Unrequited Love

While I am thinking about it, one or two of my unrequited loves became something nice.

• There is D whom I adore and go to visit as often as I can.
• There is U who likes to sit in cafes and talk about the opera.

It adds a certain buzz to the relationship.

With me it was the requited ones that generally got me into trouble.

The current state of economics

I was listening to the radio to commentators on economics, and one of them was claiming that government regulation was bad and offered as proof the fact that credit swaps were not traded on a stock exchange. Trading them outside the stock exchange was called regulation and placing them for trade on the stock exchange was called deregulation. Well, guess what? Stock exchanges are regulated. In fact it was their regulated qualities that were sited for why they were desirable. (I'm for outlawing credit swaps altogether.)

One despairs. Listening to people talk about economics could make you cry and pull out your hair. I'm convinced whether or not things go well is just a coincidence.

I would like to propose a criterion for judgment. How will the product or behavior act in a bear market?

• How will we feel about all these dicey mortgages when the unemployment rate is rising?

• How desirable will credit swaps be when they are called upon to actually do something when businesses start to fail?

Think worst case scenario. I think it would be best to consider these things in advance.

In the conversation of these radio economists regulation seems to be equated with all government action by the public sector. We aren't proposing that all people appointed to government office are wise, or that decisions by government employees are naturally superior to those made in the private sector. Think Alan Greenspan.

I'm sure the average person has in mind that logical rules for economic activity will be set up and enforced, such as one assumes occurs at the SEC, and that this is what one means by regulation.

One begins to wonder if it is possible to know anything at all about economics.

Zen

Love

OC has this quote:

Anonymous: "Love that we cannot have is the one that lasts the longest, hurts the deepest and feels the strongest..."

Does it count that you had it and then lost it? I have had the habit of unrequited loves all my life, but I feel and regret none of them today.

Denying the Holocaust

Every now and then people come on the scene who want to believe the holocaust didn't happen.

All I know is what I have experienced personally.

In Ulm in Germany where I lived in the middle seventies there was a sign on the side of one of the department stores telling that this is where the synagogue had stood and what year it had been burned down.

Now there is no synagogue because there is no one to go there. Why is there no Jewish subculture in modern Germany as there was in the past? If there was no holocaust, where did they all go?

Pakistan

For years I have been saying the problem wasn't Iraq, it was Pakistan. It's an odd situation. They are our ally and have been for many years, but why is a little hard to figure out. We send them chunks of money to bolster their military so it can get into fights with India. I fail to see that American interests are in any way aided by fighting with India. I would just tell Pakistan to grow up and learn to get along. I would also precondition military aid with tests for what they were doing with the money. Each attack on India would mean x amount subtracted from aid.

What we need is for Pakistan to control activities within its own borders. This problem is undoubtedly political. Constituencies get all warm and fuzzy when politicians talk about attacking India, but no one gets that warm all over feeling when talking about identifying domestic terrorists. Apparently. People love their own private bigotries.

History

Mohammed Ali is there on the podium for the inauguration. On MSNBC they showed a long shot of him and talked about him as a freedom fighter. I have lived to see this.