MAD AS HELL AND...

From the Pragmatic Capitalist via The Business Insider we finally have someone giving the American Republic and the American People the “straight dope.”  There is a lot we could say here, but the Pragmatic Capitalist says it all…

 

Will The “Cult of the Equity” Investor Die?

“RBS recently published a dramatic and very bearish research note that described equity investors as “the world’s worst cult”.  While I thought the note was a bit over the top it did raise some interesting and thought provoking topics.  More specifically, they said:

“The big turnover in the US economy will lead to dramatic turns down in valuations we suspect – and may finally destroy the world’s worst cult: the cult of the equity, which has no basis in fact, or history, but yet seems universally accepted.”

The credit crisis is a reflection of our excesses and this is best reflected in the markets.   We have become a society that values those who get rich quick over those who create sustainable and productive businesses.  This is nowhere more apparent than it is in the financial sector which has become the epicenter of the crisis.  Our bloated financial sector steals our best minds and puts them to work doing little of real value while rewarding them excessively.  The excess growth of this industry has coincided with Main Street’s obsession with Wall Street.  While the buy side reaps the rewards of 2 & 20 or 2% funds fees for what is effectively an index fund (sorry mutual fund managers) the sell side reels the small investor in with the myth of becoming the next Warren Buffett.  The result?   What RBS would call the worst cult in history – an economy that has become transfixed with making money by effectively doing nothing.

We have spent more than we have and lived well beyond our means.  We buy every new Apple product, houses because we believe it is a right and not a privilege, and think of debt as a way to keep up with the way of life that God bestowed upon us.  It is not sustainable and this is becoming clear to us all as the economy appears to be in a perpetual stall.  The worst part in all of this is that we have tried with all our might to prop up a sector that has failed us all.  While Main Street struggles Wall Street is back to their old tricks.”

Now this is a Man that actually KNOWS UP FROM DOWN!  The Pragmatic Capitalist continues this incredibly insightful post…

“As a nation I sometimes wonder if a depression wouldn’t set us straight.  I have often cited the “greatest generation” in this regard.  They were not great because they believed they were owed a way of life.  They were great because they were raised by a nation of hardened Americans.  A generation that fought in a world war, struggled through a depression and was rewarded with another world war.  Their children were a product of that environment and a general “toughness”.

Many graybeards have proclaimed that the equity markets likely won’t bottom until we see excessively low valuations.  The kinds of valuations that coincide with window jumping and vomiting (usually on ones self).  This would likely coincide with a truly breath taking equity decline – a true death of the “equity cult”.  In a recent letter John Hussman proclaimed that bear markets generally crush Wall Street to powder: “quite honestly, it’s difficult to envision a return to long-term saving, productive investment, and thoughtful allocation of capital until – as happens every two or three decades – the speculative elements of Wall Street are crushed to powder.”

Is this time truly different?  For the good of the country, let’s hope not….”

All we can say here at Mad As Hell And is….

AMEN TO ALL THAT Pragmatic Capitalist!

…..and that Thomas Jefferson knew long ago about the dangers of the Las Vegas Gambling that is often referred to as “Wall Street.”

 

“All the capital employed in paper speculation is barren and useless, producing, like that on a gaming table, no accession to itself, and is withdrawn from commerce and agriculture where it would have produced addition to the common mass… It nourishes in our citizens habits of vice and idleness instead of industry and morality… It has furnished effectual means of corrupting such a portion of the legislature as turns the balance between the honest voters whichever way it is directed.” –Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1792

Thomas Jefferson and the Pragmatic Capitalist are talking the same talk about these Vegas Gamblers on “Wall Street” that are diverting TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS from the Real Economy in our country!

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The Unemployment Insurance Debate in Washington DC seems to dealing with everything but the real problem in the United States today.  The problem is that right now there are very few jobs for job seekers and if the United States Government is going to have a policy of paying unemployed Americans for months on end when they cannot find work then the Government should just go ahead and step-in and create work for the jobless to do.

