Homo Fukushimaensis

You can compartmentalize former lives successfully, balance them down into cool dormancies but the problem is you can't predict why or when they'll heat up which ones or what parts. You only know that they come back in waves and packets of eternal radiation rolling real and ghostly in your wakefulness and dreams.

Japan comes back with clarity. In my first airy hours there, I landed at Haneda, or Wing-Field, and was met by a young guide whose only mission was to get me to headquarters. It was o-hanami, when cherries pop out undeniably into pink blossoms, the Yeats in your heart burgeons on through your blood and only a pagan festival will do. Dawn was breaking too and the Tokyo-bound train passed through a steady succession of coastal rice paddies and hamlets. In its originating night, fog had settled down into a latticed matrix like lozenges of gallium arsenide between over-sized transistors, into flooded rice fields below dikes arraying off into hazy whites. My guide, who had probably woken up at 3 or 4AM local time to come retrieve her cargo, sat in silence, certainly, and what might possibly be described as aggrieved judgement. It was hard to tell. Everything was hard to tell. The Disorient Express.

Travel and you'll see how hemispheres and continents have their own ideas of trees. Even the grasses are different. The rocks, the weeds, the doorknobs. New sceneries, so plush, so manufactured, so old ran along my moistened window north and to my right. An acutely angled sun sidled up behind to jostle the sheltering fog, poking it first then stirring it up sprightly out of beds like pillows being fluffed and shifted one last time over sleepy heads. With my sleeve, I rubbed the grease patches my nose had left off the glass and asked the guide, "How do you say the word for the rice? What's in there? In Japanese?"

To insist on learning something in her language at that ungodly hour was typically inconsiderate. So gaijin, so outside-person. But there's no help for that. Some years later Kyoko would accuse, "you Americans, you always have to ask why." A half-minute later my companion said, "Ko-may. Go-han." By which she meant, "Rice...Food." Those little clicks and exhalations are loaded with a cultural power their translations can't approach. In that land they approximate a term more like "Staff of Life," but even that falls short. I spoke my first words in the language of the rising sun with the rehearsal of intended memory.

As a child, rice had been fair forced into my mouth from Rice-a-Roni boxes, and came with Chinese restaurant food for free. The Japanese, however, have a dissenting proverb: to grow one grain of it, a grandmother had to bend over in a shit-field for an hour. Live there, and you learn the monsoons come every June and reverse the weather's prevailing direction from easterly winds to west. The west wind's are insistent, and they carry, well, one hesitates to say rain. It's an airborne flood robust enough to drench every inch of you if you walk or ride a bike or motorcycle, warm water driven sideways up underneath your mackinaw, to run all icky down or up your neck and back, up your shins and into your ass crack, into your sneakers, your boots or spongy shoes. Most of these will mold up spectacularly, hairier with green than a neglected loaf of Wonder Bread if not well-rubbed with oil or soap on that evening.

The neon lights of Ginza would come sooner, and they made Manhattan's Times Square look antiquated and dirty, dingy and half-hearted. Ginza was 20 years more clever, clean and unyellowed, and its videotronic interweavings had cogently combined to form the world's biggest, most colorful bug zapper. It bathed me in hellacious beauty, stunned my eyes with variegations of ostentatious wealth and styles my pupils' backsides had never yet reflected, much less dwelt upon. Here was a city and a country cavorting in abnegations of a prior and now completely invisible defeat, working to overcome the insecurities of a small but proud island nation with no natural resources, dancing the steps to be richer than the West. Nuclear power made it possible.

There was someone named Karen on the long flight over. Despite being already engaged to a nice Mormon girl, I agreed to meet her under the Ginza clock tower, and did so in what had immediately become a whole different world. Walking hip to hip with someone whose job was simply to be herself, slower than normal while the throttle of one of the world's rarest and most unmuffled cars was blipped, I realized we were keeping pace with two teenage boys in a 1966 Iso Rivolta. Both were driving, after a fashion. 5, 10, 20 blips and they'd jerk forward 20 or 30 feet then come tautly to a halt. There were many others doing versions of likewise.

In a tortured, halting procession down the well-lit strip there came a brand-new chaffeured Rolls Royce, its tuxedoed passengers drinking from champagne glasses, there was a prim and pretty girl on display behind the wheel of a white Jaguar XK 12o wearing a matching angora sweater, there was a plethora of garden-variety Ferraris, Porsches all with their windows open in a circus of consumption with everything but jugglers on horses. There might've been horses there but we didn't notice. There was a lot going on, and but for the closeness of humanity it would've been cold out. It didn't seem cold. We were all of us floating on the deliciously flying fuck of it, blessed and knowing it, unleashed and transmogrified. I feel as privileged as those kids trying to cruise in the Rivolta. More privileged. We were energized, and some white horses would've been perfect.

21st Century Intelligence Test

This is a multiple-choice word problem. Your government has announced the tap water in your local municipality (of 36 million people) has been poisoned due to a radiation leak at a nearby nuclear power plant. This level is unsafe for infants, and possibly other living organisms which are made from infants. Reporting about the plant has suddenly gotten very quiet. You should:

a) Go buy bottled water;

b) Wait for the Ministry of Denial to raise the safe limit to levels above current contamination;

c) Leave town now before the panic-driven wave of irradiated cannibalism and general mayhem begins.

d) BTFD (Trader acronym for "Buy the Fucking Dip")

Everything Is Under "Control"

So glad to know that everything is just fine at the Fukushima nuclear reactors, and that I was being a damned fool to go out and get things that block the uptake of radioactive iodine-131, bind with caesium-137 and -134, and to tally the beeps from my Geiger counter keychain. And the 130 gallons of drinking water, the portable garage, the Mac-10, the inflatable roadblock, etc? All unnecessary frivolities of a paranoiac.

So far, so good, just a few extra x-rays for the people in the Pacific Northwest, which the media tells me is actually *great* for your health! Such a relief to know that a bunch of fate-tempting dipshits in engineer suits aren't poisoning my children from halfway around the world, but that they're actually helping them!

I Was Wrong

There. I finally admitted it. When you're wrong, you're wrong. In the previous post, I said that NATO would invade Libya. That was completely ham-headed.

I should've said the United Nations would first pass a resolution to invade Libya, then demand that the Arabic world invade itself, then hand over operations to NATO after the Arabic world told the UN to fuck off. And I should've said that no one is going to have the foggiest notion about how to get 1.5 million barrels of light sweet crude flowing out of there again, and mentioned that Libya also sits on top of a huge fresh water aquifer. Thus the word "invade."

The Big Picture: Oil Curtain Meets Domino Theory

We're off on the road to Morocco
This camel is tough on the spine
Where they're going, why we're going, how can we be sure?
I'll lay you 8 to 5 we'll meet Dorothy Lamour

Living under a rock and listening to swing music isn't a bad way to go. Get yourself some root beer, a tall glass and vanilla ice cream, drop in a couple scoops and let it fizz. Put on some WWII-era classics like Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train" or Jimmy McHugh's "Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer." Garand-damn-teed, you'll start feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in no time. It's way more scientific than scientology, more meditative than meditation, and takes even less effort than Methodism. But sometimes a rock just isn't thick enough, or worse, is equipped with a wireless network.

Empires do not sensibly retreat or reduce expenditures, but follow a repeating, well-established pattern of symptoms:

"One symptom is widespread public concern over cultural and economic decay, with its many corollaries. The second is a growing religious fervor, church-state relationship, or crusading insistence. Next comes a rising commitment to faith as opposed to reason and a corollary downplaying of science. Fourth, we often find a considerable popular anticipation of a millenial time frame: an epochal battle, emergence of an antichrist, or belief in an imminent second coming or Armageddon. Last, these empires are prone to a hubris-driven national strategic and military overreach, often pursuing abstract international missions that the nation can no longer afford, economically or politically."

Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy

The West's inflatable, indispensable clown punching bag, Moammar Qaddafi, has fled from Libya. The largest tribes there, ones sitting on petroleum reserves which make their dust storm farm one of the world's 10 largest oil exporters, called for his departure. Said tribal chieftains also threatened to cut off oil exports to whoever was responsible machine-gunning protestors, by which they mean said West. From there it has devolved to civil war, and oil and gas exports from Libya have stopped. Germany, Italy, and China are sending warships. Add this to the 20 or so other South Vietnam-type US-funded regimes that are coming down, and I'm frantically searching the living room for back issues of People magazine. I'm hoping to find one from no later than 1996.

