Merry Christmas from the Family

This is a favorite of mine.  Robert Earl Keen just nails it.  Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas

Some Christmas cheer from the New York Sun, ca. 1897:

DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.' Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Stewardship... It was nice to know ya...

stewardship: (1) the office, duties, and obligations of one who actively directs affairs; (2) the individual's responsibility to manage his life and property with proper regard to the rights of others.

I realize that a concept such as stewardship must seem a quaint relic from a bygone era.  But did MF Global need some more of it?  Does the CME need some more of it?

Why don't we go and ask their customers?

Who needs stewardship?

R.I.P., Smokin' Joe

"The relentless, undersized heavyweight..."

This is Curious

Just Because They're Broke Doesn't Mean They're Stupid

When I read the first sentence in the lead story of this morning's Wall Street Journal, I couldn't help but smile a little bit.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou stunned Europe by announcing a referendum on his country's latest bailout—a high-stakes gamble that could undermine the international effort to preserve the euro.

Only the European mentality could be stunned by a country actually wanting to exercise its sovereignty and national choice.  The finances of Greece may be in complete disarray, but I'm glad to see that the country still has a prime minister that is looking out for the self interest of his nation.  He negotiated hard for a bailout deal for his country, and now he's taking it to his people for a vote.

How dare he do such a thing? Truly that is a question that could only be asked by a mindless European socialist.

The Greeks may be broke, but they are not stupid.  Good for you Mr. Papandreou.

It's ironic that Greece, the birthplace of democracy, is stunning Europe by calling for a vote to decide an important matter.  These days it's not supposed to work that way.  All Europeans are supposed to take their directives from the uberlords in Brussels... or so the uberlords in Brussels thought.

Words to Heed in a Web-based World

If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer.  You're the product being sold.

Hat tip: Ace

Trick Shots

Hat tip: Houston's Clear Thinkers

"He said he would be off the mic for a few to handle his gunshot wounds."

This is from Business Insider, but I thought I'd just copy the whole article.  Go to this link for the source:

When U.S. Army Special Forces entered a Taliban village in western Afghanistan back in 2009, they had one man with them to coordinate the vital air support that would keep them alive.
His name is Robert Gutierrez and shortly into the fight he was hit with an armor piercing round that tore through his chest and shoulder.

"I've seen those types of injuries before, and time isn't your friend," Gutierrez said later. "I thought, ‘I have three minutes before I'm going to die. I've got to do something big. Based on that time frame, I'm going to change the world in three minutes.’"

With Taliban fighters shooting down on his platoon from rooftops just 10 feet from their position, Gutierrez maintained radio contact with airmen overhead to keep the enemy from killing them all. His efforts earned him the Air Force Cross for extraordinary heroism late last month.

The four-hour firefight included sniper and small-arms fire, as well as rocket propelled grenades attacks. Though Gutierrez lost five pints of blood and walked over a mile, he maintained constant radio contact.

Soldiers on the ground attempting to treat Gutierrez said he refused to remove his body armor because it held his radio, relenting only for a moment so the medic could insert a tube below his collarbone. The move kept his lung from collapsing, allowing him to continue breathing and speaking into the radio.

The A-10 pilot talking to him on the ground said he had no idea Gutierrez was wounded, that his voice was calm the whole time, and only realized the man was injured when his team moved to the medical landing zone.

"He said he would be off of the mic for a few to handle his gunshot wounds," Air Force Capt. Ethan Sabin said. "Until that point he was calm, cool and collected."

When it was all over Gutierrez had taken a bullet to the upper shoulder, triceps, left chest and lateral muscle causing two broken ribs, a broken scapula, and a softball-sized hole in his back.


He suffered a collapsed lung and multiple blood infections, which required three chest tubes, three blood transfusions and seven surgeries.


To top it off the 30 mm strafing runs from the A-10 he was calling in ruptured both of his eardrums.


Gutierrez is only the second living recipient of the Air Force Cross since 9/11 and he is now assigned a training role at the Special Operations Training Center at Pope AFB, N.C.

Character Flaw was Always an Important Theme in Greek Tragedy

"There are many lessons for America in the current agonies of the Greeks. Perhaps the most important is that there is such a thing as “national character”. The Greeks collectively are mercurial, spendthrift, comparatively unproductive, and have an unearned sense of entitlement. They feed on past glories while doing nothing to ensure future prosperity. The dodge taxes as though it were a national sport. They take alms as if they are earned wages, and then complain that the money isn’t enough. They lied their way into the Eurozone and now resent the consequences of that lie.