 

Our proposal here at Mad As Hell And…

The Work For America Program

Current Unemployment Insurance Amount:  $300 dollars weekly approx.

Since there is lot of work that can be done in communities throughout the United States, cleaning up parks, painting, rebuilding public facilities, cleaning up schools, cleaning up roads, etc., why not create a new jobs program funded by the US Government?  Hell, we are already paying out Unemployment Insurance for what will be over 99 weeks if the Congress acts this week, so why not get Americans to work with that same money?

Work For America Program would pay $100 dollars a week over the $300 dollars weekly amount that Unemployment Insurance now pays and any American could enter this new Work For America Program and they would then report to someone in their local county or city and be assigned work to do in the local community.

Maybe to encourage Americans to enter the Work For America program and to get them out doing work that needs to be done in every local community, we could require that after 90 days (3 months) of not finding work and taking Unemployment Insurance one would be required to then enter the Work For America Program if they still wanted to receive benefits from the American Taxpayer

Would there be waste in this type of jobs program?  Well, the government would be involved so of course there would be some waste, but it seems to us that it makes a lot more sense to create some kind of jobs program to gett long-term unemployed Americans back to work.  Yes, we can do this because we are the United States of America!  Let’s put Americans BACK TO WORK and get the Damn Country Moving Again!

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The Age of Aquarius crowd strikes again in the Bizarro-World that is the State of California!  This time it is parents of kindergarteners that are sending their kids to school without Whopping Cough vaccine and have filed “personal belief” vaccine waivers!  Oh, when will the madness end in California!

California Watch has the story on these Nuts that are putting their kids and communities in great danger:

Are 10,000 kindergartners driving whooping cough epidemic?

“Seven of the 12 California counties with the highest whooping cough rates also have above average rates of kindergarten students showing up to school with “personal-belief” vaccine waivers, a California Watch review of state data shows.

The state’s emerging whooping cough epidemic took center stage yesterday when a state public health official called on those caring for infants to get vaccines and to immunize children.

Clearly, the ailment is reaching epidemic proportions not seen since the 1950s, according to state public health officials.

But what’s less clear is how much the ailment is being spread by the 10,280 California kindergartners whose parents cite personal beliefs in declining to immunize them last year.

Last month, I reported on the high rate of cases in Marin County, where the county’s health officer pointed to personal-belief vaccine exemptions as a possible culprit.

The Bay Citizen expanded on my piece in an article in the New York Times, talking to Marin parents who declined to immunize their kids.

The controversy over kids and vaccines tends to pit public health officials, who favor vaccines, against jittery parents uncertain about the role that shots play in unexplained increases in autism and similar disorders.

Researchers took a global look at how personal-belief waivers drive whooping cough in a 2006 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They found that states – like California – that have easy-to-obtain-vaccine waivers saw a 90 percent higher incidence of whooping cough than other states.”

Oh, these are some Very Dumb and Very Dangerous People who are willing to risk the health of their neighbors, but also the health and lives of their own children!

“Looking at the 20 California counties with whooping cough rates above the state average of about 4 cases per 100,000 people, it’s a draw. Ten of those counties have more kids than the average state personal-belief exemption rate. Ten have fewer.

There’s another compounding factor to all of this. Counties with tiny populations, like Nevada (No. 1 in “personal belief” waivers), Del Norte and Siskiyou counties, tend to cluster to the top of rate lists, confounding the total picture. And larger counties seem to lag behind in their reporting (unless Los Angeles is truly seeing fewer whooping cough cases this year than last).

Oh, and another twist: Some California schools have vaccine exemption rates as high as 70 percent, a DPH spokesman told ABC News. According to that report, 175 schools have exemption rates of 20 percent or higher.

The final answer, perhaps, lies in a close look at the data, examining exactly where the vaccine exemptions and whooping cough cases meet.”

No, that’s not the final answer!  The final answer is giving parents the truth about the safety of vaccines and how their “personal beliefs” are putting everyone in danger, including their own kids’ lives.