Regimes in Tunisia, Algiers, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Iran are either toppled or teetered by waves of revolt ignited by skyrocketing food prices and no prospects. Bahrain, home of the US 5th Fleet, also looks like it's toast, and I've probably forgotten a few others like Oman. Food protests are now spreading across India and China. (Note: The Federal Reserve Bank is a primary cause of the rampant commodities inflation after a massive and continuing policy of money supply creation. The conversion of this money supply to things of actual value is known as Gresham's Law.) Saudi Arabia's sclerotic sheikhs won't last the summer, and the bin Laden family, the country's largest employer, is poised to serve as kingmaker.

In other news, Obama's State Department seems bumblingly oblivious, and it even continues to insist a CIA assassin caught red-handed in Pakistan should enjoy diplomatic immunity, effectively ending a crucial alliance over one thug's incarceration. Obama's minions appear to be consuming far more powerful anti-depressants than root beer floats, and they grasp neither the simplest repeats in pattern of outcomes, nor the enormity of their scale. This President has instead chosen to frame the collapse of dictators hand-picked by the US, skillful enforcers who have provided decades of brutal stability and oil exports, as healthy "democratic reform." This must be a lot like watching a man being torn to death by pit bulls and hearing him repeat, "I really love dogs! I really love dogs!" Yes, maybe the earth is just going through one big fit of democracy right now. Maybe the new Mid-East governments will only put up a few Twitter feeds and Facebook group pages while we continue to pump out all their remaining oil.

As Vincent commented on the earlier Oil Curtain piece, the Muslim Brotherhood seems well positioned to take over in Egypt and elsewhere. The structures of the current host nations for these mutinies simply don't favor near-term reform by any democratic process, and the global economic system is now rapidly destabilizing. Whereas the Koran was conceived as a road map for social justice, stability, equity, and charity, the precise improvements desired by the protestors. What is more likely to win: parliamentary democracy, or shared authoritarian tradition? While the Muslim Brotherhood isn't driving the bus yet, they and the chimerical "al Qaeda" can position themselves near the steering wheel and ready themselves to provide governing bodies with practical reach, or what I call waste management services. Whoever can keep the streets clear of garbage in these countries will end up running them, and the mosques are already organized by neighborhood. At minimum, religious thought leaders will have powerful seats at the bargaining tables, ones not well disposed to US, UK, or NATO interests as currently configured.

Whatever political spots you choose to sport, I think we can agree that Domino Theory, when applied to the cradle of crude, sounds expensive. My spots are known, and if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, I may ask, "What did the state of Israel have against that tree?" But the problems in these forests and deserts are far bigger than Israel, and even I can't pin 2010's 70+% increase in the price of wheat on one hyper-paranoid enterprise in deviousness. In fact, purely from a stress level perspective, it's a great time to not be an Israeli. (When asked a couple weeks ago what effect the revolts in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt are having on the collective psyche of America's land-based aircraft carrier in the Mid-East, Hassaf, the considerate former citizen of Jerusalem replied immediately, "Hysterical fear.") The UK, and later the US, went to extraordinary pains to arrange Israel and the Mid-East just the way it was circa November 2010. That arrangement is gone.

Sucking vanilla ice cream and root beer up a straw to the tunes of Glenn Miller means you choose not to experience hysterical fear. But it doesn't stop you from pondering the effects of your fellow citizens paying $5 per gallon gasoline this year. That roughly equates to oil at $150/bbl. Every 1 penny increase in the price of gasoline means 1 billion consumer dollars is removed from the US economy. $5 gasoline means a gross domestic product reduced in the neighborhood of 10-15%. At the micro level, many people already have to make choices between getting to work or eating well, or between eating and freezing. At the macro level, $5 gasoline is the sword of hyperinflation and the shield of demand destruction beating each other to smithereens. $5 gasoline may not even be possible, as $125 per barrel oil might take out the whole global economy before that happens. Like it did in 2008. One way or the other, oil is going to be a lot harder to get out of the Mid-East, and I'm frantically searching my living room for copies of People Magazine, hoping to find some from no later than 1996.

Empires don't reduce and they don't retreat borne on reason's wings. Empires collapse. Don Quixote was written by Cervantes many years after the effective fall of the Spanish Empire, one that was based on the most bloodthirsty forms of gold extraction, silver collection, and which was increasingly subject to the dictates of a religion completely disconnected from all semblance of sensible statecraft. In other words, it was just like this one. But at least the Alzheimer's-riddled old Don had some windmills to tilt at. The United States now devotes 54% of its annual budget to paying for current and previous wars. Offer this empire solutions, offer it alternatives, and it declines. It doesn't believe in windmills, it thinks they're only for wooden clog-wearing wusses. It doesn't want solar panels, rather the internal revenue service gives businesses tax breaks for using oil and gas. The empire's government is going to shut down this next month, its credit rating should have been cut in 2008, and public workers are beginning to strike across its states. Federal, state, and municipal debt are at a higher level than when they were singing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me) at the end of 1945.

NATO is going to invade Libya unless someone kills its punching bag clown over the next few days. Once again, that sounds expensive. So here's a rhetorical question, and a serious one, meaning I don't know the answer: what do you think it would take for the US to give up control over Saudi Arabia's oil?

China Shifting Orientation

Pun intended, and this is important. If you've been watching, the overall impression you get is of a ship listing over because it's turning as fast as it can. There's a frenzy of activity observable above deck, you can see the proverbial fire drill, and hopefully it will hold together for a few more months. China's ship of state is clearly preparing for a heavy impact and is out of fiscal policy maneuver room. Their huge dam of saved foreign exchange dollars is flooding even more quickly into world equities and commodities. I expect its government to announce a currency liberalization soon, now that it's inflating anyway.

China's money supply increased 53% over last 2 years.

"The latest numbers show inflation is soaring out of control in China. The CPI is up 4.9% year-over-year, up from 4.6% in December. The PPI clocked in at 6.6% compared with 5.9% last month."

Producer price inflation index crests 6% in China.

China's inflation statistics clouded by data reporting changes.

China a net seller of US Treasury holdings for second straight month.

Must be a coincidence, Mr. Treasury Secretary.

The world's largest gold producer, China, imports as much gold in January 2011 as the first six months of 2010.

China crude oil imports up 27% in January.

The appetite for gold and diesel, physical delivery thereof, has hit the insatiable button. The entrepreneurial elites have either direct or familial memories of the Cultural Revolution, and fear something like it may happen again.

Cotton prices up by 44% so far in January and February of 2011; Chinese textile makers cornering supply, amid 95% cotton price increase since September 2010.

China hoarding grain in response to drought and global supply squeeze, imports running 9x higher than 2010.

Yes, that wheat import number is really 9 times higher. The current drought may have wiped out a third or so of their winter wheat crop, as well as Russia's. Cotton prices have so far averaged up by 1% per day this year.

China hoarding food staples, world food prices continue to rise

They're hoarding corn, wheat and rice supplies. Adverse weather across the globe has already hit grain production, and futures contracts are now on steroids. They like not starving, and they vote (with dollars).

Chinese passenger car sales plunge 10.3% in January.

Automakers who dreamed of selling tens of millions of cars there probably never traveled much in the lesser cities where they play Whack-a-Scooter. General Motors did sell more cars there in 2010 than in the US, but the government has rolled back its previous tax incentives on passenger vehicles.

China-based hackers knock Canadian government agencies offline.

This Digital Journal article does not sensationalize the attack, and explains why it may not be government a.k.a. signals intelligence hackers as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation accused. However, I've been seeing a definite increase in the number and target values of similar attacks, which have recently included successful server hacks on the Pentagon, utilities, and oil exploration companies. Militarily, even simple Denial of Service is an ideal asymmetric weapons, being cheap and effective if well-timed.

China's power output growth slowed dramatically in the latter half of 2010.

The chart from this article is above the title, comparing claimed yearly quarter-on-quarter GDP growth against power demand. In the 4th quarter of 2010, power consumption was only 5.5% higher compared with 2009, a time of relative contraction, while claimed GDP growth remained at a 9.8% growth rate. In other words, the low Q4 demand for power and the overall downward trend makes the growth claim implausible. The power side of this chart looks very much like a double-dip recession. The relaxed power consumption figures would seem to indicate a global structural recession, if not depression or systemic failure. If these power figures are valid it means foreign marketing and design companies cut back on orders to their lowest-cost manufacturer of widgets on the planet.

