Thursday, August 23, 2007

[thursday quiz] quotes about age

This time - hints about the personages who said them [in brackets]:

1] The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. [Sage of Baltimore]

2] To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am. [Park Bench Statesman]

3] With age comes the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals? [first women's rights convention]

4] I can't get old; I'm working. As long as you're working, you stay young. [Gracie Allen]

5] It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides. [Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin]

6] Sure I'm for helping elderly people. I'm going to be one myself some day. [Jimmy Carter]

7] A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time. [The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table]

8] I am not young enough to know everything. [All art is quite useless.]

9] He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden. [Aristocles]

10] I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find - at the age of fifty, say - that a whole new life has opened before you … [Mary Westmacott]

And this is them:

[Agatha Christie 1890 - 1976]

(H. L. Mencken 1880 - 1956)

(George Burns 1896 - 1996)

(Oscar Wilde 1854 - 1900)

(Bernard M. Baruch 1870 - 1965)

[Lillian Carter, in her 80s]

(Oliver Wendell Holmes 1809 - 1894)

(Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815 - 1902)

(George Sand 1804 - 1876)

(Plato 427 BC - 347 BC, The Republic)

Answers here.

[which craft] design considerations

There is no other water based experience to match this - these are the royalty of the high seas. Click on the photo for a better view.

I thought this might be of interest to a minority of you and even if only one is interested, it will have been worth it. The downside is that it is long but it does explain the thinking which finally produced the design I produced. Anyway, let's try it.

When choosing a water craft, one must decide between:

1] Sail, with at most a putt-putt motor for emergencies;

2] Power, with or without a sail option.

You might love this craft but do you have a spare $20 million?

This article presupposes you've chosen "sail". Your next choices are predicated on:

1] a compromise between purpose, cost and size;

2] hull configuration;

3] sailplan.

All other details come later. Click here to follow this dilemma of choices.


The joy of sailing - the fresh air, the speed, the whoosh of nature, the fun of deciding where to go, the freedom.

[live crane blogging] passion in metal

This is the closest I could get to the look of the place over the road. Now imagine a second building and second crane, not so far away and I'm much closer to the action than this.

I 've written before of the ballet of cranes and how the giant triangualized arms sweep through the air at twentieth storey level but I've never seen what I just saw a few moments ago.

Two cranes making love to one another.

In public.

13:32 The male red crane is tending to one new house and the female gold crane is tending to another, slightly shorter building, a short distance away.

13:41 Both coil in their cables and Red [the taller, thicker crane] brings his gantry tip to the pointy crown of Goldie and massages her on the peak.

13:45 Clearly enjoying it, she swings her own golden gantry round and starts rubbing cables against Red's flanks.

13:52 They pull apart for a breather and to reposition themselves then Red moves the head of his gantry to the foot of Goldie's and she brings her head round to his end and locked together in an embrace, the cables whir.

13:58 I start writing this.

14:12 My mate phones and I read him this so far. But wait - things are changing - Goldie has now swung up and over Red's gantry and has lowered hers right near the control hut near the centre.

14:18 My mate tells me I need another woman.

The photos I found of cranes are not all that beautiful but the ones across the road here are something else. I'm going to ask my [other] mate tomorrow to take some shots of them and I'll post them for your delectation. We'll try to catch them in mid-act.


[feminism] where higham's coming from

This is the horse after the cart and should have been done before the last post but still - I need to explain from whence I'm coming on this matter of feminism.

1. From a very early age [4], I had what could be construed as girlfriends and though both sets of parents probably saw it as amusing, it had the effect of my upbringing being normal [not "usual" as usual in those days meant separation of the genders until "coming out"].

Far from learning to respect the opposite sex as "ladies", I saw nothing different or unusual at all and judged her on how she acted and if she'd do the things we all liked to do - ride bikes, smoke, talk rubbish. Very early I saw that they were more moral than us - girls would castigate me for my behaviour and so I drifted off to my mates.

2. I've always tried to correct anomalies so when I became a teacher and saw girls continually lowering themselves before the male in maths, science and sport, I thought to hell with that and began a campaign of many years building them up, presenting chances of success and so on until I realized some girls had a social agenda to appear lesser.

