91 – 21.

No, that’s not the score of last week’s Packers/Vikings game, it’s the number of fans ejected and arrested, far ahead of their average performance of 18.4 and 5.5 a game.

The Packers looked better than average on the field also, dominating most of the game except for a late 4th Quarter score in a 24 – 10 victory.

Aaron Rogers is not the only Packer getting healthier just in time for the post season so their contest against the ‘9ers could be more interesting than people expect, though in fairness the ‘9ers are a mere 2.5 point favorite and that because of home field advantage.

As opposed to the AFC, the NFC is a tough pick, almost any team could win.

The ‘9ers can’t count on a 30 – 22 romp like they got in Week 1 and their defense is playing injured.  Justin Smith’s triceps is definitely questionable and they are much less effective without him.  Quarterback Colin Kaepernick is a mid-season replacement so who knows, though his scrambling style is something the Packers have had trouble dealing with in other teams.  Both kickers have the potential to suck but the ‘9ers signed Billy Cundiff during their bye week so they have a replacement even though the still slumping Akers will start.

The ‘9ers are not a bad team, there’s nothing much to hate about them and I’m going to be disappointed to miss this game.

But I hope the Packers win.  What about

The Packers are the only non-profit, community-owned major league professional sports team in the United States.

are we not understanding?

The AFC is shaping up as a Ponies/Patsies showdown if teams play to form.

Last week the Ravens dispatched the Bolts kinda decisively, 24 – 9 in what is more accurately described as an offensive rather than defensive struggle.  Flacco and the Ravens finally put something together while Luck wasn’t able to.

A big deal will be made about the last match-up between Payton Manning and Ray Lewis with Lewis retiring after the season, but the game is more likely to turn on the Ravens offense or lack thereof.  The Ravens changed offensive coordinators just last month because they were so ineffective.

Payton Manning is Payton Manning, not Tebow, and the Broncos are likely to make this a very tough game for Lewis because they don’t suck and can put up a score or two.  On the other hand it bespeaks a kind of institutional idiocy that they hired him in the first place so there is hope for the Carrion Crows.

Still, the Ponies won 34 – 17 in their match-up 4 weeks ago, in part because running back Ray Rice has fumble fingers and didn’t get many calls, and they have one of the best records against the pass in the league.

I’m missing both games today for a holiday party with some of the people I know through my other life as a community organizer.  As always it’s up to you to make your own fun though I’ve tried to encourage a couple of folks to stop by.

    You’re immature, Fielding.

    How am I immature?

    Well, emotionally, sexually, and intellectually.

    Yeah, but what other ways?

How dumb do you have to be to write for Forbes?

Experts Agree: U.S. May Become A ‘Simpsons’ Episode And Need Platinum Coins Or IOUs

Abram Brown, Forbes Staff

1/10/2013 @ 11:32AM

If the Treasury did mint that $1 trillion platinum coin, depositing it at the Federal Reserve would allow it to keep paying the bills, says Donald Marron, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. The Fed would book $1 trillion, just as it would book 25 cents if the Treasury sent a quarter instead.

Marron quickly concedes the mind-boggling nature of a $1 trillion coin, which would weigh more than 43 million pounds and occupy roughly 32,000 cubic foot (assuming about $1,600 a troy ounce of platinum): “Minting a trillion-dollar coin sounds like the plot of a Simpsons episode or an Austin Powers sequel. It lacks dignity.” For perspective, the coin would weigh as much as 100 Statues of Liberty; America’s copper-cast leading lady weighs in at 450,000 pounds.

Too dumb, it seems, to have passed even a High School “Introduction to Economics” class.

Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given socio-economic context or country.

…

(N)early all contemporary money systems are based on fiat money. Fiat money, like any check or note of debt, is without intrinsic use value as a physical commodity. It derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender; that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the boundaries of the country, for “all debts, public and private”. Such laws in practice cause fiat money to acquire the value of any of the goods and services that it may be traded for within the nation that issues it.

The money supply of a country consists of currency (banknotes and coins) and bank money (the balance held in checking accounts and savings accounts). Bank money, which consists only of records (mostly computerized in modern banking), forms by far the largest part of the money supply in developed nations.