Behind the Oil Curtain: Why Egypt is America's Poland

For one so long prepared, and still possessing courage,
as must be so in a prince granted such an estimable city,
steadfastly grip a port-hole now and force yourself to listen,
forswearing any plaintive or coward-wrought entreaties.
Dwell instead on these reveries, dwell on their sweet choruses,
dwell on dazzling tunes borne aloft by strange and fantastic processions.
Dwell mightily, and give proper farewells to the Alexandria you're losing.

It was in center of the shipyards in old Danzig where the Soviet Union first felt its Warsaw Pact herniate. A young trouble-making electrician from Chalin came to work there in the late 1960s and founded the USSR's first and only trade union. The emergent union promptly struck in 1970, just after the government decreed an increase in food prices; their strike was put down in the traditional Soviet manner and 30 of its members were killed.

Suppressing the shipyard union then became the secret police's top priority. Despite a standard arsenal of techniques, they failed to quell Solidarity's membership or expunge its widely circulated underground weekly newsletter. When the next food-price hikes occurred in 1980, the shipyard's strike rippled across Poland, inspiring the government to officially recognize Solidarity and cave to their demands. Moreso, the government soon fell, martial law was declared, and interim rule passed to General Jaruzelski. I and others sent the Poles bars of soap, that being their most common aid request. Lech Walesa, Solidarity's founder, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. He later became Poland's president following its first free elections in 1990.

The regimes in remaining Warsaw Pact nations either experienced revolts or simply sued for divorce, collapsing the Soviet Union. The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan is widely perceived as a primary catalyst of disintegration, but consistently wasteful, inflexible, inequitable and incompetent policies that generated determined internal resistance may well have had much stronger influenced on the demise's timing. Determined internal resistance is hereby mentally noted, as illustrated in the pic above the title.

Egypt's narrative arc may differ from Poland in aspects. Its ongoing revolt can genuinely be argued to spring from generational, technological, ideological, demographic and unemployment angles; but Egypt revolted because of high wheat prices, not the existence of Twitter. It's the same desperate anger that began to blaze under the keystone of Russia's Cold War strategy against the West, Poland, and heat and gravity pulled down the Warsaw Pact like dominoes. They were the Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Rumanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Albanians, and Cossacks who were second- or third-class subjects of the Kremlin, or even its designated enemies. This same exact process of too much heat and gravity on populations, on peoples denuded by predatory centrally planned regimes, who are now contemplating even grimmer futures than they became accustomed to, and whose leaders have long answered to foreign powers giving less than a toilet flush about them, is now resounding throughout Egypt and the rest of the countries shrouded behind the Oil Curtain. Hopefully world history will not remember this time very well, as that will mean it didn't devolve into a major war.

The Oil Curtain. That phrase has been ringing in my head for awhile, soon after Obama inhabited the White House, and it became immediately clear his main goal was not to "change the culture in Washington" but to simply keep the plates spinning and the vomitoreum going. Obviously I'm drawing a comparison between the Soviet Union and the United States some readers or family members may not be comfortable with. Unfortunately, the analogy fits all too well, and it won't take very long to fit even better. In a Part II I'd like to discuss why the US is not likely to intervene directly in Egypt, but will feel forced to nearby.

Crude Awakenings

A natural gas pipeline to Israel blew up Saturday in Egypt. This would appear to support a possible Oil Shock scenario I floated in my last post, Why Israel May Abandon Zionism. A follow-up post on that theme could also be titled, "Why It Might Not Do Any Good."

http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/50519/icode/

Port workers who keep the Suez Canal running went on strike today:

"Suez Canal Company workers from the cities of Suez, Port Said, and Ismailia began an open-ended sit in today. Disruptions to shipping movements, as well as disasterous econmic losses, are expected if the strike continues. Over 6000 protesters have agreed that they will not go home today once their shift is over and will continue their in front of the company's headquarters until their demands are met. They are protesting against poor wages and deteriorating health and working conditions.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/here-we-go-suez-canal-workers-go-strike

In a bout of synchronicity or purposeful timing, Wikileaks published 4 memos today quoting Sadad al-Husseini, a Saudi oil exec, as stating their reserves in the ground have been overstated by 40%, or 300 billion barrels. He began making these disclosures in 2007. The US Embassy in Riyadh acknowledged the validity of Husseini's statements in a later cable:

"Our mission now questions how much the Saudis can now substantively influence the crude markets over the long term. Clearly they can drive prices up, but we question whether they any longer have the power to drive prices down for a prolonged period."

This is no surprise here at the world headquarters of Adored by Hordes. Back during the oil shocks of the 1970s, the oil export limits of oil-producing member nations were based upon their stated reserves, thus providing powerful incentive to inflate said reserves in order to bank more dollars during the embargoes. The reserve estimates were never subsequently written down by any OPEC member country, and have been treated as state secrets ever since.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/did-wikileaks-confirm-peak-oil-saudi-said-have-overstated-crude-oil-reserves-300-billion-bar

Which is why I've assumed Iran's regime has continued to pursue nuclear energy production despite knowing that Israel or the US would bomb whatever plants they build. To Israel, an Iran with a nuclear power plant is equal to an Iran turning Tel Aviv into fluffy black powder. The Iranian regime sees the pressure readings coming back from their fields, and tailors the cloaks and daggers of their diplomacy with available materiel. Almost all of Iran's revenues come from oil sales, yet they rescinded gasoline subsidies 3 weeks ago in a time of rising prices and a context of unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Sudan. Its oil exports seem to have been shrinking by 10-12% per year since 2007.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/opinion/08iht-edstern.4136795.html

Finally, a regiment or so of Marines are presently being dispatched to Egypt. US warships are already near the Suez Canal. Since the families of high-ranking Marines only got notice of upcoming foreign deployment on Sunday, the grunts will have to be airlifted onto their ships. The stated mission: get US citizens out. Kind of a tall order while parked in the Suez Canal, ey?

http://debka.com/article/20646/

In terms of global trade, the Suez Canal is disruptive, but fairly minor. Next stop? The Straits of Hormuz, where @20% of the world's oil sails through, and it's not too hard to predict that Israel be sorely tempted to seize some big fat oil tankers. Sorry for skipping over last Wednesday's informative meeting with Hassaf the Informative Dissident, but things have been hopping around here.

Why Israel May Abandon Zionism

"We will not be silenced! Whether you're a Christian, whether you're a Muslim, whether you're an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights, and we will have our rights, one way or the other! We will never be silenced!"
Cairo Protester, January 25th, 2011

Last Wednesday Lord Wife and I went to meet an Israeli dissident for an evening. His name is Hassaf and we know him from our kids' co-op school. The school's annual auction was our reason for being there, having bid on and won "Understanding the Palestine-Israel Conflict." Because a couple of other co-op school parents were there, both of whom had traveled across the region in their youth, in addition to two local peace-active scholars, the main focus of dialogue was the region's history of conflict following Israel's formation.

Hassaf is a deeply thoughtful, fair-minded, and forthcoming man who decided to leave his country rather than run afoul of the Shin Bet (the secret police), so I did my best to shut up and learn something while the others questioned and commented. I failed the first objective and said far more than I intended, but it was hard not to succeed on the second, since Hassaf is the perfect perch on which to have one's thoughts provoked. The elephant in the room, the current tsunami of pan-Arabic civil and economic unrest, waited patiently in the wings, its trunk peeking out occasionally.

Obviously what's going on in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and soon to be Syria and Saudi Arabia is huge from Israel's perspective, because it spells d-o-o-m. (Note: a handy Barometer of Badness for the tsunami's strength is the price of oil, which has already crested $100/bbl.) To me, of course, what's happening is expected. The equation is child's play. You take Western client states with decades of stability achieved through brutal repression, a strong and largely homogeneous religion, a young unemployed demographic, then you add rampant inflation in food commodities and top it off with a wheat crop failure in Russia. Take away bread and sugar and this is what you get. Really, what else could you expect?

What's not child's play is the immediate and long-term effects on Israel, aka "US interests in the region." That's what I was brooding on last Wednesday night. It's had time to percolate and its coming out right now despite it being in the middle of my workday, perhaps because we'll be meeting with Hassaf again this Wednesday night. A lot of commentary or causation could be laid out here. But there's no time so here's the deal. Every single day that Mubarak, Egypt's military dictator for the past 30 years, stays on is bad for everybody. Every day he stays, support for the Muslim Brotherhood swells.

