Sunday, May 30, 2010

Red Dead Redemption Game Play

Here is a video of a mini-game within this game. Win it and you get immunity from complaints about your crime until you commit a murder. "Bad Company" by Bad Company seems to be the best song for this.

Our Cat Sammy

Sammy our last recent male cat died last year. Here is a video I shot of him.

Monday, May 24, 2010

CBO Reinforces Reasons For Not Doing Cap and Trade

Cap and Trade is one of the systems proposed to "lower" greenhouse gases for the United States. This is basically a system where the amount of emissions has a hard top and companies buy and sell credits to get around the cap. At his blog, Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Five Lessons of Economic Analysis, Congressional Budget Director Douglas Elmendorf says that the effect of a cap and trade system would be " lower overall GDP, employment, and households’ purchasing power by a modest amount relative to what would occur otherwise".

He then goes on to state that this would be similar to one or two years growth in GDP for the U.S. Looking at TradingEconomics the U.S. growth in GDP since 2006 has been 2.53%, -1.83%, >1% and 3.2% for the first quarter of 2010.

Implementing a cap and trade system would not help the U.S. economy grow in the short term and would only be doable if one assumes some growth in the future. Despite the first quarter's rate I don't see 2010 being a very good year considering what has happened in the last month.

This does not even take into account the fact that there may be no reason to limit greenhouse gases beyond what we are already doing.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Language As Only The Communists Of The Thirties Could Say

I have written in the past about the "Annals of Communism Series" at Yale University. They just released a new batch of documents related to the Comintern and the fight for global Communism in the Thirties.

One of the documents about "the work of exposing “the wreckers in the ECCI.” included the phrase "The proof of this are the recent [and] blatant facts regarding Fritz David, the miscreant agent of the counterrevolutionaries Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev, who stretched their bloody hands towards the heart and brain of the working class party, towards the VKP(b)’s Central Committee, and towards [its] leader com. Stalin."

This must have been written to the foreign Communist parties in an attempt to explain the purges by Stalin in the late Thirties. The ECCI was the Comintern's Executive Committee which was made up of international representatives.

You just don't see the phrase "the miscreant agent of the counterrevolutionaries Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev," anymore.