Month: May 2010

HFT demonstrably does not provide liquidity unless the market is going up and has market-wrecking implications. This is to say nothing about the advantages it gives institutional traders over non-HFT firms or individuals.

unsolicitedanalysis
reblogging nonolet
This strikes me as the critical truth of the recent craziness, and one that I’ve not heard uttered by anyone at any level of the MSM, who were almost universally still peddling various demonstrably false interpretations.
tl;dr: We are fucked

My sweet untouched Miranda

It occurs to me that people like Joementum, the Commonwealth’s own Code Brown, and apparently all of those in the media that slavishly cover them simply don’t understand what the Miranda warning even is.

Here’s what it’s not: conferring you any new rights

Here’s what it is: warning you of the rights you hold, by dint of being a living citizen of these United States and of which you may or may not choose to avail yourself (specifically, this boils down to the right to sit there mute unless and until you’ve spoken to counsel). Beginning to see why they so frequently put that word “warning” in there after the word Miranda?

How is it that these same folks that recite and (incorrectly) parse the Second Amendment ad nauseum (but inevitably, and notably verbatim) don’t understand the most basic concepts regarding what I would deem the single most fundamental right governing our interactions with our pre- and post-W.Bush-administration government?
Ironically, though, does it surprise anyone that gun ownership also happens to be the one Constitutional right that suspected terrorists get to keep under the GOP’s dream setup. Honestly, we should probably make it even easier for the suspected terrorist to buy guns; I’d assume this policy is best achieved through a wide-ranging program of blanket tax cuts.

So, once again for the truly slow and Brian Williams: Mirandizing someone simply ensures that they are fully aware of rights that are operative for all citizens no matter what; it doesn’t confer said rights, and neither do those rights magically begin only subsequent to their being invoked by rote recitation. Just like on all the cop shows!

These people are thoroughgoing frauds – a bunch of right-wing victim-mongers whining about something they have no actual ideas about confronting. They are not something new. They are the decaying stench of the Republican corpse. If they get into power somehow, it will be Weekend At Bernie’s for conservatism.

Andrew Sullivan on the Tea Party. Whole thing well worth your short read. Breathtaking stuff. (via spiegelman)

Say Hello to the Woodman

Robert Lauder: At one point in Hannah and Her Sisters, your character, Mickey, is very disillusioned. He is thinking about becoming a Catholic and he sees Duck Soup. He seems to think, “Maybe in a world where there are the Marx Brothers and humor, maybe there is a God. Who knows.” And maybe Mickey can live with that. Am I interpreting this correctly?

Woody Allen: No. I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful.

Because the boundaries of political debate in Washington are also the horizons of the discussion on “Washington Week,” the show has no grace, mystery, edge or dissonant voice. What if the system is broken, the political elite is failing the country, accountability is a mirage and the game is a farce run by well-educated people who manipulate the symbols of the republic? Whenever those things are true, “Washington Week” becomes a lie.

Jay Rosen. Don’t mince words, Jay, tell us what you really think. Oh, and: yep.

That was surreal. Guys, what I just saw in there made me realize, we have got to win. It was crazy in there.

Maybe I shouldn’t be president, but [McCain] definitely shouldn’t be.

Barack Obama, as reported by Jonathan Alter, reacting to the pre-election meeting with Hank Paulson, McCain, various members of Congress, and then-president Bush

Oil’s Darkside

It was not a mistake. The response to Katrina was not a mistake, and neither was the lack of an acoustic switch on the wellhead that could have shut down the flow when the platform was lost:

Cheney’s energy task force – the secretive one that he wouldn’t say much about publicly – that decided that the [acoustic] switches, which cost $500,000, were too much a burden on the industry

$500,000 was “too much of a burden” on an industry receiving $36.5 BILLION in government subsidies over and above any historic profits they just might be reaping. BILLION. With a “B”. Versus $500 THOUSAND. I’m willing to bet that Halliburton’s compensation committee gives bonuses in excess of the cost of said acoustic switch that wasn’t there to stop the oil spill that occured when they fucked up the bore cementing job they were down there doing. Poorly, in all likelihood.
In 2009, Halliburton’s CEO received $12.4M, a stunning reduction of 20%. One wonders how he gets by. The no-doubt struggling compensation committee awarded him, him, as in just him ALONE, a bonus of $8.1M. By my count, that’s 16.2 acoustic switches without even touching his regular pay. This, however, is an unsustainable burden on the oil industry, which Halliburton isn’t even directly involved with (in terms of directing exploration, drilling, and refining).
Worth noting that there are, as of April 2010 56 licensed and operating oil platforms that the US has purview over. FIFTY SIX. It would cost $2.8M to outfit THEM ALL. $36.5 BILLION in direct government subsidies to the oil industry before any profits are even estimated, but, according to Dick Cheney, $2.8M is too great a price to pay.

By all means, blame it on Obama. His fault all the way.