Hannah’s Blog

The kingsnake came to drink at the pond. It’s at least five feet long. Did not go in the water and didn’t frighten the fish.

Donald Rumsfeld once famously explained,

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

That was a true statement, as far as it went. The implied corollary he left out, that “not evidence of absence” is equal to “presence” when a decision has to be made, is false and, in effect, turns a true statement into a lie. Perhaps that’s what the priests meant when they talked about the “sins of omission.”
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Funny how one of the Senators interrogating Goldman Sachs mentioned the “heartland” being stressed by the crash. But this map suggests that fly-over country was relatively unscathed. Of course, that may be because the heartland has been emptied out.

The narrator in this video bemoans that America doesn’t make anything anymore and the stuff we buy comes from China. But, if everybody’s got too much stuff, it doesn’t make any difference where it comes from. Nor does Wall Street renaming its cheat sheets “instruments” and “products” turn imagined figments into figs. The problem with our economy isn’t that financial arrangements aren’t transparent. It’s that tangible reality has been disappeared in a mist of half truths and hype.

For that clarification. In endorsing Marco (as in Marco Polo?) Rubio’s candidacy for the United States Senate, Rudi Giuliani explained,

“This is an easy choice. Not just for Republicans but for Floridians. He is the one and only candidate we can trust to represent Republican principles in Washington,”
and put his finger on why Republicans and democracy don’t mix. Republicans see themselves as representing “principles,” not people and “protecting” people, not the integrity of the Constitution. That explains why Republicans manage to turn the country upside down. They’ve got the whole process of governing backwards. The people are to be locked up and the principles can’t object.
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The core problem is that private corporations are not properly regulated. Instead of being treated similar to a public corporations (cities, towns, states) and strictly limited as to their obligations and functions, private corporations have enjoyed the prerequisites of the private individual or natural person, with none of the prohibitions against causing injury to another person.
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Lest we forget

Not an original observation, but accurate, I think. As I’ve said before, the conservatives’ saving grace and our good fortune is their sloth. Sloth keeps them from acting as they instinctively want. Laziness is the only internal check on their irrational response. (”Let sleeping dogs lie”)
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In the last few weeks, the shadow economy has become a hot topic. As recently as two days before tax day it was possible to note that the one authority on the shadow economy (also known as “the underground economy” or “the black market”) in the United States, Edgar Feige had been surfaced in the Sacramento Bee. Since then, Google coughs up over two thousand references to the shadow economy in the news. Prominent in the list are references in speeches by President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Reid and Senator Dodd in connection with proposed regulatory reform of the financial system. Big banks and speculators trading in the shadows are the new denizens of the shadow economy. But, that’s not whom Feige and a few European researchers were focused on. From their perspective, which I share, the shadow economy being undocumented and unregulated provides evidence that most economic analysis is flawed because of what it leaves out.

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In the last few weeks, the shadow economy has become a hot topic. As recently as two days before tax day it was possible to note that the one authority on the shadow economy (also known as “the underground economy” or “the black market”) in the United States, Edgar Feige had been surfaced in the Sacramento Bee. Since then, Google coughs up over two thousand references to the shadow economy in the news. Prominent in the list are references in speeches by President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Reid and Senator Dodd in connection with proposed regulatory reform of the financial system. Big banks and speculators trading in the shadows are the new denizens of the shadow economy. But, that’s not whom Feige and a few European researchers were focused on. From their perspective, which I share, the shadow economy being undocumented and unregulated provides evidence that most economic analysis is flawed because of what it leaves out.
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