…

Fiat money or fiat currency is money whose value is not derived from any intrinsic value or guarantee that it can be converted into a valuable commodity (such as gold). Instead, it has value only by government order (fiat). Usually, the government declares the fiat currency (typically notes and coins from a central bank, such as the Federal Reserve System in the U.S.) to be legal tender, making it unlawful to not accept the fiat currency as a means of repayment for all debts, public and private.

…

One of the last countries to break away from the gold standard was the United States in 1971.

No country anywhere in the world today has an enforceable gold standard or silver standard currency system.

…

Commercial bank money is created through fractional-reserve banking, the banking practice where banks keep only a fraction of their deposits in reserve (as cash and other highly liquid assets) and lend out the remainder, while maintaining the simultaneous obligation to redeem all these deposits upon demand. Commercial bank money differs from commodity and fiat money in two ways, firstly it is non-physical, as its existence is only reflected in the account ledgers of banks and other financial institutions, and secondly, there is some element of risk that the claim will not be fulfilled if the financial institution becomes insolvent. The process of fractional-reserve banking has a cumulative effect of money creation by commercial banks, as it expands money supply (cash and demand deposits) beyond what it would otherwise be. Because of the prevalence of fractional reserve banking, the broad money supply of most countries is a multiple larger than the amount of base money created by the country’s central bank. That multiple (called the money multiplier) is determined by the reserve requirement or other financial ratio requirements imposed by financial regulators.

Or, indeed, to have learned how to use Wikipedia.  This level of dumb applies to “economists” who are directors of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center too.

Investopedia–

Metals also have a market value; silver and gold, for example are traded daily. Other metals also have value and a new breed of investors is emerging: the coin hoarder.

All American coins are made from a variety of base metals. Prior to 1965, dimes and quarters were made primarily of silver, until the soaring cost of silver forced the United States Mint to change the composition of the coins to a cheaper alloy. Prior to 1982, pennies were composed of 95% copper, until lower-cost zinc replaced a substantial amount of it. Nickels are still composed of 25% nickel and 75% copper. As the underlying values of the metals rise, the coins become theoretically more valuable. At today’s prices for copper and nickel, a five-cent piece is worth almost seven cents. There’s a catch, however. Since 2006, it has been illegal to melt down pennies and nickels.

NO circulating United States coin, save for those with minimal face value intended for trade as bullion, EXCEPT for pre-1982 pennies and all nickles has a commodity value as metal greater than its face value as currency.  This difference between the value of money and the cost to produce and distribute it is called Seigniorage.

So, unless you want to be laughed at as some ignorant wacko destined to die under a pile of used coffee grounds and old newspapers, please don’t let this fallacy enter your conversation even though you are an “economist” who is a director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center or a columnist for a major “financial” publication.

It makes people wonder if you got your job through nepotism and inbreeding.

Now the thing that’s always bothered me about this film is how does Dr. Taylor deal with the fact that removing her from her own time line with no warning or explanation whatever, the kind of granny-killing paradox that we’re told so often will totally destroy the universe as we know it by making a mockery of causality or some such HAS ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT AT ALL!

I mean, she doesn’t have a cat or something?

But I like to deliver good news on occasion and we seem to have some from the Great White North.

Stranded killer whales break free from Hudson Bay ice

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent, The Guardian

Thursday 10 January 2013 12.17 EST

A dozen killer whales, trapped and facing near-certain death in the frozen expanse of Canada’s Hudson Bay, broke free on Thursday morning, to the vast relief of locals and many thousands monitoring their plight online.

…

“They are free, they are gone,” Johnny Williams, the town manager, said in a telephone interview. “Last night, the winds shifted from the north. The ice cracked and with the new moon, the ice went. We have open waters on the coastline of Hudson Bay.”

…

Had the weather not intervened, it is likely the whales would have suffocated beneath the sea ice, or endured slow starvation until the break-up of the ice next May.

So, good news right?

Stranding of killer whales in Arctic ice is relatively unheard of. Williams, who is 69, said in his lifetime he had only ever seen two or three carcasses of orcas before this week.

But marine biologists say killer whales are moving into the Arctic in greater numbers over the last decade as the sea ice retreats due to climate change.

Orcas face no natural predators in the Arctic, putting them at the top of the food chain.