Mubarak must be convinced to step down at once, with safe haven assured for his family and the metric tons of gold they got out last week. The longer he attempts to stay, the higher anti-Israel sentiment of succeeding governments will be, as well as its cohesion and duration across them as a group. It's already too late, but fast action in Egypt and ginger diplomacy with the replacement(s) would ameliorate the effects of a possible, and probably a likely, near-term oil shock. Two words nobody in our media is mentioning: Oil Shock. The Happy Chatter I've heard most out of the twittering heads is about democracy breaking out in the Mid-East. Democracy in the Mid-East? Give me a fucking break! Democracy in the Mid-East is about as useful as a refrigerator of ping-pong balls. Nitroglycerin-filled ping-pong balls.

[ed. note: Some very smart analysts see voting democracies as a positive way forward. Whereas I see them as quick paths to majority rule by Islamists. My opinion is formed by having seen my own government taken over by religious radicals, ones who still effectively set its policies, and by having been a young eyewitness to the formation of their plans.]

The Obama Administration is, unfortunately, too locked into its own foreign policy ass and damage control processes to accomplish anything like fast, effective action. Therefore, Israel will find itself in a truly interesting position: having aggressively settled the hell out of Palestine and boxed its bothersome inhabitants into a tiny fraction of the available land mass, generating pan-Arabic enmity, it can now turn around and make concessions, very soothing concessions. Such as would provide the next Western client state successors, such as probably El Baradei in Egypt and the bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia with quick victories and credibility. This means stabbing its own Zionists from the front, and from the back or the side will do just as well. If it can stab them down, Israel can reestablish a semblance of stability.

I see that opening, at least, and will allow myself a wallow or two in my own optimism, even for at least one more sentence. Implementing concessions may not deflect all the existential problems coming for Israel, not least its own neuroses and habits, but giving up its Zionist political strategy (adopted in order to generate immigration) buys more time. More time is a good thing, right? (Wow. That wallow felt really nice.) One must admittedly recognize the solution verges on the politically insufferable, and if so that's too damned bad. Again, the equation is pretty easy here. Over time, a reunified pan-Arabia defeats Israel via mere copulation, and there are already just too many Arabs to kill. The biogenetic weapons Israel has tried to come up with, ones which could selectively attack only Arab populations and spare Jews, haven't materialized. Trouble is, Arabs are every bit as Semitic as ancestral Jews, much moreso than European Jews, having all come from father Abraham.

Pacifying the anger is now a far more fruitful course, since the opposite tack manifestly failed as of Sunday, January 30th, 2011. Now, as a gloomer and doomer, it would be remiss of me to not repeat that it's probably too late. Many things have changed, human nature isn't among them. Peoples do change when they've exhausted other options. Well they're exhausted, baby, and leadership's inattention to and denial of bad fundamentals on the ground went on far too long. It's out of control now and no known countervailing force exists which can contain the Mid-East's grievances. Except maybe, just maybe making a half million or so hostile, entitled, crazy-ass-racist religious radicals move out of settlements built with US foreign aid. Oh and until that happens, as an aside, anyone reading this would be well advised to go buy at least 50 gallons of gasoline...and browse Craigslist for a moped.

Truths, Realties, and Double Santa Claus Theories

My son, previously dubbed Lord Running Boy (LRB), is now a 6-year old first grader. His teacher asked to speak with Lord Wife and me after school about his behavior one day this past week, an oft-recurring theme this year, and she started off like this:

"Well...there's an incident I need to bring to your attention, and the timing might not be, kind of another shock for you. It's hard to, well, I'm not sure what your belief systems are at home, but..."

Our attention? "Another shock" and "belief systems" along with Mrs. L's ginger, reluctant tone shoved us onto the parental Def-Con 4 footing, a place from whence the mind rushes to worst-case scenarios. Did he start a fight? Is a window broken, or a taboo? Did he tell his classmates America is running out of gasoline and their parents are going to starve? (Some of our household commentary, lacking context, might be embroidered by an eavesdropping child.) I was thinking property damage could be involved, resigned myself to his suspension or a lawsuit and hoped one wouldn't last too long or the other cost too much.

His teacher, a professional and compassionate woman with young children of her own, explained that our boy disrupted the class by suddenly climbing up onto his group desk and proclaiming to a room chock-full of 26 kindergartners and first graders, 

"Everybody! I have an important announcement...Santa Claus is not real. Santa Claus is your mom and your dad!"

As she described it, a pregnant pause was followed by one child's plaintive denial and went from there on to general uproar. We could easily picture frowns of doubt and consternation rippling across the room, little faces shooting red, pairs of fists starting to clench. She said one boy's body tensed so rigidly for so long she was afraid he would pass out. There was crying and staring blankly into space. In response to these defenses, our son maintained his position and emphasized it: "No. Research has been done. There is evidence. Santa Claus is DEAD!" 

About this time, Mrs. L switched into damage control mode, casting LRB's conspiracy theories into doubt by parsing, as the philosopher Kierkegaard might call it, her monstrous paradox through a public school's handy diversity filters and addressing her charges: 

"Class, LRB may think Santa isn't real, but every family believes differently, and what's most important is what your own family believes."

Order was eventually restored by moral relativism and insinuating our son is a crackpot, so have a merry Wiccan/Kundalini/Bacchus Chanukah. Peace out, and fair enough. But she went on to tell us that later in the library, by the aquatic-themed books, two girls she sees as class leaders apparently berated LRB for his outburst. While she didn't hear what was said, after it was said he retreated to cry inconsolably behind a further bookshelf. I had been wondering whether to come clean with her or not, and here was my cue. It wasn't about our belief systems, or our mostly futile attempts to raise something more than a Wanting Machine brainwashed by commercials for labor-arbitraged plastic toys screwed over transistors. No, we had done our level best to preserve the Santa mythos, and he figured it out all on his own.

The previous night I'd read him a bedtime story, "A Grumpy Santa Claus." After we finished, he leveled his gaze at me and said with an air of gravity, "Uhh, Dad...you know I know that Santa's fake, right?" I did know, and had observed his first seeds of doubt and the detective case he opened last Christmas with a rhetorical question: "I can't understand it. Why would Santa forget my Star Wars Lego ship after Grandma wrote it down on the letter?" (Answer: both Lord Wife and I have small businesses and families, with the obligations they entail. By the time we got to Toys R Us, they were sold out.) From there he soon progressed to time-honored logistical doubts. How, after all, is it possible to visit every house, fit down a chimney, or gain access to the disadvantaged families who live in locked condos and apartment buildings? Santa's sleigh must be rocket-powered, reindeer could never fly fast enough. And what are elves, anyway? They look more like dwarves than magic people, and not very productive ones.

I confirmed his assertion, but coolly asked how came to such a radical conclusion. As if addressing a simpleton he said, "Dad, I saw you and Mom wrapping presents on Christmas Eve." Sometimes a Teaching Moment is subtle, and sometimes it beats you on the head like a five-pound salami. I explained that while Santa isn't "real," it's not that simple, either. First, a long time ago in Amsterdam there was a real man named Santa Claus who became famous for giving presents and candy to children, especially to poor children, and who really wore a red coat. Next, his idea, of giving gifts to kids on Christmas, especially to those who were poor and good, was so powerful people wanted to keep it going. So he remains real in a sense, and taking on the role of Santa is fun. Lord Running Boy sought final clarification: "Yeah, but he died, right?" 

Some teacher. What I should have told him is truth is volatile, corrosive, people fight over it and it's a lot like nitroglycerin which when mixed carefully with sawdust stabilizes into dynamite so you can nestle lethal carrots of it under where you want to blow something up and activate it with blasting caps. It can be the most beautiful light-bringing thing or be treated as a terrible crime all at the same time. I should have said it's best to practice with small amounts first, use long fuses and take good cover because reality is a currency we must necessarily agree upon every day, and don't tell this to your class tomorrow because everybody has agreed there should be a Santa and children must believe in him until, as Mrs. L informed us, they're in 3rd grade. When truth disagrees with reality and you choose to set them close together you'll get burned by your own blast and you might even die. Furthermore, feudal aristocracies successfully convinced people the earth was flat for a thousand years, when even the Bible clearly said it's round. So think hard about that one if you're going up against Santa.
  
Despite his emotional injuries and those he inflicted on his classmates, we don't know that it's not for the best. At least he may have learned early what we learned much later, although to be honest we're proud of this son's ability to pursue and can take being known as the parents of the boy who ruined Christmas in easy stride. The principle I wish to delve more into for myself, and to somehow get all my sons thinking about too, is how simply seeing the truth is the easy part. The bigger trump to be pursued lies in the clever art of conflict resolution, of applying just the right myrrh-scented balm to human wounds and desires.