Here’s the real kicker:  Here we have Real Science that has advanced over the past century and solved many of the diseases that used to strike kids during childhood, but we also have the Absolute Bogus Science of the Wacko Environmental Nuts that believe that all of us together can alter the environment of the Earth!

At the core of both “personal beliefs” is the selfishness and madness that any fantasy dreamed up by the Age of Aquarius crowd that puts them the center of the universe with all things judged relative to how thing affect them personally!  Got Global Warming?

As former NOBEL PRIZE WINNER in Physics and Stanford Professor Robert Laughlin recently said about the Wacko Environmental Nuts that believe in all this Global Warming Nonsense:

 

Please remain calm:  The Earth will heal itself

“Stanford University physicist Robert Laughlin says governments – and people generally – should proceed with more humility in dealing with climate change. The Earth, he says, is very old and has suffered grievously: volcanic explosions, floods, meteor impacts, mountain formation “and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict.” Yet, the Earth is still here. “It’s a survivor.”

Writing in the summer issue of the magazine The American Scholar, Prof. Laughlin offers a profoundly different perspective on climate change. “Common sense tells us that damaging a thing as old as [Earth] is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish – like invading Russia.” For planet Earth, he says, the crisis of climate change, if crisis it be, will be a walk in the park.

Relax, Prof. Laughlin advises. Let it be. “The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we gaze into the future,” he says, “not because it’s unimportant but because it’s beyond our power to control.” Whatever humans throw at it, in other words, Earth will fix things in its own time and its own way.

Prof. Laughlin is the co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for physics. Brilliantly imagined, incisively expressed and vastly entertaining, Prof. Laughlin’s essay on climate change (What the Earth Knows) has been adapted from his forthcoming book on the future of fossil fuels. (His 2008 book, The Crime of Reason, documented pervasive government and corporate “sequestering” of scientific knowledge.)

You can’t discuss climate change, Prof. Laughlin says, without looking backward across geologic time. He puts ordinary rainfall into perspective to illustrate the point. The rain that now falls on the world in a normal year measures a metre – “about the height of a golden retriever.” The rain that has fallen since the beginning of the Industrial Age measures 200 metres. The rain that has fallen since the age of dinosaurs would fill Earth’s oceans 20,000 times. The rain that has fallen since oxygen formed would fill the entire world 100 times.

Yet, the amount of water in Earth’s oceans hasn’t changed significantly in all of this time. In Earth’s most recent glacial melting, 15,000 years ago, the sea level rose by one centimetre a year for 10,000 years – and then abruptly stopped. The heat required to produce this melting was 10 times the total energy consumption of all human civilization.

Excess carbon in the atmosphere? It happens all the time. And Earth deals with it. Anything that humans do to mitigate it will be a waste of time. Governments and citizens delude themselves when they think they can make a difference.””

But the Age of Aquarius crowd then screams out, “But us driving electric cars and using our own bags at the grocery store is saving the Earth!”  Uhhhh…….Please get a clue!

 

Professor Laughlin continues as he puts the Woodstock Crowd in their place, which tragically for them, is not at the Center of the Universe!

“The Earth regulates climate change in geologic time, Prof. Laughlin says, “without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” If the Earth determines that Canada should freeze again, the best response would simply be to sell your Canadian real estate. The Earth moves on, Prof. Laughlin says. So should we.”

Oh, that has to hit the Age of Aquarius crowd RIGHT IN THE GUT!  No, they are not at the Center of Everything and No the Earth doesn’t give a rip if you drive a Tesla or Hummer!

Never underestimate the power of someone standing up and saying up and saying the world is coming to an end and YOU can save the planet.  Hey, P.T. Barnum made a fortune ripping off the same group of people in his lifetime and that “sucker being born every minute” didn’t stop when Barnum left the Planet!  Long after humans are gone from the Earth the Planet will still be spinning with the Sun still coming up every day and it won’t remember Humans no more than it remembers the Dinosaurs!  Don’t tell that to the Age of Aquarius crowd because they might lose their bearings completely!

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