Friday open road

Go check out the Friday Flyby over at OldAFSarge's place.   Good stuff is waiting for you there.

Kingfisher bird scores a successful hunt.  Simply awesome images.

This would be perfectly true except it doesn't take into account the personal immorality and evil of each of these characters.

Via Ninetymilesfromtyranny.

Brutal soccer fight - hahahahahaha!

These two guys hereby have their man cards REVOKED!

Karma - it's a beeyotch

Freckles, they are good.  

Thanks to Irish for sending them along.  I always like freckles.

These belong to a Brazilian super model, believe it or not.

Sitting around watching TV a while ago, I felt the chair I was in moving gently from side to side.  The 17 year old felt it as well.   

Turns out it was a relatively sturdy earth quake about 150 or so miles to the north of us, up in Plumas County. It's the big red square in this map.

California is famous for it's quakes, but they mostly happen along the coast and in Southern California. We don't feel them that much here snuggled up to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, but that one was apparent, even at that distance.  I'll bet stuff was falling off the shelves up near the epicenter.

A good post over at Jesse's Cafe Americain, explaining why the bank's practice of rehypothication of the collateral underlying their loans is the ticking time bomb of the financial system - actually just one of the ticking time bombs.

From the article:

  "Rehypothecation is a practice that occurs principally in the financial markets, where a bank or other broker-dealer reuses the collateral pledged by its clients as collateral for its own borrowing.

You may find this article by modern monetarist Peter Stella to be interesting:   What Economists Need to Know About the Modern Money Creation Process

In it Mr. Stella describes how the banking system routinely pledges the same piece of collateral over and over again without a properly risk adjusted diminution of value. No wonder the housing market is in such a mess, with the concept of title to property having been reduced to a financialized abstraction. 

"In the traditional money creation process, collateral consists of central bank reserves; in the modern private money creation process, collateral is in the eye of the beholder. Here is an example.

A Hong Kong hedge fund may get financing from UBS secured by collateral pledged to the UBS bank’s UK affiliate – say, Indonesian bonds. Naturally, there will be a haircut on the pledged collateral (i.e. each borrower, the hedge fund in this example, will have to pledge more than $1 of collateral for each $1 of credit).

These bonds are ‘pledged collateral’ as far as UBS is concerned and under modern legal practices, they can be ‘re-used’. This is the part that may strike non-specialists as novel; collateral that backs one loan can in turn be used as collateral against further loans, so the same underlying asset ends up as securing loans worth multiples of its value. Of course the re-pledging cannot go on forever as haircuts progressively reduce the credit-raising potential of the underlying asset, but ultimately, several lenders are counting on the underlying assets as backup in case things go wrong."

The final word: it's another form of Ponzi scheme.  I get that financiers love this because of the profits, but there simply has to be an adult somewhere that puts a stop to this insanity.  Since there isn't, it will naturally be on our backs when this all blows.

The birds were getting our cherries, so the wife and I picked as many undamaged ones as we could.

I wonder what to make with all this?

Something different

Cloned video GIF's from Erdal Inci.

I just saw this quote from Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, and it couldn't be more appropriate to the significance of the whole IRS affair.

In a government of laws, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipotent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. If government becomes a lawbreaker it breeds contempt for law: it invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy.

Kitten loses it.

I hope that limey gecko tastes good.

Investor's Business Daily has a study that shows that red (conservative) states far outperform the blue states in economic progress.

  "In addition, an IBD analysis of the data finds that conservative, Republican states vastly outperformed liberal, Democratic states over the past decade on jobs and economic growth, and attracted more people to their states.

In fact, of the 10 states that had the best economic performance over the past decade, all but two — Nevada and Washington — are solid red states, based on the past four presidential elections. Other top economic performers include Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, Idaho and Arizona.

At the other end of the spectrum, all but two of the worst-performing states are solidly blue. In addition to Michigan, bottom-dwelling states include New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The only non-blue states in the bottom 10 were Ohio and Missouri."

This should be no surprise to anyone.   The "Liberal" world view is, to be kind, completely delusional, although it attracts votes.