yeah I basically stopped posting in this thread because they made a special thread just for me there

every other politics thread I ever posted in (just about) ended up getting locked, lol

what information is it exactly that you are looking for? do you already have the austrian theory of the business cycle under your belt? because the whole boom bust cycle is caused by artificial monetary surplus which must eventually be followed by an artificial scarcity.

the classic metaphor is we are building a house of bricks. because the Fed keeps interest rates at levels well below the market, we think we have far more resources than we have, so we think we have enough bricks for a 4-bedroom home. 70% of the way into the project we discover that we are out of bricks. we now have an unfinished worthless pile of bricks that must be dismantled to rebuild into a 2-bedroom home, which is what we would have built in the first place if we hadn't been lied to about our resources, and now we have to pull further resources to finish our project.

really the best thing i have seen on this is this post by borodog which has lots of fun graphs. he should get a nobel for that post. his tl;dr: Artificial credit expansion causes the business cycle.

if you already knew all this and were looking for something else let us know what and i'm sure we can oblige you.

Explaining the news through Diplomacy:

http://www10.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/...a.html?_r=5&em

F Black Sea - Sevastopol (bounce)
A Ukraine - Sevastopol (bounce)

Yeah, that's a standoff alright. I suppose it'll intensify if the Russian Black Sea Fleet gets support from Moscow and Ukraine gets support from Armenia or Rumania.

basically a totally one-sided article that continues the myth that Russia is being the aggressor-- although at least we can give them credit this time for not just flat out lying and saying that it was Russia that attacked Georgia last year, even if they did insinuate it...

Hear Hear.

The Georgians for some delusional reason expected to maintain their border as it was since the dissolution of the TSFSR in 1922. 86 years isn't enough time to legitimize a border. Come on. That's just crazy expansionist talk. Their move within their own rightful borders was pure aggression.

And the Ukranians? Just because Russia gave the Crimea to Ukraine 55 years ago, it doesn't mean Ukraine actually owned it. It stayed Russian the whole time. Everyone knows that. When you do the hard work of ethnic cleansing on a peninsula to rid it of the Tatars, you're the real owner regardless of whatever laws and agreements you enter to give it away.

You can't really justify Georgia's actions last year in South Ossetia. They killed Russia peacekeepers and then attacked civilians. And if their intent was to try and maintain their border then all it did was cause the exact opposite effect and made Georgia look like crap within the international community.

I don't know enough about whats going on with the Ukraine so I'll refrain from commenting on that.

So Dustin (or Soah),

How's Argentinian Politics? How's the news coverage of the US? Any overt bias'?

Are they still smarting over that Falkland thing? (j/k )

kind of the same way it's tempting to shove your thumb into a meat grinder

MarkK,

I just worked on a really long post about Argentinian politics that failed to post and then disappeared and now I'm on semi life-tilt.

I will say that my Spanish isn't good enough to follow the news closely enough to look for biases. At some point soon I'll work on a post about Argentinian politics/history again-- although I would guess that Argentinian politics is more driven by real issues between the have and have-nots than the sort of superficial media driven left-right politics of the United States.

name a real issue between the have and have nots

money, allocation of resources (aka money)

taxes (money)

destruction of the environment (especially with the Indians)

I am His Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
— Alexander Pope

yes there was a similar ending to my sentence that i deleted. That post you linked to looks v good. I've only read the first half so far.

Can I ask, would I be right in thinking the cash for clunkers programme (assuming it's the same as the uk version - being paid to trash perfectly workable cars) is actually economic madness?

see quote above.

I don;t really know any economic history, but iirc, there are some interesting works which compare the US and argentina some time in the C19(?), and one is a newish country with vast expanses of space, teeming with resources, burgening with new possibilities and hope and potential, and the other is, you know, the US, and that that the US turns into the global hegemonic evil empire it is and argentina is a basket case would appear to be surprising.

It's the broken window fallacy. The link is an excerpt from economics in one lesson, which is paraphrasing Bastiat.

Taxes break windows.

Its been said that the Argentinians don't have a very strong work ethic, so perhaps that has something to do with their relative stagnation, and that was a point that I had meant to make earlier in response to this, but whats prompting me to post now is that as Soah and I were walking back from the grocery store earlier today there was a little girl who couldn't have been more than 5 singing a song-- and I didn't quite catch the first few words that she sang, but "no quiero trabajar" I heard quite clearly. It was a catchy tune.

* found it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkU-0IhVTcI

This podcast about the SEC and the CFTC is a pretty damming indictment of the US government response to the End of the World(TM). I find it amazing, not that the state is so ****ed up that it can't do something everyone agrees it should (not that i think it would make a blind bit of difference, but w/e, they're trying in their own little way), but that everyone is so sanguine about the abject failure.

you gotta admit, this is funny

Here's a graph of an Asian fund. They're pretty good, afaik, but the strength of the rebound in the markets is pretty amazing.

Micheal Moore is a source of mild frustration to me because he is very intelligent and sees many things very clearly, and obviously cares about people, but is crippled by his partisanship which forces most discussions about his movies into simpleminded crossfire-style rep v. dem argument rather than the content of his otherwise interesting work.

Now with that off my chest, what the ****ing **** is Wolf Blitzer doing in this interview? What does he think his job is? To defend democracy and capitalism and accuse Moore of being a socialist? And this is CNN, not FOX. There is simply no possibility of discussing ideas. Mind you, I think he's wrong a lot, my issue is with the level of discussion. This is why I don't watch the news.

Michael Moore.....

Is either a disinformation artist or an idiot

not sure which (although I do have an idea)

You say he's either lying or stupid. I disagree completely. I think he is neither lying nor stupid, which is why he interests me. What fundamental error is he making that, if corrected, would open his eyes to the idea that government is not your friend and that democrats are not superior to republicans or even distinguishable except for issues so petty that people feel obliged to exude considerable vitriol on their behalf?

No. Not exactly. I think his lies are lies of omission and not lies of commission.

9/11 ought to do it. His 9/11 stance is pretty lol and his movie couldn't have missed the mark more.

Again, I'm not talking about whether he's correct or not. I couldn't agree less with him about any of his conclusions. I think what I was trying to tease out of my jumble of thoughts was that he correctly perceives that something is wrong with everything about the way our country is run. Except he then draws absolutely incorrect conclusions about what a rational response to that situation would be, and how it got that way.

I haven't seen Capitalism: A Love Story but in the preview he gets in the face of these Wall Street jerks who make billions by ****ing you over and manipulating markets, which is a good and fun thing to do in a movie. But I bet you anything that his idea of how to fix it is more regulation, more government bureaus to monitor activity, more more more.

He's right that what goes on in the USA is not capitalism, but wrong that it isn't capitalism because the government isn't involved enough in the economy. Dead wrong. Everything any government ever does to any economy is drain resources from it and **** it up. He thinks that markets become freer by regulating them more heavily. This is the exact opposite of reality in every way.

So why does he think that?

Noam Chomsky is the same way.

Well. Tbh I think its deliberate. I don't have much proof to back it up with, but it makes sense.

*other people that I think are on the payroll include Amy Goodman (duh) and Vincent Bugliosi