New element discovered: Antimoney

I've no time for a real post today but can't resist quoting a couple of comments from the discussion board at Marketwatch.

Easyesteemer writes: "At the end of the day today what has changed? The market gave back all of yesterdays gains so nothing has happened. Oh, yes, a couple of fat cats walked with millions of severance pay. Kind of like watching one of those fuzzy videos of a store robbery. Only we are the ones getting robbed."

Robpublicagain writes:

The LHC [Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator] has discovered a new previously unknown subatomic state of matter. Scientists have named this new state of matter – Antimoney.

Antimoney identifying physical trait is that it completely annihilates regular money. Scientists are studying this behavior and are trying determine why the chain reaction continued even after the shut down of the LHC. Further, it appears a beam of Antimoney has been generated and focused in the direction of Wall Steet.

Even if we Americans lose everything else in the gathering financial apocalypse, we'll still have our sense of humor.

United States: "More Communist than China"?

Chairman, National Committee To Save
Fannie and Freddie: "Thanks for the moo-lah"

If you live in the United States and have successfully paid off your own mortgage, congratulations. Now your reward is that you can pay to save devil-may-care banks and their enablers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who herded millions into buying homes they couldn't afford. As widely expected, the latter two institutions, incompetent and corrupt to the bone, are now wards of the state.

Jim Rogers, the commodity investor, says: "America is more communist than China is right now. You can see that this is welfare of the rich, it is socialism for the rich … it's just bailing out financial institutions."

It's not only a matter of "the government" — you, taxpaying sucker — plunging US$100 billion or so to make Fannie and Freddie whole again. With the federal deficit in deep space anyway, what's another hundred billion? (Or two or six hundred billion, who knows what the reckoning will eventually be?)

No, the thing is, we have just officially abandoned any pretense that we have a capitalist economic system self-regulated by Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the market. The U.S. economy is now a government-directed system. Institutions are too big to fail. You are not. You are free to go broke without let or hindrance, as long as Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, etc. stay dry.

Not to mention, in the case of Fannie and Freddie, their top managers who got their positions as political plums, ran their organizations aground, and can now retire gracefully or step into another feathered nest.

Under the terms of his employment contract, Daniel H. Mudd, the departing head of Fannie Mae [whose shareholders are lighter by 86 percent at this writing], stands to collect $9.3 million in severance pay, retirement benefits and deferred compensation, provided his dismissal is deemed to be “without cause,” according to an analysis by the consulting firm James F. Reda & Associates. Mr. Mudd has already taken home $12.4 million in cash compensation and stock option gains since becoming chief executive in 2004, according to an analysis by Equilar, an executive pay research firm.

Richard F. Syron, the departing chief executive of Freddie Mac [shares down 82 percent at the moment], could receive an exit package of at least $14.1 million, largely because of a clause added to his employment contract in mid-July as his company’s troubles deepened. He has taken home $17.1 million in pay and stock option gains since becoming chief executive in 2003.

Rogers again: "This is madness, this is insanity, they have more than doubled the American national debt in one weekend for a bunch of crooks and incompetents. I'm not quite sure why I or anybody else should be paying for this."

But undoubtedly he has, quite legally and legitimately, gamed the system so that he won't be paying for this farce. Many of the rest of us can't say the same. Even to make a stab at paying off this new government expense, there will have to be higher taxes and printing presses or computers creating more dollars nonstop, hence higher inflation from now until someone notices that there is no longer a country left.

Have a nice life.

Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights

Wong Kar Wai has made his first American film, My Blueberry Nights.

Having been impressed with his Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, and particularly his near-masterpiece 2046 -- all of which I caught up with on DVD -- I was keen to see his latest opus in a real movie theater. Normally, I prefer DVDs (unless I can see a movie in a technically superb theater, like Hollywood's ArcLight Cinema), but Wong is such a strong visual director that I figured it was worth it to endure the hassles and expense of a trip to the bigger screen of the cineplex. But My Blueberry Nights lingered at my local semi-art-house theater for only a week, and I missed it. But at least it was quickly released on DVD.

Probably wisely, Wong didn't try for a tour de force like 2046 while getting his bearings in the American idiom. Nights is a leisurely paced, gorgeously tinted adult fairy tale -- shallow but engaging. It follows Norah Jones (the delightful singer and songwriter) as Elizabeth, who wanders into a New York cafe owned by Jeremy (Jude Law) after breaking up with her boyfriend. It soon develops that he, too, is nursing a wounded heart from a relationship cutoff. When he offers her a slice of blueberry pie, the running metaphor starts.

