Thursday, September 27, 2012

Borrow from Peter w/o paying Paul

Fed funding entire deficit. QE3: $40 billion a month without end. Are. They. Insane?

The truth is blasphemy???

Only from Islamic documents do we know that Mohammad was an illiterate misogynous pedophile serial hate-crime murderer (including murder of quite a number of his own family who had some things to say about him themselves) that believed his god Allah requires members of his religion to convert, enslave or kill every other person on the planet.

Jesus had a quite different life. Does Islam's teaching that Mohammad was superior to Jesus make any sense on any level?

There are moderate muslims. Libya seems to have them.

Mike Rowe has a website

Thanks to the libtards in the media that cut him off (yeah, they believe in free speech but only when it's theirs) and Rand reminding me I found his great web site.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Great lines...

Thomas Sowell, "Let's stop and think, if only for the novelty of it."

I'll add more later.

Equal protection and justice

Article XIV:1 [No State shall] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Ed brought the subject up regarding our tax laws and then I came across this article.

Unequal protection under British rule is why we became these United States.

We will not continue to be a country if we don't fix this starting with the elite political class that like the status quo.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Stranger than fiction

Wow. This story is beyond belief. I remember the trial.

In the middle of it is Joe McGinniss, the creep that moved into the house next to Sarah and her family.

History has lessons

We are heading down the same path with QE3.

Thrift may be dead as well. But would come back if the economy went back to historical norms.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Spontaneous, right?

thousands of protesters arrived in buses and cars to gather on the main street near the heavily-fortified US embassy
They're being bussed in. (I don't care that spell check says only one 's') If you think this is about an anti-Mohammed film I've got a bridge to sell ya.

What they really need...

...is cameras watching the cameras that are watching the cameras...

Dum da dum dum... dumb.

Obama throws himself under the bus

As president, Obama is our head of state. He can't throw members of the state department under the bus because they work directly for him. He can try, and the press will go along, but that doesn't change anything.

They knew the attack was coming 48 hrs before. They let 4 people die, including an ambassador.

An attack on our embassy or consulate is an attack on our country and as my previous post point out, their are standard historical responses that Obama is the first president to ignore.

Normally, you stand with a president during a national crisis like this, but with Obama changing the rules, he's lost the right to have anybody stand with him... but the press will continue to ignore this reality in order to bash Romney so they can get their guy reelected to another term.

We rounded up the Japanese during WW2. It would make more sense to round up the anti-America press, but instead of sending them to camps, we send them on holiday (revoke their citizenship and exile them.) Freedom of speech we must defend (without bias.) Sedition is something else altogether.

There is no benefit of doubt anymore regarding Obama. He is bad for America.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Embassy basics that 'everybody knows'

What Obama and Hillary don't know...
...the time for an official government protest for an attack on a US embassy is always when rioters attack or deface the embassy compound itself, long before they violate or penetrate the US sovereign territory or deface the US Flag. Not nine hours later and not when the details become clear. Then it is too late to take action to keep an embassy from burning or to protect American diplomats. The objective is safety, more than knowledge.
When foreign TV videos showed rioters on the walls of the US Embassy and tearing apart the US Flag on the early evening of 11 September, the time for a strong US official protest and angry telephone calls to Mursi had already passed. 
Every student of international affairs and international diplomacy knows this. Every experienced foreign policy staff and every competent journalist knows this. But not this State Department and not this US administration and not mainstream US news services. The US simply failed to defend itself.

Supercomputer for $4000!

I don't know???

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Our Sarah

Has no loss for words.

Update: ...and her follow up hits the nail on the head. How much closer to disaster do we need to go before the country wakes up?

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Point of no return

...the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed.

We looked in awe when protesters in Greece rioted because of a cut in welfare. We are Greece.

Point of no return is just that. It's the point where you don't have enough resources left to get back to solid ground... but when you run out of resources, the ground comes up to get you. It's never pretty.

All Obama has to do...

...is get everyone to stop looking for work; then the unemployment rate falls to zero!

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Friday, September 7, 2012

Some lovely real estate

Robots make a nice precursor to people, but we need to send geologists and real estate developers soon.
Click on image to really see terrain, Curiosity rover in bluish patch
Onsite view.

What happens when...