The next night I sent him back with a message for his classmates, that Santa is still real in some ways, and you get more presents from your parents if you believe in him. We all know how there are lies that draw smiles and truths which draw tears. He imparted the message, and I'm not sure what the right thing was to do, but he had a good day and maybe he's on his way to learning how to skillfully manipulate the credulousness of his classmates without taking too much advantage of them.

Would Martin Luther King Love Him Some Warz?

Today is Martin Luther King Day. Saw this story and was enraged enough to post it. The general counsel for the Department of Defense, Jeh Johnson, speaking at today's Pentagon commemoration of Dr. King, seized the opportunity to enlist his posthumous support (courtesy of Salon):

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.


Johnson goes on to argue that American soldiers play the role of the Biblical Good Samaritan cited by King because they "have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people."

Given that Dr. King privately deplored war, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and publicly gave a speech themed "My Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam" at Manhattan's Riverside Church in 1967, the Pentagon lawyer might just have his tranquilizer dosages set to Bobsled Run.


In that forthright 1967 speech, Dr. King factually defined the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," and defied it for dropping "thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8000 miles from its shores." Some statements he made from that pulpit may well have gotten himself marked for assassination; either way, at a distance of 43 years it rings like prophecy:

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

He went on to call for an immediate cease fire and full US withdrawal from Vietnam. As for Jeh Johnson, David Dayen of FDL put up the full transcript of his remarks, in which he recalls graduating from Morehouse College, getting chummy with MLK III, and traversing the mazes of overt and veiled racism on his way to career success. And, hopefully, not yet all the way to spiritual death.

Dr. King's techniques for persistent and pressing yet non-violent change were but a subset of his far more liberating message, one deeply embedded with a solid understanding of gospel principles. We would do well to review and keep those principles, which easily transcend any creed, uppermost in our minds as we face the challenges of building the church of Earth. In the meantime, give unto the Pentagon that which is the Pentagon's. 

WikiLeaks, A Semi-Alternative Take

To be honest, I haven't followed the Wikileaks situation very closely, but Naj, my friend over at Iran Facts, got out her 3,000 mile long cattle prod and zapped me into writing about it. No doubt she knows more about the particulars, but I'd best not let that stop me. Cattle prods hurt! (As they say, Naj, be careful what you wish for.) First off, on leaks, an old Secretary of State once said something like, "Anybody thinks they can keep a secret in this town is nuts." To which I say, "Anybody thinks they can keep a secret in this internet architecture is nuts." 

By thinking its own communications so inviolate, the US government was exposed as being both a loon and its own worst security risk. For this effrontery, the streets must now run with human blood, the open internet must be destroyed, demons are being summoned from their crypts in McLean, Virginia, and diplomacy is...well, I'll stop quoting the current Secretary of State for a minute. Seriously, it's worth noting that the US will now start actively aiding and abetting industry efforts to tame the internet as we've known it, get those peer-to-peer free song downloads done while you can, and we can expect a rapid escalation in censorship policies based around shutting down internet provider servers. Again, those steps won't work very well, but it's the best strategy they've got.

Good spycraft and reportage count on a variety of human urges to leak, particularly on lucky combinations of them. Remember the FBI agent who leaked Watergate details to Woodward and Bernstein? I don't either, but he became charmingly known as Deep Throat, and his primary motivation for leaking was that he was passed over for promotion. He was pretty pissed. His secondary motivation, however, was an offended sensibility which bordered on a good conscience, and it was probably this latter quality that tipped the scales of an embittered man towards action and risk.

There's a reason for dwelling on emotional states and revelation, and I'll preface it by unequivocally stating I'm ecstatic WikiLeaks exists, and think it's greater than Brylcreem and pre-sliced loaves of bread; we are likely entering an age when our sins will increasingly, as Jesus said, be shouted from the housetops; it's great that imitators like OpenLeaks are being spawned; it's great that the MSM has its undies in yet another twist; it's great that mere taxpaying mortals can directly view the often petty, weak-minded drivel they're funding. Also, Julian Assange is one gangsta S.O.B. and it's pathetically obvious the US is trumping up whatever charges it can to detain him. And now, unfortunately, I have some questions about the source(s) of this particular material.


Whoever leaked the Pentagon-State cables was no low-level signals intelligence officer feeling some pangs of guilt and disgust, as was apparently the case with the Iraq papers. I don't have detailed knowledge of Pentagon security procedures, only rudimentary knowledge of general security for online systems, but given the breadth and content of the material, it seems very unlikely this leak was conducted by a single low-ranking, low-cleared individual, and far less likely that it was conducted by multiple leakers acting in concert. Only a high-level administrator or bureaucrat with a lot of knowledge, free access, and time on their hands fits the profile of someone who could pull this off. The Pentagon Papers era is long gone, when one Daniel Ellsburg could simply take a microfiche copy of a classified report and drop it into the lap of The New York Times, or surely when any newspaper published such papers in full without heavy deliberation and editing. Point being, even back then very few people besides Ellsburg had a high enough security clearance to get those papers.

Yes, I'm making the dangerous assumption that the Pentagon and State Department have security procedures and follow them to some extent, but all that money they've gone through has probably been spent on something and paranoia has institutional tendencies. More importantly, any such person or group looking to leak would have to be really, really motivated. Like motivated enough to be executed for violating the State Secrets Act. Motivated enough to face the ongoing scrutiny of a withering internal investigation and polygraph tests. And this in order to merely provide proof of what we in The West already knew with excruciating, repetitive clarity, that many of our emissaries and generals are first-order twits? Sorry, something just isn't adding up for me yet.


There's no doubt the US government is conducting a cyberwar against WikiLeaks, no matter how Man of La Mancha, hypocritical, and technically ignorant that may be. It's a predictable response that will rain repercussions like canned hams down on us all in terms of constrained liberties and commerce. But maybe this really wasn't a leak at all. It lacks the classic, targeted earmarks of a leak and looks more like a well-planned intelligence operation intended to embarrass the West. This looks like the famously dreaded Fuck You Flourish. Penetration could have been gained via patient internal sleeper personnel or a back door, possibly with the former activating the latter. It may have been nothing more than a neat crime of opportunity, but along with the polygraph tests, the Pentagon might want to carefully review its list of network vendors.


So much for Obama's harping on the Chinese about greater transparency. This is like being at a formal dinner in the South, listening to your hosts happily extol the benefits of racial equality after the Civil Rights Act and how thankful they are those bad old days are finally behind them. Then a group of young kids straight out of To Kill A Mockingbird run inside yelling that Tom Robinson just raped Mayella Ewell, the Klan is rounding up to lynch him, and your host grabs a long white robe out of a closet and bolts out of the the house. You can perceive a real democracy by how it welcomes the currency of clear information. This is not that.

Does The Republic Still Stand? Part Three: Not Really

If by "Republic," you mean Goldman Sachs, then yes it's doing really really well, so well that "still standing" is more like "surveying the world in a towering, thrustingly Brobdingnagian manner." Patient and perceptive Phil over at Perils of Caffeine in the Evening asked in the comments section of Part Two of this series, seems about a month ago (it is), "Does this mean I should buy Goldman's new 50-year bonds?" That's a great question, Phil. Let's share a virtual martini before I advise you to sell out your entire Berkshire Hathaways position.


Goldman's first $1.3 Bill bond issue, originally priced at 6.25%, was so oversubscribed that the final yield went down to 6.125% and the instruments sold out in about 5 minutes. So for practical purposes the question now becomes, will Goldman issue more? Either way, it's important to supplicate the Beast, one bond issue being neither here nor there, so I recommend setting up a large and handsome altar in your front yard, erecting an imposing and permanent Buddha statue not less than 8 feet high with burning incense and shiny flags sticking out at trapezoidally proper angles, and a laminated picture of patron saint Hank Paulson's face lovingly hung over Buddha's. If that's too much for you, a stopgap for the holiday season would be flashing lights that say "WELCOME, GOLDMAN! SACHS TOO!" hung in your front window instead of the outmoded "MERRY CHRISTMAS."

