I had to add these quotes cited in Bloomberg from Messrs. Geithner, Greenspan, and Summers, on the economy, because they make a pretty good illustration of the government’s spin on the economy and serve up a nice contrast to the not-so-pretty reality underneath:

Geithner (Treasury Secretary): “There are signs the recession is easing. The broad consensus of private forecasters is that you are going to see positive growth in the second half of this year and expect that to continue.” It is “not clear yet” how strong growth will be, he said.

Greenspan (former Federal Reserve Chairman): “Collapse, I think, is now off the table. I’m pretty sure we’ve already seen the bottom. In fact, if you look at the weekly production figures for various different industries, it’s clear that we’ve turned, perhaps in the middle of last month, the middle of July.”

Summers (Director of the White House National Economic Council): “While the economy will resume growth in the second half of the year, the job picture will be serious for some time to come.” [indirect quote until “the job picture…come”].

Meanwhile, outside the spin zone, Mark Hulbert at Market Watch notes that “Corporate insiders have recently been selling their companies’ shares at a greater pace than at any time since the top of the bull market in the fall of 2007.”

ORIGINAL POST
“Those “green shoots” were either marijuana plants (and were being smoked by the media) or worse, they have been running around with cans of green spray paint, “colorizing” the dead brown weeds, then pointing at them and screaming “green shoots!”

— Karl Denninger

Over at Market Ticker, (via 321gold) the estimable Karl Denninger has a good analysis of what the GDP figures this morning really mean.

The money part:

*Consumer debt peaked in January of 2009 and is on a decline. This means that spending is going to decline, and now we’re seeing it.  Durable goods orders were down (despite the pumping of “better” durables reported month after month on CNBC!) and non-durables – that is, consumed goods (in the short term) decreased as well.

*Both import and export demand has effectively collapsed! We are now anywhere from 40 to 60% below comparable levels on imports and exports.  Those who believe that “China will save us” are delusional; how is that going to work when half of their exports to us are gone?  Bluntly: The alleged “Chinese recovery” is a manipulated lie from the Chinese government.

* Personal current taxes decreased $113.1 billion in the second quarter, compared with a decrease of   $241.7 billion in the first. You only pay taxes on earned and unearned income.  It is collapsing.

My Comment:

Well, that explains the dollar index plunging below 78 this morning, for the first time this year. Look for more pressure on the dollar and some support for gold, keeping it at the higher end of the trading range it’s been in.

Meanwhile, other writers are hazarding a guess at how this cosmic effort to prop up Treasury bonds will all play out – an interesting one being future Yuan-bond issuance by the US government and/or the sale of US property and farmland to the Chinese….

I’m reading the reviews of “Bruno,” apparently a new and “shocking” movie that’s a take-down of the hetero world by homos… or a satire of the way heteros look at homos (shade of the “Obama jihadist” picture by the satirists at the New Yorker)…or a homo-hetero fable… or some such convoluted high-brow business, depending on whom you’re reading.

Whatever.

The idea that gross sexual displays or vulgar language or imagery is at all transgressive in the West…or East.. any more is a bit funny. Grossness is mainstream. It’s big business.

At best, Bruno, I imagine, is a toilet-brush scratching the nostrils of a few suburbanites who on all other counts embrace the ethos from which it rises – the worship of mass taste ….and the reflexive genuflection before the god of “art,” which now means practically anything in print or screen of any quality.

To be truly transgressive today, you’d have to adopt the persona of a nun, believe in the Holy Ghost and Resurrection day….oppose abortion….or cling to your guns…

Notice how in some of the panegyrics to the movie, the word “red-neck” gets thrown around. “White-trash” too.

Some transgressions it seems are a lot more respectable than others.

Censor Bruno? Never.

That would be giving a bit of money-making trivia far too much importance. I’d as soon censor the contents of an old, abandoned sewer. As much garbage circulates in the veins of modern culture, a break-out every now and then on its aging face is no more than a symptom. Bruno is a pimple for aging adolescents to pinch, poke, and rub anxiously, as they primp in front of the mirror.