The high or low point possibly came when we took a cricket team to St Peters School and there were two girls in it. St Peters were respectful but their coach took me aside and virtually asked what the hell I was doing - striking a blow for feminism? I hadn't thought about it that way before - seriously.

What made it worse was that one of our girls got their star batsman out with a ball which cut back from the edge of the pitch, then proceeded to do a pirouhette and cartwheel. I spoke to her about dour gentlemen cricketers later.

She played two more games, then not because she was a girl but because she was basically inconsistent, she couldn't be kept in the team over some pretty hot boys and so that particular experiment ended - there were others along the way.

My attitude was that girls could do anything boys could do if they really wanted to but it was shown through events that it wasn't entirely so - that there were some things they did better, some not as well for whatever reasons - social, whatever, I didn't explore that.

3. I can say in all honesty that if they didn't mind James being quite close to their daughters [which some did], there were more than a few parents who pushed for the girls to go into his stream because it increased the girls' chance of academic success. It came out, actually, through rumblings from two boys who felt I favoured the girls more.

4. So it's fair to say I've spent my working life building girls up and though I have many male clients, there are a lot of women who come along, preparing for new positions and I try to get them thinking strongly, thinking manager and going through the whole business construct and how to get round it and in fact, over it.

Understandably, with a background like that, one develops an understanding of the female mind in a non-confrontational setting and often when I expect she can do such and such, she stops me and says well she's not all that confident about that and so on.

Then it's a case of believing in her, cutting away the excess baggage and helping her upwards. When she comes back with thanks later [and she always has got the job] I refuse to accept the thanks because all I did was utilize her own talent I knew was there and state the bleedin' obvious. Easy as pie. If the product is good in the first place, it's easy to sell.

5. So that's the frame of mind I was in when I wrote the feminism post. Not some woman hater hiding in his room with a computer, not some jilted and jaundiced lover but a man who detests the treason which has been committed on women by the Feminists.

There are so many fantastically talented [and beautiful] women who still don't give themselves a chance and I don't mean the vocal and the bloggers - I mean Mary Smith from Dartford who doesn't have a computer but does have an ipod and cell phone.

Feminism just gets in the way of that and turns men against them, without respect and with increasing violence and mind playing. A woman does have certain vulnerabilities, as we do and Feminism simply highlights them and supplies men with the ammunition to treat them badly.

I want to cut away that baggage and so, as you can see from the last few posts, do a hell of a lot of women. I say again - when you don't work within the totality of humanity to improve the lot of all disadvantaged groups, when you set yourself at a distance from the other gender which the Feminists and Gay Mafia do [see quotes in the post below], then not only are you buying yourself trouble but you're also betraying humanity.

Such people are my enemy because I am pro-humanity.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

[blogfocus] not tonight, josephine

Sorry, readers but the feminism post which had to be done plus the blog crash this morning really set me back today. Will get on to BF as soon as I can, along with a few other fun things for a change.

It looks now like it is not possible before Saturday because:

1] I go back to work tomorrow after my three day holiday;

2] I haven't repaired the crash yet;

3] I don't want to do a half-baked job.

So Saturday evening for Blogfocus, all right?

[feminism] one size fits all dystopia

Trying to create a distinction between different schools or waves of Feminists or trying to distinguish between "radical" and "mild" Feminists is like distinguishing between "partly pregnant" and "wholly pregnant", "a little bit dead" and "a lot dead".


Dale O'Leary, in
The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality, p. 24, defines that which men and women should be protecting instead:

The "family" in all ages and in all corners of the globe can be defined as a man and a woman bonded together through a socially approved covenant of marriage to regulate sexuality, to bear, raise, and protect children, to provide mutual care and protection, to create a small home economy, and to maintain continuity between the generations, those going before and those coming after.

It is out of the reciprocal, naturally recreated relations of the family that the broader communities—such as tribes, villages, peoples, and nations—grow.