Now that we've had that virtually refreshing pause, I am about to channel the Ghosts of Stock Markets Past in trading floor lingua fracas, circa 1989. One of my mentors, or more accurately a guide through hell, happened to be a 32nd-degree Master Mahan of Fuck-Speak, a true virtuoso and the only person I've met who used "infuckitively" as a word. Forgive me in advance, though I'll censor out the dirty stuff:

"Phil-Phil! I hear you wanna buy those big swingin' Goldmans! C'mon, though, a measly 50 year term? You *%(#*#@ kiddin' me? If Goldman Sucks wanted to really tell the other banks to go $#$^ their grandmothers, those pompinos woulda gone with 100-year bonds straight outta the *&^# and paid, I dunno, let's say 6.66%. HahahaHAAA!! {Grand Master playfully punches you in left shoulder, making you nearly fall down.}Well I say *%(# 'em, buncha friggin finocchies playin' widdemselves, only sold, what, like rat shit, $1.3 bill last month? Whaddathey, *%(#^*&@^ Germany? *%(#^*%&* Switzerland? Goddammit, this is America! My Aunt Mary coulda made more than that blowin' sailors! Ya never know, maybe the *&$(%&(#%^s find the #^*&^s to ante up, so me personally, I'm gonna hold out for those big 100-year marangas and go in-fucking-finite. {Grand Master holds two cupped hands up and well out in front of his chest, indicating sign language for gigantic firm female breasts, and makes corresponding antic gestures.} But with that ass-raping 5-year call on the 50s? They can %*(% the $%(* outta my @##*&@^&$%^& @#%$^&$#!"

Emerson once wrote, "A man must be clothed in society, or he shall feel a certain bareness and poverty." One must naturally incline to agree whilst endeavoring to be more than a mere collection of personal vices, but on a trading floor everyone,  your friends most of all, attempts to rip that social clothing off and lay you bare. Reasons for doing so are the usual boredom, depravity and sadism, of course, but it's also because the sharp point of a market is a deeply cynical place, and your only real purpose for being there is to make money. A market is a collection of arguments over value, and real fistfights are apt to break out at any time. I've seen them, and once saw a grown man fake a heart attack to avoid being physically attacked. I've also seen a real heart attack, sex in the bathroom, suspiciously white nostrils, a famous trader taken from the floor in handcuffs by Giuliani's goons, and a close-up video of a female broker giving birth played from every TV on the floor. The last one made everybody stop what they were doing and more than one man in my presence had to wipe tears from his face, and another said "Dat's da most byootiful ting I eva seen!" Markets are like Geiger counters for emotion.


A big reason for all the undressing is that the most dangerous and expensive commodity in a market is bullshit so credible it makes you lose all your money. Most of the people working the floor around me grew up on the corners of Bedlam and Squalor and heaped derision and scorn much like a patellar reflex because it correlated with financial survival. They would never have failed to take notice that Goldman Sachs has started acting like a sovereign nation, and my real mentor, the last independent floor trader on either exchange at the time, would easily have seen the intention behind these Goldman Longs, as well as significance and likely consequences. On the surface, a bond yielding 6.125% over 50 years looks pretty damned attractive, sorta like Nicolette Sheridan did in that red bikini top and sarong in which she played The Sure Thing. Hubba hubba! But when I first read about these 50s they're dipping a toe into the water with, I asked myself, "Why would they borrow money for 6% per year when they can get it for free from the Window, and already drew upwards of $600 Bill last year?"


That's on top of getting completely bailed out on $160 Bill of bad AIG bets. And wouldn't the ability to front-run every Fed bond auction be enough for even Gordon Gecko? Issuing these mid-range vehicles begs immediate you-and-me-sense, and it may be unprecedented unless your bankers happen to be Hoares (the world's oldest surviving investment bank, and pun intended). Come to think of it, the 484 rolls of toilet paper I've already stacked in the Zombie Bunker are unprecedented too; I figure we might be down there for awhile, and what if we ran out? One thing is sure. Goldman felt October was time to test the market for these long bonds, and that was right when they were hearing, ahead of everyone else, what the Fed's plans were for Quantitative Easing Two. (The bar chart above shows Treasury holdings in November 2010, when the Fed became the largest owner of US debt.)

To roll with a metaphor in the previous paragraph, this 50-year issue is the equivalent of Goldman getting up in the middle of a movie and loudly announcing it has to drain its main vein. It proceeds out past the exit sign, sets the garbage can ablaze then leans back in and starts screaming FIRE! Just as any modern investment banking MBAs will do when they feel well positioned, their incentives are aligned and pointing straight at that next Christmas bonus. Goldman Banksters have been paying close attention and correctly and finally responded to global retail investor desire for yields between where so much scared money flew down to, (i.e., out of retail equity and mutual funds and into Treasuries paying well below real inflation), and to where so much hedge fund money flew up into (to corporate junk bond packages yielding between 7 and 13 percent, where there hasn't been enough product to satisfy appetite). The Banksters saw the blips going into commodities, which have made moonshots as the monetary base went pure vertical. They saw the housing sector resume its slide, banks hoarding cash and not making loans, and they saw a municipal bond market obviously about to go bidless sometime this Fall or Winter. They drew a few conclusions: Treasuries Will Tank. We Can Become As Gods. And Rule Humanity From Our Ranches In Costa Rica.


There was a yawning yield vacuum, and Goldman, having effectively taken over the US government's fiscal and monetary policies two years ago along with its Treasury and central bank, can step in to fill it with vast, practically infinite amounts of free capital and serve as the pricing benchmark for a whole new market in mid-yield bonds. Current investor sentiment will price Goldman's debt more favorably than almost any other country's (whoops, Freudian slip). Goldman is kinda like a doctor who admits himself into the Emergency Room with a broken leg in order to take over the entire hospital. At its sole discretion, it took over $600 Bill of the first $3.3 Trill in 2008 bail-out electrons. It has taken more since then and given an accounting of where it's put the money to nobody. 6.125% per year on $1.3 Bill over 50 years is indeed rat shit to them. So what's the point? Is there a deeper agenda? You can count on me to think so.

Goldman has become far more than just an investment bank in a globally securitized world. They are the First Bank of the New World Order. The geniuses Goldman employs out of the finest MBA schools and physics departments, the thousand-yard-stare boys willing to work 90 hour weeks to play grab-ass with each other, have determined that sovereign interest rates must go way above 6 or 7 percent, bailouts be damned. Fortunately it took them a couple years for this play to completely dawn on their cocaine-starched white collars and minds, because long-term bond plays are very dangerous investments. Fortunately my mantra position of huddling under the office desk with my AK, loaded banana clips going snik-snik-click as I check them in turn while watching It's A Wonderful Life as I munch away on Costco-sized bags of Cheetos pulled from long-term food storage no longer seems entirely paranoid. At least to me. Inflation could easily send long-term bond yields up by 3%. Or 5%. Or 15%. Pick a number. 

Here's the one thing markets really suck at: properly discounting adverse long-term risk. The less recent volatility, the more presumption of stability. Just because aliens haven't landed on the White House lawn to meet with President Obama doesn't mean they're not going to. Or that they haven't had more private consultation. But even under more imaginable scenarios, such as a mere 3% increase in long-term yields due to a mild inflationary frisson (and the 10-year Treasury yield has already risen from 2.3% to over 3% in just the past two months despite the Fed's cunning plans to keep it low), then the face value of those pristine Goldman 50-year bets would fall by about 33%. How's that for capital preservation?

Ah, volatility. She whom age cannot wither nor custom stale. The European Union is imploding (more on that next time) and markets have already priced various sovereign debenture yields up over 10%. An alleged European Central Bank and the IM-effing-F are riding in to save bondholders with taxpayer money, and to unleash austerity programs which have about as much chance of succeeding as my plans to own Magritte's "Use of Language" (I've built a backlit frame!). Put simply: Goldman Sachs is betting on dollar hyperinflation, a plethora of imitators have lined up to dangle bait, and that's how market vacuums get filled, often with nasty stuff sucked up loose from floors. 

There is every reason to think this new class of bonds is why the Fed is having so much trouble selling its 10-year Treasuries. Mexico has just issued dollar-denominated 100-year bonds. Venezuela and Brazil are issuing similar instruments. Investors are gobbling up recent 50-year issues from Norfolk Southern, the Netherland's Rabobank, GDF Suez and, umm, I'm having a little trouble typing this last one out, I t a l y (aaagggg, swallowing my tongue... the seizures hit again...hey, those Mexican Centominos are starting to look pretty good!). This long bond gravy train is on motion lotion and it's got biscuits for wheels.


