Scary People in the News, Part Two: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Scary People in the News, Part Two: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

My second nominee for last week’s most scary people in the news is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a brilliant, Lebanese-born scholar, mathematician, epistemologist, and best-selling author who is scary for reasons different from Malik Zulu Shabazz’ scariness.

Shabazz is scary because he’s a dangerous black supremacist. Taleb is scary because he validates the opinion of millions of people who believe the President of the United States hasn’t a clue as to what he’s doing.

Taleb is the author of The Black Swan, the Impact of the Highly Improbable. The Black Swan Theory” refers “to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history.”

Taleb has concluded that Obama’s vaunted “stimulus,” the linchpin of the administration’s scheme for reviving and stimulating the American economy, the stimulus he now wants replicated, was probably the worst thing that could have been done toward that end.

Now, that’s not really news. The administration’s tried–and failed–mantra that, “Bush did it!” never did ring true since our economic mess was a bi-partisan effort caused not chiefly by GWB spending like a drunken Dem but by Democrat congresses. Bush was grossly wrong. However, for necessary perspective, it was the Dems–with Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Chris Dodd, and ACORN in the vanguard–who made a bad situation worse..

Democrats set up the housing crisis which precipitated the banking crisis by forcing lending institutions, especially but not exclusively Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, to grant mortgages to too many people who didn’t have a pot to pee in but whom Frank and Dodd magnanimously felt were entitled to the American Dream, to own a home of their own

That’s an admirable goal on its surface but pockmarked by the realities that many people aren’t prepared, financially or in practicality, to own a home.

All that aside, back to Professor Taleb who is scary mainly because he reinforces what economic conservatives have felt all along but haven’t had sufficient mainstream support to prove our contentions that Obama and his fellow hotshots, his economic gurus who believed spending gazillions of dollars, would lead the country back to prosperity if not to the land of boundless milk and honey, were and are horses’ derrieres.

It’s disconcerting to be right when being right means your country is in a financial pickle the likes of which we haven’t witnessed since the Great Depression and from which extricating ourselves will take generations, if we can succeed at all.

In a speech last week, Taleb charged that Obama and his merry band of economic clods weakened the country’s economy by seeking to foster growth instead of paying down the federal debt. That logical route to solvency was lost on Obama’s misbegotten band of inept advisors and may be in process of being phased out. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1991)

Who Said That?

Who Said That?

A 3 question quickie, multiple guess quiz to evaluate the reader’s grasp of current events:

1. “The second way government assistance programs contribute to long-term unemployment is by providing an incentive, and the means, not to work. Each unemployed person has a ‘reservation wage’—the minimum wage he or she insists on getting before accepting a job. Unemployment insurance and other social assistance programs increase [the] reservation wage, causing an unemployed person to remain unemployed longer:” (http://bit.ly/axiHCb)

Who said that? a) Karl Marx b) Bill Clinton c) Rush Limbaugh d) Larry Summers

The answer is . . . Larry Summers, the Obama White House economic advisor. Summers thereby punched gaping holes in the US Senate plan to extend unemployment benefits to 99 weeks. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1635)

Predictable News

Predictable News

Some news items fall into the category of fully-anticipated reports passed off as if they’re real news instead of events and statements that a well-educated high school student–if there are any–could have predicted.

Examples:

A Brooklyn, N.Y. Office of ACORN Has Been Given a Pass: New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town, especially for pimps employed by Barack Obama’s favorite community organizer, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, acronym ACORN.

The videotaped sting operation conducted by conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe last summer helped effect the decline and fall of ACORN which is now on the ropes with little government funding coming its way.

It was all unfair, I tell you, screamed ACORNers, just because they offered instructions on establishing a child prostitution ring and tax avoidance.

The Brooklyn D.A.’s office seems to agree since it has just decided to forego prosecution of those involved since Giles and O’Keefe “edited the tape to meet their agenda,” according to a D.A. source: http://bit.ly/9YUL5a

That means that the Congress of the United States somehow missed that editing and was wrong in cutting the funding and causing the virtual dissolution of the entire ACORN organization.

Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes on the Upcoming Jobless Figures: They will be released on Friday and to cushion the bad news White House economic advisor Larry Summers has already pinned the blame on Mother Nature. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1534)