Don't Get Me Started

"'A report by Internet firm GMO Cloud characterises the difference as "self-escapism versus self-expression.' 

True or not, Grand Theft Auto is undoubtedly violent, especially when compared to Nintendo's award-winning 'Animal Crossing: New Leaf,' in which players take on the role of a mayor running a rural community. 

By contrast, past versions of Grand Theft Auto have included simulated sex with prostitutes and drunken driving, along with profanity-packed dialogue. Carjacking, gambling and killing are the staples of a game in which players take on the role of a psychopathic killer in fictional Los Angeles.'"

Excerpted from: Japan's gaming market is a world apart

What could be more socially instructive, more physically developing, more spiritually uplifting and exemplary, more all-around self-building, than hours, days, weeks, years, even decades on the couch of good healthy murder, joystick virtual sex with prostitutes, gambling, carjacking and DUI as fast mindfood, all while being a genuine psychopathic killer? Some paths just have to lead upward.

Can't wait for GTA XXV!

PAULSON SAYS "LET THEM EAT CAKE."

"The swindle of American taxpayers is proceeding more or less in broad daylight, as the unwitting voters are preoccupied with the national election. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson agreed to invest $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for Goldman Sachs, his old firm. But, if you look more closely at Paulson's transaction, the taxpayers were taken for a ride--a very expensive ride. They paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5 billion. That means half of the public's money was a straight-out gift to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return."

***

"How else to make sense of the bizarre decisions that have governed the allocation of the bail-out money? When the Bush administration announced it would be injecting $250bn into US banks in exchange for equity, the plan was widely referred to as 'partial nationalisation' - a radical measure required to get banks lending again. Henry Paulson, the treasury secretary, had seen the light, we were told, and was following the lead of Gordon Brown.

In fact, there has been no nationalisation, partial or otherwise. American taxpayers have gained no meaningful control over the banks, which is why the banks are free to spend the new money as they wish. At Morgan Stanley, it looks as if much of the windfall will cover this year's bonuses. Citigroup has been hinting it will use its $25bn buying other banks, while John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told analysts: 'At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion.'"

***

"Goldman Sachs is on course to pay its top City bankers multimillion-pound bonuses - despite asking the U.S. government for an emergency bail-out.

The struggling Wall Street bank has set aside £7billion for salaries and 2008 year-end bonuses, it emerged yesterday.

Each of the firm's 443 partners is on course to pocket an average Christmas bonus of more than £3million.

The size of the pay pool comfortably dwarfs the £6.1billion lifeline which the U.S. government is throwing to Goldman as part of its £430billion bail-out.

As Washington pours money into the bank, the cash will immediately be channelled to Goldman's already well-heeled employees."

***

In the old days, crowds would be heading for Wall Street with pitchforks, tar and feathers!

THIS EXPLAINS A LOT

INTERESTING QUOTES ON THE BAILOUT

"How much inflation has there been? From the signing of the Constitution right up until landing a man on the moon the whole American experience, every house, car, television, freeway, airplane, war... everything, cost one trillion dollars. Then consider that the debt ceiling has been raised 2 1/2 trillion dollars just this last 12 months. Do you see the value in that? Of course not; that is because you didn't get it. The rich bankers and their Wall Street friends that you are now being told you have to bail out got the lot."

--Sam Mathid

"It is just that simple. When the Secretary of the Treasury said it is too complicated and that time was critical and that no one needs to understand all this and that we just needed to give him the biggest blank check ever written in the history of the world and that he would be exempt from all prosecution and his use of these funds was final... I almost burst a blood vessel. The 700 billion dollar fund is just the start. How many times have you heard of a deal gone bad that asks for more money only to come back a while later and say they needed even more; and then more; and then more. Does anyone think it a bit odd that the very man asking for dictatorial power over the finances of these United States was the chairman of Goldman Sachs; one of the largest culprits that got us into this mess and that profited greatly in the process. We, as a country, are being asked to give a known arsonist the keys to the fire truck and then look the other way? We are being told that there is no other option but to give one of the very men who got us into this mess by unrestrained greed a blank check to spend with his cronies to fix the mess... with no oversight... and a get out of jail free card stapled to the check for good measure?"

--Larry LaBorde

"The scheme is actually pretty simple. Please forgive my primitive graphics abilities.
The fund will buy mortgages from the banks at market value, and then re-sell them back to the banks at a discount. The fund will then repurchase those mortgages from the banks, who will sell them back to the fund again. The same product (perhaps an ill-advised mortgage for a half-million dollars taken out on a house in the distant suburbs of Las Vegas) will be bought, then resold, then re-bought and re-resold in an endless spiral of profit-taking. The taxpayer will lose on every transaction, the banks robbing the treasury each time each mortgage, or package of mortgages is swapped.

It is amazing to observe the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from Main Street to Wall Street,from the many to the few. What is even more amazing is that nobody seems to be stopping it."