If you think the dollar is going to hyperinflate, it makes perfect sense for you to sell as much debt as you can and convert it into something of real value. Then you pay off with cheap-o dollars in the future. This is a really great time for anyone besides the US Treasury to be issuing bonds, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. It's also a great time to take credit card companies up on those 0% for 15 month offers and buy RonCo products. US Treasuries aren't priced anywhere close to reflecting their true default risk. So the Fed has become that chap so sought-after by Wall Street professionals, the Fool in the Market, and its Chairman is too stupid to even have seen the vacuum much less recognize it as his own creation. Treasuries are someday, maybe in 2011, going to look a lot like the average American Muni bond: gangrenous. Anyhow, a violent market argument has started and it's not too hard to see who's going to get the beat-down. The US will next attempt to force various countries to buy its Treasury bonds at the barrel of a gun, or its sudden absence. There's no other way to keep selling them for long.


What are the chances the sovereign states of Goldman Sachs, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil are going to stick around for the next lifetime and pay off? Doesn't matter, not relevant. The new market has been created, is swelling, and the music blaring in it is rock and roll, so you don't have to wait for salvation. It's right here. I recognize my future masters, and I want in. After all, you can still buy really neat stuff with dollars and my bonds will be backed with high-grade toilet paper and Cheetos, and they will yield 6.3%. 6.5% if you get in right now. When Goldman Sachs buys Nebraska and people are fighting each other to become indentured servants on its farms, it'll be even more obvious who's running this country. So to finally answer the question, Phil, I would wait for the inflation wave to crest, wipe out the face values of the extra-long bonds, and then step in and buy a basket of some that aren't defaulting.

Does the Republic Stand? Part Two: How It Has, and for How Long...

Other than my mental super-powers, the ones I struggle with every day to keep them in peaceful check, the United States is the only military power with true force projection capability. Without next-generation weaponry like mine, the government must rely on oodles of obsolescent hardware, I mean stuff that needs actual people to work it and isn't on SkyNet artificial intelligence yet, to bully its friends and enemies. The US has 11 complete aircraft carrier strike groups (CSGs or CBGs, formerly CVBGs in Pentagon parlance, pre-formerly CARBATGRU). These are the only 11 CSGs in existence. Britain, France, Russia, and Italy had a few but all decommissioned theirs, saying, "Why bother? We'll develop mental super-powers!" Thailand and Brazil do have one vanity carrier each, but sadly lack the fleet and orbital patrol capabilities required to protect huge floating things full of juicy jet fuel, and to attack over any distance, they'd have to deploy sails.

Auric Goldfinger and Dr. Julius No would hold lively debates on the wisdom of building aircraft carriers, each of which are approximately as expensive as an average country. (Bond villain Interviewer: "To best achieve world domination, is it better to: A) rob Fort Knox; B) threaten to nuke London; C) build a death ray on a remote island, or; D) build Carrier Battle Groups? Discuss.") Return on Investment (ROI) aside, the purpose of a real carrier battle group is to send a coked-up maritime Warren Zevon sort of Werewolves of London message:

"You better stay away from him...he'll rip your lungs out Jim! But oo-woo--I'd like to meet his tailor."

The real thing even comes with lawyers, guns, and money to deal with the predictable fallout that rains down in its ports of calls, otherwise known as Drunken Puking Disease Pits (DPDPs).

For context, merely one (1) of these floaty assemblages embodies sufficient force projection and firepower advantages to defeat all the fleets that ever existed. At the same time. If the US parked any one of its strike groups within range of Ireland and the UK right now, it could blow the holy shits out of them despite the combined maximal efforts of both countries to the contrary. Our military capabilities so far outclass those of any competitors, in fact of all others put together, that conventional resistance is Not an Option (NO). While it's true that India and China have announced plans to outfit militarily viable CSGs, and have each increased military spending commensurately over the last decade, what they fail to explain is that their fleets will be comprised of weaponized Jet Skis and Sea-Doos commanded by Jacques Cousteau's kids, because at least they have some experience with oceans.

That India and China would even think of building aircraft carriers was foreseen in the mid-1980s by Mssrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld, two brilliantly evil agents of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. These Blofeld agents managed to take over the US government from the inside, then generated a CIA study that examined with surprising competence the likely future economic growth rates of those countries; the study predicted the expanding military powers of both and assumed the imperial extension of either or both, particularly westwards to Iraq and the Caspian Basin to seize the necessary hydrocarbon resources to fuel further growth.

The Blofeld Study was evangelized to thought leaders and policy makers, the more dimwitted legions of whom promptly be-shat themselves. The dimwit panic was the impetus for a so-called Neo-Con movement, which was neither nearly as neo nor as con as my Aunt Sophie, with its most cynically be-shat members organizing and formalizing themselves into something they called PNAC (Paranoid Narcissistic Asshole Chickenhawks). This group eventually caused or allowed a falsely flagged causus belli to occur. Hence GWOT ensued, which sounds a lot more menacing than SPECTRE, and is. 50 years from now people won't know what the acronym stood for, but its mere sound will signify. Of course that's assuming people will still use the alphabet.

This movement envisaged the need for a Jupiter-like military that could beam lasers from Mars onto skateboarders, also sagely foreseen as the Enemy. After 30 years of massive investment, they've just about achieved the Operation Exploding Heads from Space goals, and have quite a lethal bag of new tricks, including tanks that can microwave cattle right on the hoof! Believe me, I'm too freaked out to lie to you and am writing this while hunched under a book-reinforced desk. In this world of mad and brutal men, the misery humans suffer and visit upon each other is most unleashed by those who love others more than themselves and only want that love to be recognized and returned. When you don't or can't comply, then that is precisely why they must kill you.

Any hapless fool who wishes to actively disagree with PNAC policy goals must resort to so-called asymmetrical warfare, which primarily involves becoming an adept at hiding in plain sight so as not to have your head exploded by space weapons. As in, "No, no, I'm not about to blast your sweaty hyper-aggressive grunts to kingdom come with my cell phone speed-dial hooked up to trigger the fuse on a 40 year-old artillery shell. See, I'm smiling, we're all friends...and I'm just peeing in this ditch right here."

The practical need for such superiority arose from the US defeat in Vietnam, wherein it failed to kill every single Vietnamese person. This wasn't allowed to happen because the American public, consisting of hippies, Jewish intellectuals on welfare, militant blacks and Walter Cronkite (who was on LSD at the time) stormed the Pentagon with Molotov cocktails. Yes, I realize this never occurred. But tell that to the Pentagon, which codified these vital lessons into a military doctrine known as American People = Vietnamese (AP=V).

Since the US was bankrupted by its failure to kill Vietnamese people, Dick "No, Mister Bond, You're Going to Die!" Nixon simply foreswore the gold standard at Bretton Woods in 1971. The finance ministers of Germany and France complained that without gold backing it, the US dollar would only be worth the cotton it used to be printed on, to which Nixon coolly replied, "What part about the bombing of Dresden did you NOT understand? I think someone might need another lesson in high finance."

Nixon made a deal with Saudi Arabia to price its oil exclusively in dollars in exchange for perpetual protection by CBGs, for not letting an oil embargo get in the way of friends, and for getting richer than Croesus. Thus has the dollar been backed by oil ever since. The dollar's purchasing power, and the US ability to nakedly issue debt and then pay it off in imaginary money, and to generate full faith and credit for that imaginary money, is correlated 1:1 with the ability to blow things up real good. Sure, China has bought some fat oil field rights in Iraq, hydrocarbon and rare earth mineral rights in Africa, but if the Iraqs or Africans choose to renege, what could China do? They could build one ACG in 10 years, or they could truck a few million troops to the border of Tajikistan, drop them off and tell them to "march east for a few months, and make sure to make a left turn after you pass Tehran."

Since going off the Gold Standard, the US has increasingly enforced its currency regime in hard-power fashion, a fact not lost on Little Foreign People. Remember what happened to Saddam Hussein? The Big People know he went off the dollar and started selling his oil for Euros in early 2001, the ultimate no-no, shortly before Iraq was invaded by sheer coincidence. Just like Iran started selling its oil for Euros later and then was invaded by sheer coincidence. Yes, I know Iran wasn't really invaded. But tell them that. And tell Afghanistan, Africa, Indonesia, Paraguay, most of South America, Pakistan, and northern Florida that, too or anywhere else has erected hundreds of new military bases so far this century. All this has been flip-out expensive, with the real US military budget (including the NSA, NASA, Homeland Security, CIA, DEA, the Capo di Tutti Capi, et al) now tipping in at well over $1.xtrill.