The rest of us who aren’t nearly so self-absorbed can settle down to any number of real books and films…

Tim Wise at Counterpunch rebuts the notion being passed around (in the National Review, among others) in the aftermath of the Gates affair – that some degree of racial profiling might be unavoidable, and even appropriate, because disproportionate numbers of blacks commit violent crimes.

“For every 4.6 stops of whites, police are able to make an arrest, while they have to stop 7.3 blacks before finding evidence of criminality (4). What does this suggest? Nothing to Heather MacDonald, apparently, but to honest people it says this: police are more likely, on the basis of unjustifiable suspicion, to stop blacks than whites, and they are uniquely bad at predicting black criminality…….

But I doubt they would actually like where the underlying logic of their position leads. Indeed, if we are to use data to justify disparate treatment of this kind, we would need to go further than Charen or MacDonald would likely approve. For instance, whites have much higher rates, in all years, of drunk driving (5): so by the logic of Charen and MacDonald, police should put all their roadblocks and sobriety checkpoints in the suburbs and white rural areas, in order to catch the folks most likely to be guilty of a DWI. Likewise, whites have rates of child sexual molestation almost twice as high as the rates for blacks, according to the available data (6), so perhaps these two will soon call for rational discrimination against whites seeking to adopt? Or what about the corporate misconduct in which whites seem clearly to predominate? Will conservatives now call for affirmative action as a form of crime control in corporate America? After all, white men are demonstrating their ineptitude and even criminality repeatedly at the highest levels. Of course, they will do none of these things.”

My Comment

To Wise’s excellent points, I should add the following.

1. Psychological testing (tests by Banaji, Greenwald etc.) has shown that subconsciously even well-intentioned blacks tend to class random black faces displayed to them as less intelligent, less attractive, and less honest than white faces. That is, a high degree of color prejudice is simply built into current cultures – world over.

2. Psychological testing has also shown that groups naturally create an “outsider,” against whom they bond, during a polarized debate. And outsiders are created even among racially homogeneous groups, over trivial differences. The creation of outsiders thus seems coded into us.

Adding our assent to racial profiling as somehow rational and justified as a form of short-hand for genuine information-processing only tips the balance even more against innocent people. And then, factor in the rapid militarization of the state and its ever increasing belligerence to the population, white or black.

No. It’s one thing to argue that ordinary people are justified in making these sorts of rough calculations when they choose which neighborhood to walk through. Of course they are. It’s another to encourage state thuggery for the same reason.

Meanwhile, at least citizens get a choice about which neighborhood to walk through.
What choice do you have over financial crimes committed by the Treasury itself?

Yep. Them jihadis get bolder and bolder:

“A North Texas woman is asked to leave a Balch Springs Social Security office after a guard accused her of carrying dangerous weapons: her knitting needles.

“The armed guard came up to me and said I have to take that outside,” said Rachel Vines.”

Vines said the only thing she was trying to kill inside the waiting room was time.

Consumer Society: Massive amounts of packaging containing nothing. An invention of great scientific value that allows the suppression of real needs by the imposition of artificial ones. However, the Consumer Society meets certain resistance in backward areas. (Statement of Don Pampero Conde, native of Cardona, Uruguay: “What good is the cold if I don’t have an overcoat.”)

— Eduardo Galeano (Dictionary of the New World Order, 1991)

From the interesting blog, Surviving Argentina, by Fernando Ferfal:

“According to the very questionable INDEC, that favors the government:

*50% of the people under 18 years of age in Argentina are poor. This does not include the people that are indigent (people that lack the basic needs such as the minimum amount of calories per day to stay alive and a home)

*10% Of the Argentines are indigent. Back when the INDEC was a reliable source of information before Gillermo Moreno and his thugs took over it, the number was 20%

*The amount of shantytowns, camps made of shacks with pieces of cardboard wood and debris, tripled since 2001.(doesn’t add up with that 10% indigent number)

*46% of the indigent receive “some kind” of help from the government. (May be just a couple bags of food, usually a packet of formula for babies)

*17% of the poor receive “some kind” of help from the government (the social plans are usually 300 pesos, less than 100 dollars, and those mostly are used to pay the political foot soldiers that can be seen in campaign rallies)

*According to the INDEC’s own numbers, taking into consideration the amount of poor, indigents and the amount of money spent each year in social care, 50% of what is spent each year in social plans would be enough to give each poor family a yearly salary that would put them out of the poverty line.
Meaning, with the amount of money spent by the Argentine government in social plans (the ones you just don’t see anywhere), it would be enough to end poverty in Argentina… TWICE.