Fortunately, the script doesn't settle into pop psychology clichés about two lonely people finding each other (not for most of the film, anyway). Elizabeth bolts from New York, spends some time in a Tennessee city working as a waitress in a restaurant and bar, later heads out to Nevada for more of the same. Along the way she becomes involved in the personal dilemmas of other characters she meets in her job.

Wong wrote the script along with the crime novelist Lawrence Block, presumably recruited to add some authentically American spice to the dialogue. Nights has a few islands of drama, effectively directed and acted, but it's mostly an exercise in atmosphere. Its cinematography is typical of Wong's films, with hot, saturated colors (red and, naturally, blue predominating somewhat). When the plot energy droops, the movie's stimulating painterly qualities are often enough to keep you immersed in it. There are moments, though, when even the candy store colors seem like an effort to fill in for ideas that aren't there.

At least Wong avoided one of his mannerisms -- there aren't any long takes of characters talking while soundstage rain drenches them. (A couple of cultural bloopers, though: people in Tennessee cities don't build streetcorner shrines with flowers and a photograph of the deceased; and a Las Vegas hospital shouldn't look like a middle-sized department store, with opening and closing hours stenciled on the window.)

Natalie Portman in My Blueberry Nights

Norah Jones conveys the kind of sweet openness that she projects in her music, and it's not inappropriate for the part. Unfortunately for her, she doesn't hold the screen as well as the more professional actors in the cast -- Law, Rachel Weisz, David Strathairn, and Natalie Portman. Weisz and Portman make a meal out of their flamboyant parts, and the always-impressive Strathairn does a superb turn as an emotionally shattered policeman Elizabeth meets in the bar where she serves and he drinks.

There is no reason to doubt that Wong has further exceptional films in him. Meanwhile, My Blueberry Nights is an enjoyable divertimento. It's superior to almost anything widely available and publicized in movie theaters this year, a sad commentary on audience and media tastes.

Hiding in Palin sight

I couldn't bring myself to watch the season finale of the Republican convention last night — or is there an anti-climactic thud scheduled for tonight? — but after reading some of the glowing reviews of Ms. Palin today, my torpid political bones were stirred into just enough action to catch some of the instant replay on YouTube.

At first I was sorry I bothered, as she banged on interminably about her family and displayed them like an album of vacation photos. How have we sunk to this? Our presidential campaigns aren't about policies anymore; they're not even entirely about candidates' personalities; they're about candidates' husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, parents, grandparents, third cousins twice removed, schoolteachers, childhood playmates, pets. By the 2012 campaign, if the country survives that long, the vote will be down to competing Facebook entries.

Can you imagine Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 opening his bid for the presidency by announcing, "Ladies and gentlemen, I know we're up to our eye sockets in a Depression, some of you might want to hear about that, and yes, I can see them putting up tents for a new Hooverville there in the second balcony, and the breadlines are winding three times around the convention hall, but wait. I'm first and foremost a family man. My wife Eleanor [pause for applause] is here with me tonight — Eleanor! And that young man beaming in the front row, Elliot — Elliot! Next to him is my pride and joy, my daughter Eleanora — Eleanora! That cute little chap she's holding is our terrier, Fala — toss the folks a bark, Fala! Of course you remember Teddy … ."

I'll give it to Sarah Palin, she's a cracking good speaker. Even when she's saying nothing really, you can look at her, and that causes no pain. But she knows timing and delivery, varying the volume as needed. Either she took acting lessons or she's a natural, gets a lot of mileage out of little bits of "business" and facial expressions.

Other than the standard flag waving, promising a brighter tomorrow, etc. that any candidate has to deliver — it's in their contracts — the best of her speech, or the portion of it I saw anyway, was negative. But in a good way. She took B. Hussein Obama to the woodshed and gave him a right thrashing.

And it was fun, just different enough and clever enough that I wanted her to go into true outrageous mode. She may be the only candidate in our time who could pull off a line like that of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1733–1833), an eccentric boozehound, dueler, and champion of states' rights, who said of an opponent: "Fellow-citizens, he is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks."

It's been so long since we've seen a big-league candidate with stage presence and magnetism that we are entitled to whatever pleasure we can derive from it in this horrid campaign. But we her views are still almost as obscure as those of Mr. O himself. In any case, she is not running for president. Her firepower, for now, is in aid of that rotten mackerel John McCain, who doesn't shine, even by moonlight.