Harsh is the desert that quickly leaches bones. This is how it has gone, and this is how it will be done. Here are the bones, here is the heat of the sun, here is how white they will leach: in September and October, merely anticipating the Fed's QE2, dollar-denominated cotton prices rose by 54%, corn by 29%, soybeans by 22%, orange juice by 17%, sugar by 51%, wheat by 36%. How's that for stimulus, Alice? It'll take 6-9 months for those new price increases to pass out into products and services. Yes, Virginia, there is a Hyper Inflation.

It hurts to watch Old America sink like this, like a ship still under power but taking water on evenly, steadily faster, coming in from all sides, heading to the deep where God's voice ceaselessly resounds. At this moment Goldman and Sachs has chosen to strike. Their torpedoes are 50-year bonds yielding 6.25% interest, these will sell like Madoff Farms Municipal Bonds and will serve as the pricing benchmark in an entirely new market, one in which Goldman & Sachs is the Last Bank Standing.

It already controls the fiscal and monetary policy of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank. It will soon control the International Monetary Fund. And the best part is, they're doing it with money they got for free and their idea is to make our children pay. The money is virtual, the consequences won't be. I think hell is about to meet heaven, and vice versa. I don't know all of what will happen, but I know where the gunpowder is stacked, I see the wick, and I see how it just lit. Will be back when I can. Until then I'll be smiling for the cameras and peeing in the ditch.

Does the Republic Still Stand? Hmmm...

It's a good question, especially for me, since on Tuesday night I learned from Lord Wife that there was an election or something, which she construed as some kind of disaster having to do with Republicans and corporate carpet-baggers. To which I said, "Wait, the Republicans won?? That's fantastic! Now Baby Hugo will get his concealed carry permit and we can send him to day care with the 38 Special. It's about damned ti---"

Next thing I knew, a dream was fading away, one in which I was discussing speech impediments with a young, nubile Barbara Walters; she had been explaining to me in delightful detail how she finally conquered the letter R. Gradually, Lord Wife's concerned face began to come into focus out of a gauzy, LED-like haze. She was holding a sturdy Calphalon pot by its handle, looking down at me lying on the kitchen floor and screaming, "No, no, go back! Go towards the light, you mental pygmy! TOWARDS the light!" Don't get me wrong, women's suffrage was a wonderful thing, as was the Great Depression which soon followed, not to mention...well I'll just let it go at that and start humming "We Shall Overcome."

The Pugs may sell us down the Cuyahoga slightly faster than the Dims. Or not. All I can tell, there's a tremendous puckering tension in this country between people who want to make it better via government and those convinced that will make it worse. Government? What government?? With all due respect, sir, I see no government here. What I've been paying my spare attention to makes elections, schmelections look like the pathetic little speed bumps they've installed around my neighborhood to try and get me to slow down (I know it was you who complained Louie, don't even try to deny it), and which I continue to proceed over at a sporty 45 mph. Now, if it were the basis of a Reality TV show, the object of my attention might well be titled "When Icebergs Attack" and might even intro with unintelligible gibberish such as this:

To provide operational flexibility and to ensure that it is able to purchase the most attractive securities on a relative-value basis, the Desk is temporarily relaxing the 35 percent per-issue limit on SOMA holdings under which it has been operating. However, SOMA holdings of an individual security will be allowed to rise above the 35 percent threshold only in modest increments.

Whuuh? Didn't understand that? You're lucky. Because chances are pretty good you won't be hunted down, tied to a stake, and burned by an angry mob in, oh, about 2 years give or take. The important take-aways from the bankerly blather above, issued after Wednesday's Federal Open Market Committee meeting, are:

1) yes, they are actually calling government debt instruments by the name of a sacred ritual drink from the Indo-Iranian Rigvedas.

2) even better, Soma was the drug Aldous Huxley wrote about in Brave New World, his futurist vision of what happens when the Federal Reserve enslaves everything, passes out the SOMA like farmers grow corn syrup and make everybody high as fucking kites until they must be killed for the good of society, i.e., before they have to be paid any of their promised Social Security benefits.

3) the post-modern English translation of the SOMA pronouncement is, "All rules are out the window now, we're just making this up as we go along anyway. What we ARE going to do is monetize the US government debt right in front of your face while mumbling incantations not even we understand anymore, only we're going to do it a lot faster than before, wearing our most reassuring suits and smiles. Resistance? Hahahahaaa! You'll beg us for quick death. Now drink your SOMA and get back to hallucinating, you mental pygmies!"

4) SOMA stands for System Open Market Account holdings, or what debt the Fed has amassed. It's over $2.xtrill now, and with yesterday's announcement we can expect it to grow another $1.xtrill by early next year. The Fed is about to pass China as the single largest holder of Treasury bonds, and I fully admit that "1.xtrill" is not even a real number. Which is exactly my point. Total yearly global GDP is said to be @$55.xtrill, not including the Vatican, so whatever the Fed is planning on spinning out of its fiscal/monetary rabbit vortex-hat next, it'll be LARGE.

There's a lot more of this obfuscatory exercise in concentration camp euphemism than just two sentences, there are reams. Reams and reams, with a whole lot of reaming going on. A curious person might ask: how long, realistically, can the Triad keep getting away with this? The Fed gives 0% loans to banks, the banks buy stocks to keep the stock market trending up, they buy Treasuries half-heartedly and pocket a 2.7% difference above their 0% loans, obviating the need to actually lend. By continuing to service each other's yields on Magic-Backed Securities (MBS), the international banking system (IBS) often exudes a curiously life-like appearance of continuing to function (CTF).

When it fails to function, starts puking and drooling and its diaper overflows, the Fed buys whatever Treasuries and unwanted mortgage-ish bonds don't sell, loans money to Iceland so it can buy ads for sex tourist campaigns, then J.P. Morgan's secretly embalmed Hand of Glory is waved and it's pronounced "stimulus." This is why I'm constructing a hidden bunker in my basement, or more accurately, underneath my neighbor's house.

For more able, stable bloggers than I get into decoding stuff like Reverse Repo Counterparties, Settled Holdings, Maiden Lane Transactions (tell me more, baby) and explain why negative Treasury yields (don't ask) are now occurring. My global finance learning-perch was street-side at The Curb, so the vividly profane, mayonnaise-stained trading language of my tutelage springs effortlessly to mind. One might call that learning experience many things, but boring isn't one. You'd hear the following sort of thing there on an hourly basis:

Intro, scene, Fed metaphor: you're minding your own business, going to a neighborhood farmer's market. On the other side of the street you see they're throwing a big party in the parking lot; the mayor, city council, and chamber of commerce sit on a raised podium, all roaring off-their-asses drunk. The lot is cordoned by cops in riot gear, ringing the banners, confetti, cheerleaders and high school band. A banner in front of the podium reads The American Way of Life; under it a bunch of men are dancing. Something looks odd about the dancing from a distance, and as you draw nearer, a gap in the crowd opens and you realize the performers are from the insane asylum and they're doing a giant circle jerk. They're jumping in rhythm and howling "Stim! You! Late! Stim! You! Late!"

I could relate other financial metaphors, but they're too dirty. In the annals of sovereign finance, what these dubious, dogmatic currency assassins are doing is Feast of the Mau-Maus bad. Hieronymus Bosch painting bad. Aleister Crowley summoning Satan to eat a May Queen's soul bad. It's ghastlier, grislier, and on a far grander scale than any swindle that's ever been run. At least the Tulip Craze was just about flowers. The South Sea Bubble took down two kingdoms, and that was just over a few far-off islands that wiped out some speculators who were already rich.

What we have on our hands now is about the homes we live in and the land underneath. The banks claimed ownership of them, leveraged their values by two orders of magnitude, then couldn't pay their investors off. Meanwhile, the speculators aren't being wiped out, they're the ones being given free money. To a simpleton clouded by news cycles, illicit substances and fiat currencies, this means everything's going to be just fine and I'm a raving lunatic. Which reminds me, we're going to need a second 12-gauge shotgun to back up the electric fence.

Orwell feared nations that banned books, Huxley feared a society in which nobody wanted to read them, and it looks like we're going to get the worst of both. Books or no, you catch on that Empires can get away with a lot because, well, they're frigging Empires. So in that context you could reasonably answer the little question posed above with "Quite a while." In following posts I'll lay out some consequences of monetizing debt, explain why Goldman Sachs is about to eat the Fed's lunch (meaning ours) and in all probability will rebut myself. Pun intended.