We have one of the largest tax in the world, 21% for everything, plus savage income taxes, taxes for services and luxury goods.

They take the money, they milk the middle class, they just don’t spend it where they say they do.”

My Comment:

Ferfal has been mentioned by a couple of readers, so I took the time to check out his blog. It’s very informative and disturbing. And it confirms what I’ve heard on the street, now, as well as a few years ago (2006), when I was previously in these parts. At the time, I was looking into whether Buenos Aires was a good place for an expat. I wrote then that it was a good option for someone young who wanted to get a foot-hold in the work-place, for the adventurous, and for telecom workers. That’s still pretty much true. I also wrote that apartment prices in Buenos Aires were probably nearing a peak, and that you’d have to look carefully, if you wanted your investment to be safe.

I was looking for an apartment for myself at the time and almost did buy. But eventually, the thought of the 12-hour plane flight from the US, the expense (round-trip tickets usually go for around a $1000 and can run as high as $3000-4000, if you’re in a hurry), and the logistics made me reconsider.

Buenos Aires is still not a bad investment, in my opinion. It just depends on where and for how much you buy, how long your time-frame is, and what sorts of costs you incur during that time.

But I didn’t consider the country the best place for investment for a foreigner in South America then. And I still don’t. Especially with the Kirchners at the helm

It’s a place for adventure and for risk-taking and for lone-wolf ventures of certain kinds. Business-wise, libertarians on the lam can do better elsewhere.

Popular Mechanics has a terrific list of one hundred skills – from automotive to technological to military – that every man ought to have in his repertoire. Women should have some of them down too (hat-tip to Lew Rockwell).

Mastering these may make more sense for libertarians than wrangling about court appointments. You’re also much more more likely to win over big-government friends if you can show them how handy you are.

There’s nothing more persuasive than someone who can walk the walk…

Paste them on your fridge door or computer screen and start working through the ones you think you could use. I don’t think I have even half of them down and mostly those are from the household category. Some of these skills seem pretty esoteric to me, though. I mean, do you really need to know how to “run rapids in a canoe” for everyday survival?

On the other hand, I can think of a few much more useful skills that are missing from the list….
Budget cooking, securing your computer from viruses and trojans, and cleaning up stains on different kinds of materials, for example…

And right now, understanding just how your bank and broker operate should be on the very top of any survival list.

What about, “Figuring out how much your really owe on that loan on your house” ?
Now, that was the only skill anyone needed to know in the last ten years.

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

– G. K. Chesterton

I’m a reluctant traveler.

I left India because I had to. The best libraries, the latest research, the most influential centers of learning are in the West. You can’t “make it” in India – or even just do well enough – without some sort of credentialing from the West.

I would have been quite happy to stay in the lap of my family, if it hadn’t been for that. Family life in India is usually more sheltering than family life in the West, even if it too is changing rapidly these days…

It took me nearly ten years to get out, from the first feverish scrawl to a New York college when I was twelve…. to the stamp on my passport in Chennai.

But Chennai wasn’t home either. In India, I lived in Ooty, in Bangalore, in Chennai, and in several smaller towns I’ve half-forgotten.

In America, I stayed put, circling Philadelphia and DC for nearly two decades.

There were many reasons for that. In the first place, the contrast between how much cars were used in America, and how much they weren’t in India, made me so guilty about driving that I forced myself to take buses and trains when I could. Overtly, there were other more obvious reasons for not driving. But the psychological factor was this…

I wasn’t producing enough to consume that much fuel, I told myself.

The calculus of production and consumption kept me occupied for the next decade.
It had a useful result. I became a dexterous saver.

I saved…on nothing.
On ten dollars an hour. On fifty-cent raises.
A dollar here. A hundred there.
I weighed tomatoes in the grocery store. I squinted at weights on labels.

I saved anxiously, religiously.
Waiting for shoes to drop, for rainy days.
For some hole of perpetual anxiety to fill.