F.L. Morton & Rainer Knopff, in The Charter Revolution & The Court Party (p.75), state:

Contemporary (or second wave) feminism has aptly been described as "Marxism without economics", since feminists replace class with gender as the key social construct. Of course, what society constructs can be deconstructed. This is the feminist project: to abolish gender difference by transforming its institutional source — the patriarchal family. Certain streams of the Gay Rights movement have taken this analysis one step further. The problem is not just sexism but heterosexism, and the solution is to dismantle not just the patriarchal family but the heterosexual family as such.

Alison Jagger, in Political Philosophies of Women's Liberation: Feminism and Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co. 1977) made the destruction of the family clear:

"The end of the biological family will also eliminate the need for sexual repression. Male homosexuality, lesbianism, and extramarital sexual intercourse will no longer be viewed in the liberal way as alternative options... the very 'institution of sexual intercourse' where male and female each play a well-defined role will disappear. Humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphously perverse sexuality".

Feminism, by definition, is anti-family and anti biologically defined roles, i.e. man has a willy and woman - the place it goes. The fact that other forms of interaction require Vaseline show them to be deviant. If one definines sanity as adopting modes of behaviour which will not in themselves and in the long term, to the exclusion of other modes, destroy the fabric of society, then unsustainable modes are therefore insane.

Rabid Feminism is insanity taken to extremes, for example the oft-quoted Marilyn French:

All men are rapists and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.

... or her own desire to dominate men is explained here:

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

The sweeping, all-encompassing generalizations aside, these statements can have no other effect than to marginalize men, one half of humanity and are fundamentally insane. Minette Marrin stated in her article on rape that it could only lead to misogyny.

Melissa Scowcroft asks the question - who is responsible for the breakdown of society:

So, who or what is culpable? Well, feminism, of course - specifically ideological feminists, who, with their "relentless hostility towards men as a class of enemy aliens," have brainwashed the populace into the belief that "the only good man is either a corpse or a woman." The result, Nathanson and Young contend, is a level of anti-male sentiment that justifies comparison to Jewish persecution.

Christina Hoff-Sommers argues, in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, that feminist misandry leads directly to misogyny by what she calls "establishment feminists" against (the majority of) women who love men.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese also wrote scholarly and popular works on Feminism itself, and through all of her writings, she alienated many rabid Feminists and attracted many conservative Feminists."Sad as it may seem, my experience with radical, upscale Feminism only reinforced my growing mistrust of individual pride." She argued for common snese values between men and women.

Camille Paglia was described as one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the UK's Prospect Magazine, and is a strong critic of much of the feminism that began with Betty Friedan's 1962 The Feminine Mystique, and compared Feminists — whom she considered to be victim-centered — to the Unification Church.

Judith Levine, in My Enemy, My Love commented:

Man-hating is an emotional problem inasmuch as it creates pain and hostility between women and men. But it is not an individual neurosis à la 'Women Who Hate Men and the Men Who...' Man-hating is a collective, cultural problem — or to refrain from diagnosing it at all, a cultural phenomenon — and men, as the object of man-hating, are part of it too.

And this is the essential problem with all Feminism because it distances one half of the partnership from the other, creating confrontation when the logical and generally accepted efficacious method is consultation and dialogue.

Lillian Csernica puts it more strongly:

There's a certain school of thought among feminists which preaches the unbridled hatred of men. This attitude really bothers me. Adherents of this school insist men are all would-be rapists and sadists just waiting for the chance to throw off their civilized masks and torture their wives and daughters. Since many feminist attitudes are taken as matriarchal gospel, it follows that all men should therefore be distrusted and despised.

This is insane. This is like saying all women should be suspected of keeping an ax in the broom closet just because Lizzie Borden allegedly hacked her parents to death.

Then she says something even more interesting:

I have always preferred the company of men. If that makes me a traitor to my own sex, that's because my own sex isn't such great company these days.

And that's the thing. Feminism, in its underlying humanistic Marxism is, by definition, humourless. There is a serious agenda of the destruction of society to achieve and there is no place in this for fun. Ms Csernica is quite right when she says that such women are no fun - who would want to spend 30 minutes with such as them being earbashed on how women are so much better than men?

