Nothing much big happening this week. Just piddly little stuff. So, I'm going to draw some numbers out of the hat and give you their run down.
BAD ECONOMY
Surprise, surprise, surprise. The current period is entering a little late, but more or less exactly where I thought it would be. Remember, I originally predicted an up move until March, followed by a downward trend lasting roughly to the election. I've now revised my estimates, thinking that a less intense downturn will bottom out by the beginning of August or the middle of July.
This is due to Europe and China more than anything. US numbers have been fairly good. But we depend on the fuel of Europe and China to run our engine, and we'll all be running on a thin mixture until then.
THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
Wake me when it's over. Actually until the conventions, don't waste my time.
EUROPE
There is much yelling, screaming, and flapping of hands currently going on around Europe now, and some of it is even deserved. However, expect the European Central Bank and the EFSB to pull another rabbit out of the hat. Somehow. Some time in July.
CHINA
I told you so about this one, too. Don't think for a moment that this kerfuffle about some blind lawyer also isn't a shadow play being duked out by competing factions of the Chinese Politburo.
HISTORICAL CYCLES
If I were an Oxbridge don, I'd write a few volumes on the time period between the late 1500s (I'm thinking late Renaissance), and the Age of Reason (circa 1703). The 1600s were marked by climate change, revolutions, and a conservative reaction.
I think technology compresses time enormously, and so I see a parallel situation between the 1960s, where we are now, and some future Age of Reason somewhere down the road. Probably after I'm dead.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Inverted Interrobang
kenneth houck
Paul Fassett
Donegal Descendant
Steel Breeze
l'Heure Bleue
Salon.com
Comments
I'm personally waiting for the RNC I hope it turns into a real free for all. Not because I'm inherently evil, but because I want the people to be woken up. Only if it turns into a circus, will the American people finally wake up!
Nothing.
So why apply reason to anything??
Answering the hard questions is something that is not easy, for then the truth begins to seep in and so does reality.
Nothing.
So why apply reason to anything??
Answering the hard questions is something that is not easy, for then the truth begins to seep in and so does reality.
As McElhone used to say: "the world is not linear". The problem with most stat folks, especially the finance idiots, is that they're more than content to extrapolate from the near past into the distant future. While that was feasible when we had new, fertile continents to exploit, this ain't Kansas anymore.
Mission -- RE: the truth. You know what Jack Nicholson said in A FEW GOOD MEN. The truth? You can't handle the truth. And neither can anyone else. But to follow up on my last post, I expect that although Occupy may be in a quiescent period right now, it's only waiting for some kind of outside catalyst to reactivate again with a vengeance. Wisconsin? A new major downturn? Who knows?
Abrawang: I am somewhat sanguine about the Greek debt situation. In listening to a US ambassador to Greece, he said that he ultimately expected one or the other discredited parties that formed old majorities to eventually reform new coalitions, and until then, there will be uncertainty but no default from Greece.
Nouriel Roubini expects that if the euro is to dissolve, it will be within a 2-3 year period. The Financial Times indicates that four out of five scenarios for the euro eventually end in disaster. But it's my take that for the time being, the vast majority of Greeks, Spanish, etc. are still committed to the idea of idea of a greater federated Europe and its currency.
Tom & scanner, sometimes I'm a genius. And sometimes, I'm a geniouse. You can figure out which one I was when I posted this brain fart.
RY, as a statistician, you know what happens when you extrapolate current trends into the future when you're at the very top of the curve.
America will go down and down. China and India will go up. Japan? They bwill eventually make better connections with Chinese and rebound. Russians will go up, too. Ghey will hopeful build new and at this time real socialism there.
If this is true, then it's a true economic debacle. This is the nightmare that everyone has been fixating on, and is exactly equivalent to the problems that happened economically in 1931 after the Crash of 1929.
After a few months, if minority governments have collapsed, then maybe new elections?
Germans are now getting enough of Greeks and they will eventually be happy if Greks will go out of euro currency. For Greeks it would be best to forget euro.
Chinese are willing to give loans to at lest to Spanish, maybe even to Greeks, but Europeans are too much afraid to accept it. And it isn't probably so good idea to go to the way of Americans.
Eventually the economic system would collapse if all the rest industrial nations would start borrowing from Chinese? I think that the real cure would be to start consuming less.
And then I say, "Yes, but there were never 7,000,0000,000 million people (going on 9B. But there's this little problem called 'civilization,' and the disposal problem of what do you do with the 95% die off if nothing is done by 2100?"
Another funny joke is the conservative BS that says, "Well Smarty Pants, did you know that in the 1970s, scientists said that they projected global cooling, so what do you retard intellectual secular humanist scum know about science."
And then I say, " You may be right about that global cooling thing in the 1970s. Turns out the scientists picked up the side effects of all that nuclear testing that'd been done since 1945. Did you know that WW III cures global warming in a heartbeat? Works every time! And that's one of the scenarios that could occur when the species homo sapiens bumps up too far above the resource celing."
I clue them in on R.J.Reynolds/Exxon propaganda. But the conservatives are still afraid to talk bad against their butt buddies. And this I don't understand.
I think that the common talk of 'the human caused global warming' is just rubbish American politics. It has quite little to do with the science.
Please read first Lindzen's good old article
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n2/reg15n2g.html
And then start reading Roy Spencer's blog:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
(Wikipedia's articles about this issue are far from the truth or reality. )
Not exactly on epidemic status nowadays, is it?
;)
r