The whales spend the summers in the Arctic, feasting on seals and narwhal and beluga whales. By the time the ice freezes, in November or December, they are miles away. A killer whale once tagged near Baffin Island had made it as far as the Azores by winter.

This year, however, the freeze came later, after the new year, and the whales were trapped.

Hmm…  And then there’s this-

Ice breakers, as demanded by the mayor of Inukjuak, were too far away from the remote region.

What could be more pristine and clean than some good old Arctic crude?

In the event, however, nature took its course, freeing the whales before the list of bad options had to be explored.

“I am just very glad,” said Megan Epoo, whose elderly uncle was the hunter who originally spotted the stranded whales. “The men here had announced they were going to try and make the breathing hole bigger, and remove the ice from the side of the hole, and that would have been very dangerous. So we were all very worried that something bad would happen,” she said.

“But now nobody has to do anything because the whales are free.”

Yay us, I guess.

Here’s the video the authorities in Inukjuak posted Wednesday to attract some government attention to the whale’s plight.

I think Mr. Mellish is a traitor to this country because his views are different from the views of the President and others of his kind. Differences of opinion should be tolerated, but not when they’re too different. Then he becomes a subversive mother.

Why The Fight Over The $1 Trillion Coin Is The Most Important Fiscal Policy Debate You’ll Ever See In Your Life

Joe Weisenthal, Business Insider

Jan. 8, 2013, 12:33 PM

(C)ontrary to all these people who say that this is a childish, non-adult proposal put forth by impish trolls, it’s actually quite the opposite. It may be the most important fiscal policy debate you’ll ever seen in your lifetime, because it gets right to the nature of what is money.

This question is central to any discussion about a country’s monetary and fiscal policy, and yet it’s almost never discussed, and virtually nobody understands it.

Almost everyone talking about fiscal policy imagines money to be a commodity of sorts that we can “run out” of if we don’t spend it carefully. In this sense, although we’ve long gotten rid of the gold standard, we’re still shackled with a gold standard mentality, where we think of money as a scarce natural resource that we need to husband carefully, lest one day the bond vigilantes show up at our door, causing us to go broke.

Now the reason I started writing this piece by talking about bananas is that I thought they were sufficiently arbitrary and ridiculous to attract your attention but I had to abandon that since they’re actually much more useful than money- you can eat them and then you’re only dealing with surplus bananas over and above Foster so please ignore any bananas that creep in and mentally substitute Yap Stones or Higgs Bosons that have a slightly different electron voltage.

You see the thing about money is that its only value except as a decorative object is that the government accepts it as payment and (at least in the United States) private vendors are also compelled to accept it as payment for goods or services offered by contract (every transaction is a contract) if the contract is written (the good or service is offered) using money as a medium of exchange instead of directly exchanging some negotiated other good or service.  In common use we call the transaction using money a “sale” and a transaction using something else a “swap”.

Now there are many reasons to use money as a medium of exchange, chiefly transportability and convenience.  Transportability is kind of obvious, you need some serious pockets to haul around Yap Stones, but most frequently suggested substitutes like Gold or Oil (somewhat more banana-like in terms of utility) suffer serious transportability problems, especially in larger amounts.

When we are talking convenience what we are saying is that for the vendor it is much much easier to value his product and sell it if they do not have to calculate an exchange rate for every possible transaction.  How many Goats are a Cow worth anyway and how much time to you want to waste figuring that out?  What we have developed instead is a Market where tokens may be received by the vendor and used by him to purchase other items and relative values are negotiated arbitrarily and automatically by the collective group of buyers and sellers that participate in the Market.  Arbitrary- I decide my Cow is worth 3 Goats.  Automatically- my neighbor will take 2 Goats for his Cow and unless I throw in some Chickens you’ll automatically take his Cow and save yourself a Goat.

See how complicated it gets?  And I deliberately chose Cows, Goats, and Chickens because they get around just fine on their own and you don’t have to stuff them in your Yap Stone pocket.

Now some people also think of money as a store of value, but that is just not true except on a temporary basis.