"The “prosperity” they achieved with the Euro was nothing of the sort: it was simply a mad borrowing binge, and all that borrowed money must now be repaid...in one way or another. Debt, by itself, is morally neutral -- but debt incurred in service to weakness, vanity, and vice is most assuredly not moral. Immorality that goes unpunished or ignored leads to decadence; decadence leads to societal rot. Fiscal improvidence is a symptom. The disease is a deficit of national character.

"I have pity for individual Greeks who, through no fault of their own, are held hostage by the wastrels among them. But so many of these stories you read show the defects of the Greek character: a sense of entitlement, of grievance, of inchoate anger at their creditors, a lack of appreciation for cause and effect. Read the comments from the Greeks -- they have no plan to recover the situation, no actual belief in change. Their only hope seems to be that the world will somehow keep giving them money even though they produce nothing that the world wants.

Hat tip - Ace

Move Over Joe Cocker

Simon Cowell's talent is to create entertaining machines that funnel talent.

Putting Simon's talent aside, check out the talent on Josh Krajcik (watch the whole thing):



Brilliant!

Money quote right at the end: "Where's the bar...?"

The Exit Ramp to a Society's Death Rattle

When a society voluntarily closes its door on 700 years of tradition and custom, one has to wonder if such an act is not the harbinger of a bigger sweep into the dustbin of history?

    Jose Tomas: a snapshot of grace under pressure

Go here for the article: Last Bullfight in Catalonia

-------- 

Going to the bullfights has always been high on my bucket list.  Going back to Catalonia, after reading this story, not so much...



F.A. Hayek... Thought for the Day...

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

- F.A. Hayek

Move Over Thomas Edison

I can't wait for this technology start-up's IPO...



Money quote: "My electric bill really went down."

Great Ad

Who is the ad agency that developed this concept?

Good stuff.

9-11

My words for this great tragedy are few, for it already speaks deeply to true Americans.

REMEMBER.
AVENGE.

The First Economist

... In a While, Crocodile...

I want to know how they actually caught this thing.  The article says a 3-week hunt and it was ensnared, but that probably doesn't do justice to what really happened.  Happy Labor Day!



US Natural Gas Production Still Very Strong

Flying Squirrel...

Start watching very carefully at the 1:15 mark... truly death defying...

An Apt Description for Much Analysis in Circulation These Days

"...the report is about as useful as parsing binary voodoo entrails through the magic punch card-based 8 ball of a Princeton economist..."

That one is a keeper.

Marcellus: Reeling in Expectations??

I'm no geologist, but what's going on here?

The U.S. will slash its Marcellus Shale reserve estimate to 84 trillion cubic feet of gas from the earlier estimates of 410 trillion...

Although the new number is higher than USGS's last estimate in 2002, it represents a 80% decrease from the recent EIA estimate.

Quick story link: Slashing Marcellus Story

Keynesian Economics vs. Regular Economics

Worth the read: WSJ Opinion Piece

Best quote comes at the end.

There are two ways to view Keynesian stimulus through transfer programs. It's either a divine miracle—where one gets back more than one puts in—or else it's the macroeconomic equivalent of bloodletting. Obviously, I lean toward the latter position, but I am still hoping for more empirical evidence.

Another Sign Post on the Way to Financial Reckoning

I realize articles like the one linked below are hearsay and somewhat sensationalistic, but the sheer number of items like this that cross my desk every week is significant... like signposts alerting a driver to danger on the road ahead.

"GAO Fail: Phony Fed Audit..."

Or as the old adage goes: Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Hat tip: Zerohedge

Who is the Life of this Party?

I know this is weird, but I saw it and had a good laugh.

All the chemists and chemical engineers out there... Enjoy!



A little levity and strangeness to take our minds off of the market meltdown...

Some Sunday Morning Thoughts on the Economy and Markets

This is from Sean Corrigan, linked by Zerohedge.  A few choice quotes below.

"Debt cannot be the cure for over indebtedness, nor a more rapidly debased currency the antidote to its ongoing debasement. We must forgo the intellectual conceit that we can impose some higher order on the seeming chaos of the world and instead we must simply smooth the way so that its own emergent properties can seek out a better constellation of interconnections, all by itself.