--breadwithcircus.com

"I was sitting at the table on Saturday night trying to figure out which bills to pay. Times are tough. I owe $25 billion on my GM Visa card and they are bitching about payment. I've been paying the minimum and the bastards just raised my interest rate to 31%. My AIG Master Card is sitting at $85 billion and they want to lower my credit limit. Like where am I supposed to raise enough money to pay that down?

My FDIC Sears card is bumping the limit at $150 billion but I may be able to hold them off for another month. It would be nice to have some money for food this month.

Then my brother-in-law Bill comes over. He's a nice guy but he's a crack addict and hits the bottle and my sister a little hard. But a nice guy at heart.

He hits me up for a loan. How can I turn him down? As I said, he's a nice guy. He needs $700 billion. Or is it trillion? Those numbers are so high I can barely cope with them. He needs $700 billion and he needs it now so he can sort out his crack problem. I can understand that, a crack problem needs sorting out.

'Here,' I say, 'Take my American Express Platinum card and punch it for the $700 billion. They may give you a little bit of a hard time but they know I'm good for it. I pay my bills mostly on time. What's $700 billion between friends?'

I know it's foolish but he really does need help with his crack problem and I want to do everything I can. My friends at American Express are sure to understand."

--Bob Moriarty

"We won the battle. Please remember this is a war."

--Mike Shedlock

And just a side note about caring from above:
"The Bush administration has abruptly halted a program that tests levels of pesticides in fruits, vegetables and other crops, arguing that the $8 million dollar a year program is too expensive."

--greendaily.com

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[October 4]

"Less than two weeks after Uncle Sam gave American International Group (AIG) an $85 billion loan - staving off financial collapse - execs from one of its insurance subsidiaries, AIG American General, gathered for a conference at the uber-swank St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort, billed as “California’s only Mobil Travel Guide Five-Star Resort,” where ocean-view rooms start at $565 a night and “world class luxury” is the rule."

BACK IN THE USSA

Hard to focus these days on the beauty of the autumn... I'll go out into it and take a deep breath, do some physical work right in the midst of all that actual magnificence, as soon as I post this...

Never thought I'd live to see what's going down in the US of late, particularly under what was ostensibly labeled a conservative administration; but then again, since when have political labels actually meant anything... China, the last major bastion of socialism, now looks to be a model of financial wisdom and capitalist probity compared to the US. Karl Popper once said that he knew socialism would fail because its success hinged upon the innate goodness of man. It appears that the same is true of capitalism.

The US taxpayers are now, without their consent or prior notice, the collectively puzzled owners of several (and soon to be more) failed financial services (or is it the other way around), with their neonotional debt limit not a freshly printed and inflationary 700 billion dollars (the figure being bandied about by those who don't want the public to know what's going on just yet beyond the smoke and mirrors), but hundreds (thousands?) of trillions of dollars. Money borrowed by the US government taxpayer from the private banking consortium known as the Federal Reserve, the taxpayers' new hedge fund.

I've always wondered why, if the Federal Reserve is a private corporation, it gets to use the .gov domain; just a little thing that bugged me; a small point, really-- never been so small before, though...

.....

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

---Alexis deTocqueville

GREED PAYS.

"The bailout of AIG has exposed more than just the collapse of Casino Capitalism. It exposes the governmental system to be as much a sham as our economy has been! How is it that $85 billion can just materialize to bail out this one insurance company (insuring for the most part, opaque, enormously complicated and risky investments) without so much as a session of Congress? Where is the appropriations committee in this matter? Where were they when the Bear, Stearns/JP Morgan deal went down on a Sunday?

What has been exposed here is the complete absence of the United States Government as it is supposed to work. In its place are Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke making decisions about spending sums of money equal to the budgets of many small nations – money that will have to be paid back by the taxpayers, who have seen none of the gilded rewards. You have had no say – nor have your impotent representatives."

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And as to Lehman's collapse the day before:
"The quoted amount of OTC derivatives on Lehman's books are not notional value, but some silly mark to no market. The real number is trillions. When either party to an OTC derivative fails the value of that derivative instantaneously become the size of what was previously called notional value. With one quadrillion, one thousand one hundred and forty four trillion (BIS) in notional value, there is NO means to stop this financial cataclysm." --Jim Sinclair

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"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." [emphases mine. RB]

What part of 'Democracy' don't they understand?

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Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle

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"The double standard is stunning:
their profits are their profits,
but their losses are our losses."

AT LEAST IT WASN'T PETER THE GREAT'S FOOT

I came to blessedly metric Japan, where everything is so simply factored in powers of ten, from a retroimperial USA where 1 inch (derived from the length of 3 archaic barleycorns) was about 0.08333 feet or about 0.02778 yards, and 12 inches equaled 1 foot (the length of some ancient king's you guessed it; good thing it wasn't Peter the Great, or we'd be getting a lot fewer miles per gallon today), 3 feet equaled 1 yard (the apocryphal distance between the nose and thumb of Henry I), 16 ounces equaled one pound, 2 cups equaled 1 pint, 2 pints equaled 1 quart or was it 4 pints - no, that's quarts to a gallon, which -- anyway, a fluid ounce was 1/12 or 1/16 or 1/20 of a pint, depending - there was a gill in there somewhere, as I recall... (The schoolhours I spent memorizing all that, then all the years forgetting it!)