Let’s say I scratch in the desert around Ur and discover a pot full of Cow tokens.  I’m rich right?  All I have to do is go down to the Market…

Oh, yeah.  Over 5,000 years you say.  Well, at least I can sell them as decorative objects.  And at that they’re probably more valuable today than they ever were as Cows who would also be dead as Keynes in the long run.  If you want to see how a Market like that runs I suggest Pawn Stars and American Pickers.

I’ll give you $500 cash money right now.  Worth far more?  Not to me.  Neither rarity or antiquity represent value.  I don’t have people wandering in the shop asking for Ur Cow tokens every day so I’ll probably have them sitting on the shelf for a while.  Pleasure doing business with you, I’ll have Chumley write you up.

But, this is a good thing.

One of the problems with today’s economy is that Banks and Businesses are sitting around on a lot of Cow tokens instead of productively investing them in, oh… Cows let’s say.  The Cows would produce milk and meat and little Cows.  They would consume Grass from the Grass vendor but maybe I could get part of that cost back by selling him fertilizer.

That is a working economy.

Instead they are just putting tokens in a pot and burying them in the desert.  They are not growing into token trees or Cows but there is this expectation that in the long run you can dig them up and turn them into future Cows which are much less smelly and inconvenient than actual ones.  And as it turns out simply giving them more tokens doesn’t produce anything except more and bigger pots.

Next- more about pots in the desert.

July

August

September

October

November

December

So last night Notre Dame got crushed by Alabama 42 – 14 and I for one was not unhappy with that result.

Why I won’t be cheering for old Notre Dame

Posted by Melinda Henneberger, The Washington Post

December 4, 2012 at 11:02 pm

What’s really surprising me are those who believe as I do that two players on the team have committed serious criminal acts – sexual assault in one case, and rape in another – but assumed that I’d support the team anyway, just as they are.

“Aren’t you just a little bit excited?” one asked the other day. There are plenty of good guys on the team, too, I’m repeatedly told. And oh, that Manti Te’o is inspiring. I don’t doubt it. But as a thought exercise, how many predators would have to be on the team before you’d no longer feel like cheering?

…

Two years ago, Lizzy Seeberg, a 19-year-old freshman at Saint Mary’s College, across the street from Notre Dame, committed suicide after accusing an ND football player of sexually assaulting her. The friend Lizzy told immediately afterward said she was crying so hard she was having trouble breathing.

Yet after Lizzy went to the police, a friend of the player’s sent her a series of texts that frightened her as much as anything that had happened in the player’s dorm room. “Don’t do anything you would regret,” one of them said. “Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea.”

At the time of her death, 10 days after reporting the attack to campus police, who have jurisdiction for even the most serious crimes on school property, investigators still had not interviewed the accused. It took them five more days after she died to get around to that, though they investigated Lizzy herself quite thoroughly, even debriefing a former roommate at another school with whom she’d clashed.

…

A few months later, a resident assistant in a Notre Dame dorm drove a freshman to the hospital for a rape exam after receiving an S.O.S. call. “She said she’d been raped by a member of the football team at a party off campus,” the R.A. told me. I also spoke to the R.A.’s parents, who met the young woman that same night, when their daughter brought her to their home after leaving the hospital. They said they saw – and reported to athletic officials – a hailstorm of texts from other players, warning the young woman not to report what had happened: “They were trying to silence this girl,” the R.A.’s father told me. And did; no criminal complaint was ever filed.

Notre Dame and Penn State: Two Rape Scandals, Only One Cry for Justice

Dave Zirin, The Nation

January 7, 2013 – 10:25 AM ET

Two storied college football programs. Two rape scandals. Only one national outcry. How do we begin to explain the exponentially different levels of attention paid to crimes of violence and power at Penn State and Notre Dame?

At Penn State, revered assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was raping young boys while being shielded by a conspiracy of silence of those in power at the football powerhouse. At Notre Dame, it’s not young boys being raped by an assistant coach. It’s women being threatened, assaulted, and raped by players on the school’s unbeaten football team. Yet sports media that are overwhelmingly male and ineffably giddy about Fighting Irish football’s return to prominence have enacted their own conspiracy of silence.