Tighter little island

Peter Hitchens, bless his heart, feels sick at the prospect of the United Kingdom not only losing any of its traditional cultural identity but becoming wretchedly overpopulated, a European India.

Our Brussels masters predict that Britain will soon be the most crowded country in the whole of Europe. Presumably this is what they want, since it is their laws that have destroyed our borders and abolished British citizenship and British passports (that wretched puce thing in your pocket is an EU passport, not a British one, and the further east you go, the easier they are to get).

The European Commission says there will be almost 80million people crammed into our landscape by 2058. Just imagine all that concrete, the thousands of square miles (or square kilometres as they will be by then) chewed up by bulldozers.

Imagine the unending 24-hour whoosh and grind of traffic, the bulging trains, the seething, noisy, litter-strewn parks on hot summer Sundays, the crowded schools, the endless waits at enormous polyclinics to see a doctor you’ve never met before and will never see again, who probably doesn’t have English as a first language, and the multicultural schools where half the class will always be from somewhere else. I’m quite glad to think I’ll be dead by then.

England's "green and pleasant land" is being turned into an island-wide version of New York City and its New Jersey suburbs.

Americans have no reason to feel superior to this madness. The United States has added 100 million to its population since the 1970s, mostly through immigration and immigrants' high birth rates. On it goes, and goes. The process is like compounded interest, growth of growth, not addition.

The Liberal Establishment loves a booming population (as long as it's a non-Anglo boom), since that advances its program of race replacement. The Business Establishment loves bigger numbers because they mean more cheap labor and, in theory, more consumers.

White nationalists want to try to outbreed immigrants. The Catholic Church wants to soak in a bath of millions more Latinos accompanied by a consequent spiritual uplift for its collection plates.

"Green" activists wouldn't dream of population stabilization or reduction — they want us to adopt a meager lifestyle and live in high-rise multi-unit dwellings instead of houses, so we can shoehorn still more people into the country, since they imagine that will boost their leftist agenda. The social work Mafia wants lots more clients to build its empires on. Every group craves more people in the belief their own fortunes are thereby furthered.

We can look forward to a population of 400 million in another 30 years, unless there is a change of heart and our people say too much is too much.

The only thing that makes the U.S. any better able than the U.K. to absorb vast additional numbers is that we are a much bigger country and have more room — although that is deceptive, because population growth occurs in concentrated areas, not randomly distributed over all the so-far sparsely settled space.

Our new millions won't be living at 12,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains or the sandy hills of West Texas. They'll gravitate toward urban and suburban areas, where the effects of human density will make life less bearable with each passing year.

Who speaks up for quality of life? Almost no one, it seems, except for the occasional eccentric like Peter Hitchens. Everyone else worships growth, as though that is some kind of good in itself.

Overpopulation is the hell we will deny, deny, deny, until it becomes totally intolerable. And incapable of amelioration.

Never has reincarnation seemed less appealing.

L'affaire Palin

Whatever borderline rationality I have managed to hang onto when I think about this election campaign, which is now beyond bizarre, has become irrelevant. You can't use reason to understand surrealism. I wrote in this blog several months ago that both candidates were unelectable, and events are proving me correct.

My original tentative approval of Sarah Palin has sent me on another switchback trail. Regardless of any admirable qualities she might have, there is still this question that won't budge: what kind of woman would accept the vice presidential candidacy knowing that her daughter's situation would inevitably become an international news sensation? How could she expose her child to such hell?

As for Juan "Amnesty" McCain, he has sunk lower than the mineral kingdom in my estimation. What scale can measure the cynicism of announcing his choice of Gov. Palin, then waiting several days to reveal her messy personal situation? I can only guess that he and his handlers imagined that the initial burst of approval would cancel out any negative reaction to the delayed news. But this is not going to go away. Bad, bad judgment.

The only person in the controversy I have any sympathy for is Gov. Palin's pregnant daughter, Bristol. At most, she can be charged with the folly of youth. She and her intended husband will be paying for it indefinitely, thanks to her mother's yielding to an infinitely more dangerous lust than a corporeal one — the lust for power.

UPDATE 9/3: It appears that the announcement of her daughter's interesting condition came from Gov. Palin, not McCain. Why announce it at all? The media or the Democrats — same thing, mostly — would have leaped on the news anyway, but in that case McCain and Palin could have dined out on a show of indignation that her personal family life was being infringed for political gain.