I know it's true - I don't need it shoved down my throat.

Feminism runs hand in hand with political correctness and Diane Ravitch, in 2003, quoted guidelines by New York publishing houses for prospective writers:

"Topics not to include are: abortion, death or disease, criminals, magic, politics, religion, unemployment, weapons, violence, poverty, divorce, slavery, alcohol or addiction. Women cannot be depicted as mothers or caregivers or doing household work. Men cannot be depicted as lawyers, doctors or plumbers. African citizens are not to be portrayed in a negative light. None of these things can be themes in any publications handled by us."

It's not just the insanity - it's also unmitigated arrogance which produced this introduction to A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare by Dympna Callaghan:

The question is not whether Shakespeare studies needs feminism, but whether feminism needs Shakespeare. This is the explicitly political approach taken by all-women team of contributors to A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare.

Choice magazine, who should have known better, called it a classic of Feminist Shakespeare criticism.

This is also the current story of higher education [known as hijacked education] and I ran a series of posts on this. Heather MacDonald, for example, at City Journal, wrote: "The Feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent," striking fear in the hearts of all right-thinking women (and men).

Blogger Sisu, of Harvard, commented:

Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of Feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country. You can count on the Radcliffe Institute’s fellows and invited lecturers to proclaim the “constructed” nature of knowledge, gender, and race, and to decry endemic American sexism and racism.

Fellow blogger Teresa summed up such people this way:

The very fact that rabid feminists (like any other rabid political type group) believe they know what's better for us and want to manage our lives, should make any educated person cringe.

Because she is so enamored of her own world view, she wants to "make" people see the world as she does. This precludes any rational discussion over whether her views are valid or not. Why should such a person be leading an institution where the primary goal should be rational inquiry?

The second to last word will be Dale O'Leary's from The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality (p. 23):

Whatever positive image the word feminist may have had, it has been tarnished by those who have made it their own, and I, for one, am content to leave the militants in full possession of the term.

I agree wholeheartedly. That is what Feminism really means - a socialistic, mediocracy-tending, prescriptive and proscriptive, one size fits all, destroyer of families and of the fragile relationship between men and women which has its own problems without these piranhas gnawing at its flesh.

It's slightly misquoting the estimable Juliet Pain, which I hope she'll forgive, when she concludes:

Relationships forged out of this obligatory and mutual distrust are so often going nowhere, right from the start.

Joy, fun, laughter, mutual respect and happiness have no place in the Feminist dystopia - only gloom and hatred. They need to be quietly and impacably opposed in their destructive agenda by sane people, while there's still hope.

[cornwall] a separate kingdom, methinks

The Witanagemot are well within their rights to point out that on the traditional 1579 Christopher Saxton map, the counties are as shown on the map top left but on the Obnoxious EU map, whilst Scotland, Ireland and Wales are treated as separate identities, England is not mentioned and instead, the NWO designations such as EU Region N2 are used for nine arbitrary divisions.

This is spitting in the face of the English and is yet another reason I'm diametrically opposed to these bozos. However, the Saxton map is also troublesome because of Cornwall, which this blogger is quite uneasy for the English to include in England.

Craig Weatherhill seems to have a point when he answers the question: "So, you don’t believe that Cornwall is part of England?"

No, and for many reasons. First of all, Cornwall was portrayed on numerous maps, including the famous Mappa Mundi, as separate from England right up until the mid 16th century. Henry VIII even listed England and Cornwall separately in the list of his realms given in his coronation address and, interestingly, Elizabeth I stated that she did not rule Cornwall (but Cornish was among the languages she was reputed to speak).

I don't thnk the true Englishman will dispute this and certainly in my education, we were taught that "The West" - Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany were part of other races, other nationalities.

Even the Telegraph seems to concede this:

Like Cornwall, Brittany has a Celtic heritage.

This is far more in line with what I understood to be the case and it appears to be claimed in the musical traditions as well:

Cornwall is that piece of land at the southwest corner of Great Britain that sticks out into the Atlantic. Historically, the culture had a strong Celtic element.