"We must recognize that there are no workable macroeconomic solutions which can be laid down: that everything is a matter of functioning microeconomics building things up; that the diamond takes on its lustrous geometry, atom by atom; that the masterpiece hanging in the Louvre came into being brushstroke by painstaking brushstroke.

"Only get the microeconomics right and all else will follow.

"As Adam Smith famously remarked, "there's a lot of ruin in a country" - though, contrary to what our present rulers seem to believe, he was not issuing a challenge to them to seek to quantify its limits.

"If we are to avoid that final ruin, if we are to properly rectify much of what is broken and not merely smother it in inflationary balm and patch it over with a plaster of false accounting for a further, brief, electoral, half-life, there are three things which we could and should usefully add to the list of the downcast and destroyed.

"These are, namely: that unsound money which is truly the root of all evil; the unfunded mountains of government debt with which such bad money engages in a poisonous symbiosis of executive tyranny and political corruption; the duty-free but rights-encrusted Provider State which waxes fat on that unholy alliance of illusory finance and which not only robs Peter piecemeal to pay Paul, but empowers Pericles to oversee the theft, and so suffuses the commonwealth with a miasma of perverse incentives, ethical degeneracy, and irreconcilable conflicts of interest.

"What lies broken, we can surely fix, but only if we break in turn the habits of mind and the tyranny of the man-made institutions which we first allowed to break the things we value - our freedom of association, our independence of action, and our individual chance of prosperity.

If you have the time, click over and give a read to the whole thing... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/wasteland-how-central-planning-broke-all-markets-and-what-we-can-do-fix-them.

This is One of the Coolest Things I've Seen on the Web in a Long Time

I hope the youtube imbed works... if not, here's the link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kotK9FNEYU)



If this doesn't get you over humpday, I don't know what will.

Enjoy!

P.S. I guess the notes just gave up at Coltrane's cadenza... just too fast there at the end...

But We Must Remember S&P's Recent History

Don't forget S&P is the same group that gave the "AAA" rating to all the mortgage-backed garbage that collapsed only a few years ago.

The USA, without a doubt, must get its finances in order; but S&P as the arbiter of creditworthiness... really, REALLY??

A great comment at Innerworkings: http://blog.atimes.net/?p=1891

Ugghhh... Downgrade Deserved...

If a private sector company funded this type of activity, the boss would probably be fired and the credit would be deservedly garbage.  But I fear this is S.O.P. for our government.



Hat tip: Richard Young (http://www.richardcyoung.com/)

Food for thought this weekend....

S&P vs. Gold... Some more food for thought

Three peaks on the chart: 1929, 1966, and 2000.  After each peak, there was a decline and period of time until the ratio began climbing again.

After 1929, the climb didn't start again until 1941 - about 12 years.  After 1966, the climb didn't start until 1980 - about 14 years.  Since 2000, it has been 11 years and I'm not certain that the bottom has been made.

I look at this chart, and I tend to think the ratio of S&P to Gold will probably decrease some more - at least to the median of 0.48 (as shown by the solid red line).  Mathematically, there are plenty of combination to reach the 0.48 level, but all of them mean that Gold would have to at least double the S&P.

Dry Production Snapping Back... by almost 2 Bcf!

The EIA has released their latest Nat Gas Dry Production numbers for Mar-2011: about 61.9 Bcf per day.  Compared to Feb-2011 numbers (which were 60 Bcf per day), this is a jump of almost 2 Bcf per day.

Not Bullish... yet the market continues to climb...

Dry Production Down in Feb

While perusing the EIA's monthly stats for Feb 2011, I saw that Dry Production decreased by 0.8 Bcf per day from 60.8 Bcf per day in Jan to 60.0 Bcf per day in Feb.  Since Dec 2010, Dry Production has falled by 1.2 Bcf per day.  This is significant and reconciles with my forecasted declines... and I don't think this drop is entirely attributable to freeze-offs (a meme being repeated by the permabears).

So, we are now seeing two months, back to back, with Dry Production declines.  This is interesting.

Price per BTU: Some Very Wide Spreads

The spread between U.S. Natural Gas and WTI Crude Oil is the widest ever.

USA NG Production: 62+ bcfd by mid-summer... really?

I've been hearing that gas production in the U.S. is supposed to reach 62 bcfd by midsummer.  If that's truly the case, then we have a long wait for any signs of tightening... hmmm...

USA Rig Counts Since 1991

A lot of information in this little chart.  The nice relationship between gas rigs and dry production just isn't what it used to be...