…

But this conspiracy of silence and slander is bigger than just the school. Deindustrialized South Bend, Indiana, is a company town, and the company is Notre Dame football. The football program in 2012 was valued by Forbes as the third "most valuable" in the country, behind far larger state universities in Texas and Michigan. This is just the formal economy. Informally, every hotel, every bar, every kid at the side of the road selling bottled water depends on Notre Dame football. Home games generate $10 million in local spending for a community of just 100,000 people. It is the beating economic heart of South Bend and women have become, in this sclerotic set up, the collateral damage.

But the cone of silence that surrounds a company college football town is not enough to understand why Penn State’s rape scandal was front-page news the second the Sandusky scandal went public and Notre Dame has been largely protected by the press. The only answer that makes sense is that raping women has become “normalized” in our culture, while raping little boys has not. The only answer that makes sense is that the rape of a young boy sets all sorts of alarms of horror in the minds of the very male sports media, while the rape of women does not. The only answer that makes sense is that it’s been internalized that while boys are helpless in the face of a predator, women are responsible for their assault. The accusers are the accused.

This is not just a Notre Dame issue. At too many universities, too many football players are schooled to see women as the spoils of being a campus god. But it’s also an issue beyond the commodification of women on a big football campus. It’s the fruit of a culture where politicians can write laws that aim to define the difference between “rape” and “forcible rape” and candidates for the Senate can speak about pregnancy from rape being either a “gift from God” or biologically impossible in the case of “legitimate rape.” It’s a culture where comedians like Daniel Tosh or Tucker Max can joke about violently raping, as Max puts it, a “gender hardwired for whoredom.” The themes of power, rape and lack of accountability are just as clear in the case of the Steubenville, Ohio, football players not only boasting that they "so raped" an unconscious girl but feeling confident enough to videotape their boasts.

As Jessica Valenti wrote at TheNation.com, “It’s time to acknowledge that the rape epidemic in the United States is not just about the crimes themselves, but our own cultural and political willful ignorance. Rape is as American as apple pie-until we own that, nothing will change.”

Crossposted from DocuDharma

Are ‘grand bargains’ still possible?

By Chris Cillizza, The Washington Post

Jan 06, 2013 06:14 PM EST

Here’s a radical idea: What if a “grand bargain” – or any sort of large legislative measure requiring significant bipartisan compromise – simply isn’t possible anymore?

…

There’s plenty of reason to believe that the idea that the government can, will – or even wants to – rise to the occasion (as Boehner and Obama have advocated in recent days) is a total fallacy.

…

All signs point to the fact that if the grand bargain isn’t dead, it’s darn close. Miraculous comebacks happen in politics, which makes it worth watching, but they are the exception, not the rule. Given that, it may be time to accept that the idea of Washington doing big things in a bipartisan way is a thing of the past – perhaps never to be recovered.

Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.

Rendell Attacks Safety Net While Calling for More Elected Republicans

By John Amato, Crooks and Liars

January 07, 2013 10:00 AM

Rendell and himself would solve all our problems in a week and a half if he was allowed to. Rendell goes on to support the idea that it’s fine if more reasonable and conservative Republicans are elected to Congress. Did it ever cross his mind to maybe mention that electing many more progressive Democratic politicians would be the best solution to the crisis?

Rendell: Look, even if it means there are a few more Republicans in the Senate and the Congress, if they’re reasonable Republicans who are moderate-conservative then that’s a good prescription for America.

Republicans holding the House hostage isn’t enough for Rendell, he wants a few more, just in case their majority isn’t strong enough — and wants to add a couple more in the Senate, which would give R’s one-party rule. Ed Rendell, a major league embarrassment!

Pretty uniforms is how I feel about the Seahawks.

By which I mean painfully ugly but they are an otherwise unobjectionable team no more evil than any other unless they are playing one of my particular favorites and win.

They face the Native Americans who I hate on 3 different levels.

First of all they’re divisional rivals of the Jints that I’d despise just as much as the Evils except they employ fewer dog killers and are generally more hapless and ineffectual.

Second is their racist name I’ve decided not to dignify by repetition.

Third (and I can not emphasize this enough), they are the Village darlings and the fawning bootlicking of the courtier class is bi-partisan and universal.

‘nuf said.

I am going to the movies where I am going to watch actors attempt to sing show tunes and get weepy eyed when I hear anthems like this-

My friend Bobby will be watching while I’m distracted by flickering images.