Trouble is, where does it stop? The dividing sign on the A1[M] used to say "The North" and Northern England certainly feels its Viking roots, not only in the Jorvik exhibition. Henry VIII certainly had no love for the region as any student of history will recall.

Wiki concedes:

The north may be considered to constitute the six ancient counties of Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmorland, Durham, Lancashire and Yorkshire. This region coincides with the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria before it expanded into Gododdin and the Vikings conquered the Kingdom of Strathclyde.

To return to Cornwall, In 2000, Dr Brian Sykes of the Institute of Molecular Research carried out a huge genetic survey of Britain that highlighted the fact that:

… even today, there is a striking contrast between the western side of Britain (Sykes specifically named Cornwall, Wales, the western side of Scotland and the Hebrides, as well as running down into the Atlantic coasts of Europe), and eastern Britain …

In the new Britain which I'd like to see, there would seem to be England, Scotland, Ireland, Ulster [the nine counties], Wales and Cornwall. What's it to us, except for retirement homes to write memoirs from, to claim Cornwall?

Further essential reading here.

Crossposted at Ian Appleby's site.

[housing] couldn't resist it, sorry

Didn't plan to do a financial article today but couldn't go past this:

Foreclosures Jump 93 Percent in July

… on the new maildotcom news page:

The number of foreclosure filings reported in the U.S. last month jumped 93 percent from July of 2006 and rose 9 percent from June, the latest sign that homeowners are having trouble making payments and finding buyers during the national housing downturn.

I'm not saying anything more today. Everything's fine - all's well in this best of all possible worlds.

[russia] reasons to stay

If you haven't already done so, you might like to get over to Shades, where I have a post up on life in Russia - another in the series. I'm not cross-posting it here but rather continuing it below:

Alina Kabaeva

I don't know how much she'd appreciate it but my former girlfriend is the catalyst for this post. She does appear in my first book called Obsession [and part of the second] and obsession is what I had for her and for some years, she for me.

I came over here some time after meeting her in London and in those days it was still rare for an ordinary Russian to travel overseas but it was even rarer for an Englishman to travel to the fSU much beyond Moscow.

He'd have to have a reason and he did in my case. Her. The story is in the novel which you can get to from the sidebar or profile.

The thing is that the reputation of Russian girls generally has gone through an extraordinary transformation over a decade and not necessarily for the good.

All we'd ever had to go on was deep voiced Leonid or Boris of the Politburo saying Da or Nyet and taking the salute in Red Square as the tanks rolled past or else those ice dancers and gymnasts pictured top left and lower right.

It was a coincidental thing because I'd been watching the Olympics and there'd been a close-up of one of the winners, Oksana Grischuk and beside her the sort of square shaped woman you wouldn't want to mess with - her minder, who kept stroking and "minding" her all the way through.

When OG saw she'd won, she gave a little gasp of joy, so restrained and I knew there and then I'd have to have one of those. It's testimony to the ego that it never crossed my mind that I had neither the means nor the Don Juanishness to do this.

Then, one day in September, she came. Not the dancer but a young lady even better, shy and yet knowing what she wanted and she'd decided what she wanted was proximity to me. Was I complaining?

The rest is history and we became an item.

The western press was initially full of praise for the new kind of Russian girl coming out and though it was a much later story, [from 2003], the tale of Natalia Vodianova sums it up. The press called her hardworking, beautiful, willing to listen and be directed, unlike her western sisters.

No argument there - that's what I was finding too. Then something occurred which changed it all in western eyes - Anna Kournikova. 'Nuff said. I've seen countless pics of her and countless pics of my girl and I still say [and many who know her agree] that mine eclipses AK.

Years passed and I met many Russians - the good and the not so good. There were many females you just couldn't trust. It began to dawn on me that I'd scored one of the better types, capricious though she was and a little too immodestly dressed for my liking but wondrous in the arms.

Around this time, articles began to appear in the western press about Russian women wanting to leave the country and I put it to my girl. Nope - she wasn't averse to a trip or two but to leave permanently - no.

