both for the music and the message that rock was not yet dead, and I'd put this on my list of best-ever videos, and Benmont Tench is a great name, and in general I just like Tom Petty without really worrying about his place in the critical pantheon -- his image, at least, is antipantheonistic.

But "Better Than Bruce?" is a decent enough barroom argument, although I think that after one has teased out all the meanings of "better" it's a pretty clear "no" in this case.

Just a bad plan all the way 'round: "Arnholt said that banning the media would not only be illegal, but it would not solve concerns about a political incident because so many people have personal blogs, post video to YouTube and pass information and pictures on social Web sites."

"The degree of venom aimed at Mr. Geithner is also unusual, as was his willingness to fire back." Article, video.

Kay Hagan, in a statement released today: "We have taken a critical step forward in the process of getting a bill to the President's desk."

Full statement after the jump.

UPDATE: Richard Burr is less enthusiastic. Apparently the Democrats and their bureaucratic henchmen are going to ruin healthcare. His statement after the jump, too.

Guitarist in the backing band is Jimi Hendrix, 1965; allegedly the oldest known footage of him performing. What a difference two years can make. Thnx to PLN for the link.

File footage, the propagandist's best friend, again.

Left, a huge pro-Palin crowd prepares a human sacrifice in protest of the recent Newsweek cover.

"It's going to be a holy war," Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said Wednesday evening.

Wow. I thought it was going to be a debate over health care legislation. I am totally underdressed.

"Mr. Griffin expressed exasperation at investors' desire to keep dissecting last year's disaster, comparing their fascination with people's inability to look away from a car crash."

So a hedge fund blows up. It happens!

And it wasn't even their fault: "Citadel's biggest mistake last year, Mr. Griffin said, was putting too much faith in regulators' ability to deal with the global meltdown."

Please send more money, now.

More on the rise of outside-in technology, from Google CIO Ben Fried: "My bet was that some of these fast movers will sit on a rocket to the C-suite. Some of the people from that generation are going to be the CIO's bosses. And they'll say, 'What do you do? I've never used any of your services or respected any of them.'"