There were also 8 quarts to the peck, 4 pecks to the bushel and what the hell else, which was handled in or troy or avoirdupois was it, to say nothing of apothecary and mariner measurements, there was a gill in there somewhere too, if memory serves, I still get pretty international just thinking about it, let me see, so a mile was 190,080 barleycorns or 5280 king's feet, depending on whoever that king was.

But as I say, since I moved here to Japan, things have gotten a lot simpler, I can do without barleycorns and regal pedality, just whip out the old divide/multiply by 10 technique, except when for example I must work from a carpentry diagram measured in fractions of regal feet and nose-fingertip distances, or when I buy things like my American woodstove, whose nuts and bolts are based on various cumulations of barleycorns, whereas my wrenches are rationally graded (try to imagine a nanoinch, and you'll see where this must ultimately end), the nuts and bolts therefore being irreplaceable here except by international snailmail, and to work them I have to get hold of some old barleycorn-based tools or find a king's foot somewhere, though they only have emperors here, with small metric feet...

Jimmy Carter was practically driven out of town for trying to change the US to the metric system, though scientists in the US have always used it (what have they got against kings' feet)?

However, a quick look at the world map of non-metric nations shows us that the USA is not alone in its quest to remain faithful to a few grains and an old regal extremity...


It shares its backward-looking determination with Myanmar and Liberia.

THE KAFKA RIDE

"Strict Inspections Being Carried Out for the Prevention of Terrorism" declare the long yellow banners with blood-red lettering that now adorn the wall of the vast immigration hall at Kansai International Airport here in Japan (whose few 'terrorists' in recent decades - that's when we're talking about, isn't it? - have been purely Japanese-- Red Army long ago, Aum Shinrikyo less long ago), where we frazzled potential terrorists are strung out in a long maze of lines like for a Kafka Ride at Disney World (as I was leaving the US, after they'd x-rayed my backpack, boots, hat and everything in my pockets and I'd passed the metal detector and been bodily wanded they critically confiscated my unopened bottle of water but let me keep my chocolate-covered almonds and raisins; luckily I wasn't wearing my New York 1984 t-shirt). I think of taking a picture of the banners, but I then I think of Guantanamo... I have the strong sense that the J-higherups are delighting in this opportunity to tighten the reins of power on an increasingly freedom-demanding public...

Every immigration booth for non-Japanese has a helpful sign above it in blue-light lettering that says "Foreign Visitors," we questionable aliens zigging and zagging through the maze where it's only by accident (an official woman going along the lines checking that customs forms are filled out properly so as to save some of the time being massively blackholed by this entire procedure) that I am found to have Permanent Residency (lived, worked, paid taxes, sent my kids to school here for 28 straight years thus far) and so as a returning alien potential terrorist am privileged to be directed to either of two booths that have a helpful sign above them in blue-light lettering that says "Foreign Visitors" to distinguish them from all the other booths that have a helpful sign above them in blue-light lettering that says "Foreign Visitors," the object apparently being to dementiate any returning alien potential terrorists who - many of them, as today, with potential terrorist kids - will wind up being no more dangerous than these long jet-lagged lines of innocent travelers awaiting their turn to figure out how to mugshot and fingerprint themselves over and over until they get it right, so that they will never again try to get into this country and spend a lot of money.

The Japanese government meanwhile is shelling out billions to encourage tourism from abroad. It all makes perfect sense, if you've ever taken the Kafka Ride.

BRADY DOES THE BREASTSTROKE
(This one's for Winston)

Went this afternoon down toward the beach to a large and renowned supermarket of the AmeriCal kind whose Grand Canyon aisles I love to wander, soaking up the full spectrum of largesse on offer-- the football fields of ice cream choices and the shorelines of beer selections, all unknown in my honorable country of residence.

The acreage of root beer alone always gives me pause, as do the Everests of cheeses, the cliffs of wines. Today, like one without a compass I stumbled into the Eden of the baked goods section and there in the distance beheld - do my eyes deceive me - what appeared to be an elaborate architecture of pies that Antonio Gaudi would have admired greatly, a Sagrada Familia of pies. Drawing nearer, I beheld towers of pies of apple, chocolate creme, key lime, lemon meringue, coconut creme, cherry, berry, pecan - the list outruns my pen - all clearly on personal terms with heaven.

As I drew nearer, my eyes already swimming as in a sea of pies with their frothy peaks and scalloped crusts, all I could I do was dive in mentally and perform the breaststroke, the butterfly, the crawl, and snorkel to the luscious depths, then return to the crust, roll onto my back and just float in supreme deliciousness-- the mind can do wondrous things far from shore in an ocean of pies.

Didn't buy anything though, since I still had a Gibraltar of cherry pie a la mode to finish at home-- but now I know where they are.

This is good, for there is truth in pies that cannot be plumbed elsewhere.