Still the articles appeared and they weren't nice, such as one entitled Reds in Beds, which was so anachronistic I shouldn't have bothered:

The collapse of the Soviet Union has left its people demoralised and poor. Many women are looking for a way out as a whole generation of men is lost to a pernicious cycle of unemployment, alcoholism and despair. Meanwhile, in Australia, men with good jobs lead lonely, unfulfilled lives, complaining that women in their own country are "too pushy, too bossy or too spoilt'.

I took this to university and put it to the girls for discussion, assuring them I didn't accept it but what did they think? They were apoplectic. It's s-o-o-o wrong, they universally said. It suggests we have no brain, no talent, no way to make up our own mind. Is it true about Australian women?

I smiled and didn't reply but stats years later confirmed that part of the article had been correct:

Russian spouse visas to Australia:

1999-2000 64 female and 21 male

2003-2004 443 female and 99 male

The stats on females are one thing but the stats on males are also interesting - they were tending to go overseas to get into businesses and trading.

We saw the new problem on a trip to Cyprus when we went on safari and I found myself in a bar with the Greek driver who asked how long I'd had her [my girl]. He was amazed - he usually changed his after a few weeks. Promise them the earth, put them in a condo, have your way, disappear and they have to go home at the end of their visa stay.

My darling was upset by all this and the whisperings in the hotel and elsewhere that she was only with me because of my money quietly began a rift. A girl's not going to put up with that sort of thing for long.

What she knew though, through her work for the airline, was that many Russian girls did overstay their visas and there was a UK stat at one time that 42% between the ages of 18 and 25 absconded at the end of their stay.

About 2002 the marriage market really got into full swing plus the mafia run Eastern European porn supply and this further cheapened relations between foreign men and Russian girls. I was appalled myself because I was now cast in a light which had palpably not been the case when I'd first come over here.

Part of the problem was the way the Russian girl was portrayed to potential marriage partners - western men of a certain age.

"Aussic men want life after Lycra," says Richard Dennison, who is making a documentary about Russian mail-order brides to be screened later this year. "Women in Australia run around in their tracksuit bottoms with little caps and ponytails," he says. "But men want a life beyond that, and they find the earthy, exotic soul of Russian women very attractive, partly because the Russians have a much more traditional approach to relationships and forming a comfortable home life."

This is garbage. True, North American and Aussie men have just about had it up to here with their feministic women but to think that the new crop of Russian girls are any different is the fallacy peddled by the marriage market.

The "home values" and "obedient girls" may appeal to men but these are the values of the previous generation; this is what the girls have been told to write and they've been told to dress half nakedly the better to score a man, so they think. Truth is they're anything but homebodies and the girls signing up for these things want travel, lots of cash and independence - quite the opposite of what Mr. Dennison was stating.

The result was a huge flood of scams, prompting sites such as this which promise to filter any girl's approach to a western man for possible chantage. Often the "girls" are fat, cigar smoking Russian men in a backroom with a computer, who have a bevy of girls "signed" to scam the west via e-mail.

By 2003, it was becoming near impossible for a Russian girl, independently travelling, to get a visa into Europe in summer, particularly to Spain, as we found to our cost - and the stifled smirks which greeted us whenever we walked into a travel agent were grating.

In the end, [not for that reason necessarily but it certainly didn't help], we broke up and now occasionally meet around town. I think we miss each other.

Crossed posted at Tiberius Gracchus.


Tuesday, August 21, 2007

[agenda 2] billionaire boy's club

John Authers, at the FT, comments on the rate fluctuations:

Historically, the discount rate – governing the rate at which the Fed lends to banks – has moved less frequently than the Fed Funds rate, which covers the rate at which banks lend to each other … Stocks like rate cuts ...

Fabian Tassano draws our attention to the Fed Funds rate and William Polley comments:

Remember also that this infusion of liquidity represents reserves, or base money. It doesn't get multiplied through the deposit process unless banks lend those reserves to create new deposits.

Something tells me that's not going to be an enormous risk in this case. Intermediaries are more likely to be carrying some excess reserves at this point. And they earn zero interest on those reserves.

