'Nuff Said on Mathematics

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(a love note to my wife)

Simone DeBovoire Eat Your Heart Out

In yet another stunning upset to the postmodernist theory that gender roles are "mere artifacts of an unbalanced society" and in affirmation of Simone de Bovoire's lament that "biology is destiny", it turns out that gender-related toy-choices are biologically determined, as shown in this study on monkeys.

"Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change."

Apparently a guy named Tyler Drumheller just gave a rather important interview to CBS. It seems he was our chief spook in Europe, and he claimed that in early 2002 before the invasion of Iraq that the CIA finally got high-level HUMINT penetration in Iraq, and that Rumsfeld, Cheney et al. were very excited to hear this. That is, they were excited to hear this until the Iraqi declared that there were no WMD or WMD programs active in Iraq at that time. Then they were immediately disinteresed, and claimed that since he was just a single source, that they shouldn't weigh that too heavily, even though they'd been happy enough to accept other single-source inputs that fit their presuppositions. When Mr. Drumheller objected, saying "Hey, what about the intel", the reply was "Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change."

So here's the scary idea. Let's face it, Bush's a theocratic twerp who doesn't even pretend to be a conservative any more. Ok, we were sorta coming to grips with that, and hoping that maybe he hasn't destroyed all the momentum we'd built up on the Republican side of things. But what if the tinfoil asshats on the left are actually correct, and the president really was out for empire? I'm all for what's gone down if the claims really were true to the best of our knowledge at the time, well except for Shit-secki (misspelled on purpose -- he's an ass whose people hated him) getting his successor named years before his retirement because he said the obvious, that we'd need a lot of troops to maintain order. But what if the Bush really had gone into the war on false pretenses? I find that very disturbing. I find it doubly disturbing that I'm not hearing ANY denunciations of this guy's statements in the MSM; I've been waiting for the "ok, he's full of it and here's why", but nothing. Near media-silence. Is this CBS interview total tin-foil-hat and the left-wing twinkies have been wasting my attention or what?

Or, in the immortal words of the bard, whiskey tango foxtrot over.

It's begun ...maybe

This's a snapshot of a weekly US-Dollar <-> Japanese Yen chart. I've been waiting for a month now (since the 3rd solid blue bar from the right) for what just happened yesterday. See the vertical gap? That's called, in typically high-falutin' trader-speak, "gapping down", and is generally the result of traders with pent-up demand to pull the trigger on something all rushing to do it at the same time, sorta like "on your marks, get set, wait for it! wait for it! wait... go!".

The market's been waffling over whether or not we should be having a bear market vis-a-vis the USD or not, with most pressure downwards. Now that Russia has come stating it'll price oil in both Euros and (US)Dollars, with the implication of pricing its oil solely in Euros sometime in the future if it doesn't cause too large a diplomatic row, and with the IMF being asked to request for China to allow the yuan (CNY) to float, this could be the beginning of the end for the post-WWII dollar regime that's been around since Bretton-Woods collapsed.

Or not. The charts never lie, but nor do they predict (ever).

Is this guy a total wingnut, or is what he's saying sensible: you political guys please opine.

Vikram's Weblog - A Journey Through Life: Could George Bush be impeached from presidency ?

The U.S. Government Finances in Pictures

Hello once again, it's time for your regularly scheduled impetus to pre-pay your mortgages as fast as possible. I know I'm a broken record on this subject, but today I thought I'd present things in a more visual fashion. The following charts are true; their identities have not been changed to protect the guilty. Specifically, they're from the Treasury Department's little-used accrual-accounting version of what the government's up to. Accrual-accounting, you know, the way that everyone but the Feds manages their books? Well, they don't manage their books that way, 'cuz what does 500 years of business management experience have to do with government, right? They do, however, publish this data in a report available here.

Now, on to the pretty pictures!



You can see here what a good conservative Bush is: over 2.5 trillion dollars of debt with his name on it.


Is eleven-trillion dollars of liability enough for us? Wait till you see what's below....


Our public debt is over 30% of GDP. Anyone think we're going to grow our way out of the problem?


Does anyone honestly think that Social Security will be worth a damn?


How are we going to fund that?


Just in case Social Security weren't scary enough; how'd you like to spend 1/8 of GDP on Mediscare, much less private medical care?


Remember, those numbers are in billions!


That's right, Parts B & D alone are aiming at 10% of GDP. I don't have any collated data on the projections for all entitlements as a % of GDP, but would 30% be a bad guess?

This financial situation brought to you by the Democrats and Republicans, who're both too cowardly to admit it to the citizenry of our nation. And don't forget that the Federal Reserve is already printing money faster than you can say "wascally wabbit".

Evolutionary Timeline

If you want to put evolution into temporal perspective, here's a neat Evolutionary Timeline. Be sure to scroll manually to get the proper effect. Note that there are two comment-boxen, one up top, the other below. And people wonder why we haven't evolved an artificial intelligence yet... sheesh!