...the government chooses it's members rather than the people?

Can you see the tyranny from your porch?

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

...often wrong but never in doubt

Thomas tells the truth.

Why is it always more difficult?

I want to know what daily/weekly/monthly interest rate is equal to a given annual rate? You'd think people interested in their personal finances would all be interested in that and that it would be easy to find online calculators to provide that answer. You'd be wrong (or I'm just not using the correct google phrase?) The closest you can come is to google "Effective Interest Rate Calculator" but that gives you something slightly different. They take the annual rate, divide by the periods for a simple rate and give you a new annual rate. Not at all what I want. I want to go directly from an annual rate to a period rate that, when compounded, produces that annual rate. Obviously, too much to ask (I'm sure somewhere on the vast internet it exists, but where?)

Sure I could manipulate the compound interest formula into an spread sheet but then I'd have nothing to bitch about would I?

Anyway, this story is the jumping off point for my rant.

I'm 53. I'm figuring my retirement plans at a 5% return. Historically you could figure on 7% to 7.5% but that's ancient history. Getting 5% passively is a lot harder than it used to be. So I'm looking at what you need to do to actively get 5%. Thus I need to know a daily/weekly/monthly rate to figure that. Or I could quit being a nit picker and just use the 5.13% rate that these calculators provide as my new goal? You still have to divide 5% by the number of period to get the period rate that results in 5.13%, but it leaves little to bitch about. So now we have 0.0137% compounded daily to result in 5.13% annual. Is that right? I'm so confused.

Put another way, that means for every $10k I have, I need to get $1.37 per day to get 5.13% annual. Put that way, it doesn't seem that difficult. Assuming I didn't screw up the decimal place somewhere which is a very common mistake for me. Or to put it even another way, if I have $6k, then my goal for the day is to earn 0.6 * 1.37 or 82 cents that day. But that's when I retire. To build my nest egg, I'm looking at earning one percent per day (ten dollars for every thousand) with as little risk as possible which would make retirement come in as little as two years. It's only a goal.

The last year has been a complete loss financially for me. I've made no progress which is a large part of my reason for moving to this town in the middle of no place. So last month, again starting from scratch, I've decide that phase one of my financial plan is to save money until my birthday at the end of march. The mental trick I'm using is that the money I'm saving DOES NOT EXIST until then. Nobody has any claim on it, can not borrow it, nothing... until my birthday as which time I will have money for phase two...

One percent daily growth for a year. I consider this very doable. The risk is greed, because it's actually not hard to earn a considerably higher rate when talking about just a few tens of thousands. For example, it's pretty easy to double your money in a week by buying an old car that isn't running and paying a mechanic to make it run. Scaling that up is the problem. The stock market solves the scaling problem but has a different set of risks associated with it. Say I buy a thousand shares of a $5 stock. My broker would charge me $14 ($7 to buy and $7 to sell.) One percent of $5000 is $50 so I need to make $64. It's not that hard to find a $5 stock that will give you 7 cents while avoiding most of the downside (look for a stock that bounces considerably more per day with lots of volume. You need volume to be sure you can sell. You have no idea of what you've done until you are back in cash. You may need to make two buys and one sell for 8 cents. If you can't make 8 cents it's better to sell and take a loss than hope tomorrow gives you your money back. Holding a stock that isn't meant to be held will take all your money over time. Buy and hold is for a different type of stock.) It takes about 15 minutes a day. Trying a variety of things mitigates the risks of just a single type of investment. You must actively look for different prospects. Some things will work and others will not. You keep doing the things that work.

Then I reevaluate for phase three. Going from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.

Phase four is reaching my final goal before I'm too old for it to matter.

All of which sounds good in theory. I really have no option but to make it work in practice. We're all getting old and poverty really, really sucks. More perspective.

My ex-wife's plan is much simpler. Continue to work for another ten years while getting a fixed rate 30 year FHA mortgage and make double payments to pay it off in ten. She's then depending on social security and continuing her second job of teaching piano. She's been doing that for the last ten years with some of her successes now in college. It gives her a great deal of pleasure (and some disappointment but that she puts on the parents for not making their young ones practice.)

Monday, September 3, 2012

Lefty awakening?

Lefties are saying...
Obama has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution
Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush.
It will be over soon.