Hence, it's not entirely out of whack that at a time like this the market rate on those marginal excess reserves is significantly lower than the target. But zero?

This suggests some quite extraordinary manipulation going on. And on the inflationary pressure of the rates?

I don't see this small fraction of trades at such a low level as being inflationary. Quite the contrary, if intermediaries want to hold more excess reserves as a risk management measure then the Fed is doing the right thing by offering those reserves. It only becomes a problem if those intermediaries run out and make more questionable loans with the money.

Precisely. This is touched on further below.* And on how accurately the Fed can dial in the market it wants:

Remember, the Federal Reserve does not control this rate precisely. Also, even under normal conditions, the funds trade in a range.

The thing we can't lose sight of is the big picture. Forever red herrings are being drawn across the path in terms of local hiccups, such as the jitteriness at Wells Fargo:

"Customers may continue to experience transaction difficulties or delays in our stores, at ATMs and at the point-of-sale ... and processing for some mortgage, home equity, student loans and remittances."

It's better for non-economists and easier to understand to look at what fuels all these things. To be more specific, what is the nature of the people fuelling these collapses? *You need go no further than the super-bunny Leeson to see the true problem, the beginnings of the real picture. The Barings story is told from his perspective here and two things stand out for me:

Nick now spends much of his time presenting talks to companies on Risk Management …

… and:

How could one trader bring down the banking empire that had funded the Napoleonic Wars?

Funded the Napoleonic Wars. Yes. The role of banking in the infliction of human misery must wait and instead let's concentrate on the mindset.

The Billionaire Boys Club was the popular nickname for BBC, an investment and social club organized in southern California in 1983. The club recruited the sons of wealthy families from the Harvard School in the Los Angeles area with the promise of quick success in business life.

The organization was run initially as a Ponzi scheme, and money contributed by investors was spent on supporting lavish lifestyles for young members of the club. When funds ran short in 1984, Hunt and other club members turned to murder and at least two people were killed as Hunt tried to raise more money.

There's the Ocean's 11 to 13 mindset in one.

You have to move about in those circles for some time to really understand what I'm talking about. I can write ad nauseam of "hush power", "elysian zones", "the chosen" and any number of other epithets but it's not going to bring you any closer to understanding the allure, the sucking in of that clinically clean, besuited lifestyle.

But it must be paid for and you always want more. More and more. Your suit is tailored but his is Armani. You want that. You're so talented because they tell you you are and they know everything, with the deep cynicism of history behind them.

You're a man of ideas and they love ideas which they know to be ultimately destructive, e.g. Napoleon. They know this because they have history behind them.

The Fed is not a financial body. They are gods. Look at Mayer's comment in 1828:

"Allow me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who writes the laws."

The Fed is only one manifestation of hierarchical people whose lower echelons, with their Leeson lust, ambition and "peacockness" makes them sitting ducks for the cynical, insane real power whose deepest need is to sate destructive rage and hatred. This is never spelled out.

It works tirelessly, it seeks out nooks and crannies, it has the figures at hand, it "tweaks", it constructs "smart bombs" and treats the world to news footage of people zapped out from a distance and all you hear is a dispassionate voice: "Take him out." It is ultimately banal.

Club of Rome, Club of Paris, Round Table groups, Bank for International Settlements - they're all part of the same thought process. This latter is well worth some research.

Senator Jenner's 1954 comment [one more time]:

The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization. It is a dynamic, aggressive, elite corps, forcing its way through every opening …

And now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for another war and in Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Richard Gardner's article "The Hard Road to World Order" [CFR's "Foreign Affairs", April '74], the process is spelled out:

"[It] will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down ... but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."

The process is not hard to track - two generational softening up and dumbing down of education, the judiciary, medicine and society's moral framework; a perceived national threat, moves on civil liberties, then moves into a succession of credit squeezes, some closures and calling ins, global solutions to the crisis, then a more violent collapse at the time of a renewed national threat, a general crash and the building of a new state from the debris.

It's insane, it's impossible, it's kooky, it's happening. Keep your eyes open.