Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

The Nasdaq composite appeared to form a key reversal today on the daily chart. Also a head-and-shoulders mini-top on the 1-minute chart, and almost made an inverted hammer on the hourly chart.

In yet another 5-4 decision, the activist court has decided it's time to privatize government. Now Exxon or whoever the biggest most moneyed corporation (or maybe domestic subsidiary of a Chinese corporation 8O ) is will be able to buy up all the airtime for whatever elections/districts they need to go their way.

I find it unnerving the court's notion that a corporation or association has the same constitutional rights as a human being. I would think our inalienable rights would be reserved for humans. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. But to me a corporation (or association or labor union or whatever) is basically a machine, not a person. A corporation is a tool for accomplishing things. It is not a person with an emotional need for civil liberties or human rights. This is like giving rights to a refigerator or a toaster or something. So, having gone this far, do we start letting corporations have votes in the next elections as well?

Sooooo a 1000-point drop, and bounce back, on no news to speak of. Financial sites just pointing to the Greek/Portugal/Spain debt crisis but the market's known about that for days/weeks, everyone's been talking about it. Opinions? Is there a really big shoe about to drop that the market just caught wind of?

So what do you think -- a major action to be sure, but is it substantive, or is it just rearranging the deck chairs?

OK I admit I don't know a lot about UK politics.

A Conservative-Lib Dem coalition in the UK in opposition to Labour. Someone explain to me how, ideologically, this works. Sounds like here in the U.S. if we had, say, socialists and republicans form a coalition against the dems.

IMHO of course

'Primer' is a movie made for geeks, by geeks, on a budget of $7,000!! Not much for special FX, but very fun plot twists and paradox-related thought exercises. Loved the dialogue, the directing, everything. A must-see for any sci-fi geek or indie-movie fan.

They spend 1/3 to 1/2 of the movie just developing the mostly-accidental invention of the time machine in a garage, the amazing thing is the way they develop it makes it somehow strangely believable, not the least of which because also once built, the characters do the first thing many would try with such a device.

And of course, reality starts to come increasingly unglued as the story goes on and the ending is great but you'll want to go back and watch the final 20 minutes 3 or 4 times to unwind it all in your head.

OK I'm not in Texas so maybe someone can tell me whether this is accurate or not. The MSM doesn't seem to be touching it much of course, which shouldn't be a surprise. But I have a hard time believing this can actually happen in America, this business of airbrushing Thomas Jefferson out of history and acting like the slave trade never happened.

Isn't history supposed to be, you know, a record of stuff that actually happened, the good the bad and the ugly? You know, facts? Maybe that's an old-fashioned view, or radical or 'biased' or something. Now we have to put a big happy smiley face on history, whitewash it, make sure that we don't admit that anything nasty ever happened and meanwhile establish southern evangelism as the unquestionable state religion.

Someone tell me this article isn't true. I can almost sleep nights if it's all just a pack of lies.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history

So with Crist being more or less ousted from the party, and with Tea Party candidates promising to flip incumbents in a number primaries elsewhere, is there any room for moderates or center-right figures in the republican party anymore? Or is this the final purge of moderates from the party from the old 'big tent' days, and these folks doomed to run as independents for the forseeable future?

I find it ironic that this is occurring at a time when the R's could really make headway with the swing-voters if they really tried -- but instead the party seems to be going out of its way to marginalize itself in advance of the November elections.

I'm guessing the resurrection of a deceased loved one would do it for most.

Mostly people are looking for something other than words written in a book - in other words, more than just someone else's say so. Mere words are too easy to just make up.

There being a lot of chatter about debt crises all over the planet now is kind of interesting for the following reason: one man's debt is always another man's investment. The balance sheet must balance, after all.

So, if there is too much debt in the world, then apparently there is also too much investment, somewhere, or that debt could not exist. Right? So what does that mean?

My guess is it means that economic allocations have become dislocated or imbalanced somehow. Maybe when capital gets built up to a certain point it has a hard time finding productive investments to deploy to, so it starts doing unproductive investing like lending to people, companies or countries that have little chance of repaying.

With capital-gains tax cuts and various other incentives, along with a generational asset-allocation wave via the baby boom generation, the economy has become so oriented towards balance-sheet investment (and by necessary symmetry, its counterpart: debt) that the financial industry necessary to support it has grown to the point where there is proportionally less cash flowing through its complement, the underpinnings of basic income, production and labor.

In other words, too much supply side, not enough demand side. Emblematic of the current recession: With repeated debt crises, interest rates at zero and a consumer economy still weak, maybe we've reached the endgame in supply-side economics: the inescapable reality that you need both a supply side, and a demand side.

Focus too much on one, and the other will fall into place but not with normal effects. All supply-side results in demand-side being driven increasingly by debt rather than income gains, which can work for years, even decades, before it gets us to where we got in 2008. Thoughts?