It was a malarial guilt bred from the mosquito swamps of the poor and the deprived and the hungry and the crowded and the dirty and the dying and the malnourished and the sick that cling to the dark half of this planet.

Those were the days when buying a cup of coffee would send me into a melancholic funk, comparing what it cost me to what it cost my brother in India.

I knew the comparison was somehow not quite legitimate.
I made it anyway. It made buying anything difficult for me at first.

After ten years, the anxiety waned. I began to see that my calculations missed something – I’m not sure what.

The guilt eased, but the habit of saving remained.
And now I had the money to spend, I no longer wanted anything well enough to spend it on.
I listened to friends talking about their travels and I wondered….why?

You could watch a trek in the Himalayas, white-water rafting, scuba-diving or anything else wrapped up in a comforter at home. The adventurers and the vagabonds didn’t have all that much to show for their time or money except a few albums of photos, souvenirs, a few wild stories, memories.
Ruthlessly, I calculated the costs and the benefits and struck travel from my list of worthy activities.

Bah, humbug. It was nothing more than a status symbol, the epicurean whim of those who had more money than sense.

It was treating your fellow man like a creature in a zoo you poked bananas to through the bars. It was voyeurism. It was fetishizing geography, exoticizing human beings, consuming places like commodities. It was a waste of money, of energy — yours and the earth’s.

I still think some of those things. Only not so confidently.

I still only travel with a business or family purpose of some kind. I take pictures, not of unknown heroes arching on stone horses, but of empty houses. I tell myself it’s work.

Streets of old houses. Facades. Interiors.
Bathrooms. Patios. Stairways. Steps. Tile. Masonry. I climbed thousands of steps in the medinas of Morocco, examining the colors and the work of the old tile. Is it really 17th century, or is it revamped? I fingered the dates on plaster friezes. I climbed onto the roofs of crumbling mansions and talked to contractors about renovation costs, while other travelers drank in the bars and cavorted on the beaches.

My beaches are nearly always empty and wind-swept. They have gulls or pink flamingos or crows. There are rarely bodies, dressed or undressed.

There are few people in my pictures.

I don’t take pictures of people, and I ward them off myself. I have a horror of being captured by the lens of strangers and pinned to their albums forever. Of being passed around in their homes with coffee and dessert. I loathe the thought. It seems barbaric. If you can’t tape a conversation legally without someone’s permission, how can you film them?

So my travel album is stark.

Pictures of cathedrals and towers and mountains all over the world can be found every where. Why should I add to the clutter?

Toward the end of my visits, I start asking myself what about this trip was so necessary that it needed to harness steel monsters, burning through oceans of fuel, roaring inaudibly night and day in the clouds?

I have no good answer.

Then I saw Chesterton’s lines. There’s some small justification in them for the traveler.
They make sense. But oddly. In the opposite way.

Traveling hasn’t made me that much more a stranger in my two homelands.
I’ve always been a stranger in them. My sharpest memories are off alterity, not identity.

Traveling makes me realize I’m not as estranged from my twin motherlands as I often feel.
It shows me how much more of both I have in me than I think.

Friend and fellow Asian immigrant Suhayl Saadi gets more recognition for his original and linguistically inventive writing. Check out his new novel:

The Independent: ‘Joseph’s Box’ should have been a Booker contender

Suhayl Saadi’s novel

Joseph’s Box has been mentioned by The Independent’s literary editor Boyd Tonkin in an article on the Booker Prize as one of the novels that should have been a contender. Well, we did enter it … but, like Tonkin, have given up expecting anything other than the obvious from most big literary prizes. But it’s great to see some recognition for this stunningly original novel. Tonkin says: ‘We should never have expected a jury as orthodox in taste as the one James Naughtie chairs to seek out as waywardly extravagant a novel as Joseph’s Box by the Scottish doctor-author Suhayl Saadi, which drives us deep into the history and myths of Europe and south Asia alike. But, in a bolder year, he and other writers from non-corporate imprints might have stood a better chance.’

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/booker-back-in-mainstream-thanks-to-bigname-writers-1764013.html

Publication date is tomorrow (Friday 31 July). Take a look at the book-specific website, www.josephsbox.co.uk,  which is a whole world in itself. Order the book at only £10.99 (RRP is £13.99) or the e-book at just £7.