Ethel the Blog

The weekend was largely given over to moving everything out of the kitchen, dining room and living room so the saltillo tile floors could be cleaned and resealed.  The pluses of saltillo are that it looks good, feels good on the feet, and is relatively cheap to buy.  The minuses are that installation is significantly more complicated, i.e. expensive, than for other, less brittle and more uniform materials.  You also have to seal it after installation and then reseal every couple of years, at least if you want to keep up with all the zombies who’ve been brainwashed by HGTV, i.e. a majority of women in the USofA and a goodly number of the men as well.  I’ll leave the full anti-HGTV rant for another day, as I’m too tired at the moment to do full justice to the matter.  Inveighing with proper vigor and appropriate vituperation against true villainy requires at least 7 cylinders cranking, and we’re a bit shy in that area today.

Being the irredeemable bibliomaniac that I am, annotated bibliographies do for me what twittering, texting and all of the other forms of communication marginally more advanced than troglodytes ooking, farting and belching at each other do for gen-x, -y and -z.   My favorite from Google Books thus far is Charles Kendall Adams’ A Manual of Historical Literature, Comprising Brief Descriptions of the Most Important Histories in English, French and German (3rd Ed., 1889, 720 pp.).  This is a substantial and substantially enlightening tome wherein the frighteningly well-read Adams reviews and describes the historical literature up to 1889.  It also might prove an antidote for the historical blinders the mind-numbing, constant 24-hour news cycle has produced for many of us.  Yes, Virginia, there are historical events of more import than coeds disappearing in the Caribbean, small children being offed by their psychotic parents, and sociopathic celebrities getting all stabby and cutty on their spouses (as well as more of the same back in the day given how our moral and ethical evolution stalled out not long after the split from the bonobo line).   Hell, I liked this book so much I bought a hard copy, and not solely because - unlike most of the gems from this era that I’d really, really like to get my grubby fingers on - it could be had for less than a sawbuck.

An excerpt of his review of Mr. Gibbon’s masterpiece - known to many but read by few (including, unfortunately, this slackass) - gives a good flavor of his writing style.

The minuteness and comprehensiveness of Gibbon’s historical knowledge are somewhat appalling to the scholarship of the present day.  For twenty-two years before the appearance of his first volume he was a prodigy of steady and arduous application.  His investigations extended over almost the whole range of intellectual activity for nearly fifteen hundred years.  And so thorough were his methods that the laborious investigations of German scholarship, the keen criticisms of theological zeal, and the steady researches of a century have brought to light very few important errors in the results of his labors.  But it is not merely the learning of the work, learned as it is, that gives it character as a history.  It is also that ingenious skill by which the vast erudition, the boundless range, the infinite variety, and the gorgeous magnificence of the details are all wrought together into a symmetrical whole.

Two objections to Gibbon’s history have often been urged.  The one is to the stately magnificence of his style, the other to his strong bias against Christianity.  In both of these objections there is considerable reason.  The majestic periods with which the author describes even the least important events are a source either of annoyance or amusement to nearly every modern reader.  The other characteristic not only leads the author to describe the origin and growth of Christianity without sympathy,but it throws a gloomy hue over the whole, and gives to events as they pass before the reader something of the melancholy pomp of a funeral procession.  But whatever objections different minds may raise, either to the unbending stateliness of his style or to the stinging sarcasms of his spirit, these peculiarities will prevent no genuine scholar from studying the work and profiting by it.

He’s also not afraid to call out the trivial and less worthy as such, as in his review of J. A. Conde’s “History of the Dominion of the Arabs in Spain”, a three-volume monstrosity from 1860.

The product of a vast amount of minute learning of little value save for the purposes of reference.  The book is a record of interminable petty wars, and of little else.  It gives a very inadequate picture of Arabic civilization, though here and there in the midst of masses of rubbish one finds something of value.  A very full index affords a key to the worthless exploits of several thousands of worthless Arabic rulers and knights.

No, Adams certainly isn’t lacking in the humor and sarcasm department, and it’s most refreshing to see the book dismissed because it’s boring and trivial rather than because it’s about evil Arabs doing evil things in very evil ways, as one would almost certainly get from most of the the present-day hacks whose only reviewing criterion is to enforce ideological purity amongst the proles.  Not that Adams is unaware of the ideological struggles of the time, chiefly between the Whigs and Tories in England and their ideological brethren elsewhere.  Not much has changed in the way of ideology, other than modern technology providing us with the means of giving the discussion all the shrillness, loudness, stupidity and gravitas of a debate amongst soccer hooligans.

The real bonus of perusing Adams’ tour-de-force is that most of the books he reviews and describes are also available via Google Books, which is a really marvelous thing seeing how most of them are otherwise available only on the used market at astronomical prices.  Believe me, I’ve checked more than a few times, only to find my thoughts turning to Willie Sutton and Al Capone.

Karl Denninger looks at the data - a step beyond either the weltanschauung or, perhaps, fingers and toes - of the economists currently gaming, er, running the system.  He finds something that one might calling chilling or disturbing if one were your average, everyday, cliche-ridden blogger.  But we here at EthelCo, being relatives of Abby Normal, will simply call it obvious criminality that is unfortunately neither obvious nor criminal to all too many of the pitchfork-, feather- and tar-laden crowd that could provide a most interesting counter to the war street crowd.   Now that would be the first reality show I could sink my teeth in since “Junkyard Wars.”

That’s a clever little search in which I asked for the highest-volume stocks with prices over ten cents (to exclude the little penny pumper stocks on the OTC market.)
Well gee, let’s add this up!
That would be about 2.126 billion shares in total for these four stocks, two of which (Fannie and Freddie) are so far underwater in their equity value (to the government no less!) that there is no chance they’re worth anything, yet they remain listed, and the other two are zombie banks with Citibank existing only because of $300 billion in asset guarantees by The Fed and Treasury (which, incidentally, is under investigation, and that assumes that the $300 billion is all there is. There is persistent chatter that the real amount of “back door support” that Citibank (C) has is closer to a cool trillion dollars, although I’ve never been able to get anyone to speak on the record in that regard.)
But I digress.
Here is the NYSE Volume for Tuesday - for all shares, right off NYSE Euronext’s page:

So let me see if I get this right. 2.126 billion shares traded in four stocks, two of which that accounted for some 900 million of those shares are in companies that by any measure of accounting have absolutely zero common equity value whatsoever (and never will under any rational view of the future), yet NYSE Euronext continues to list them.
These four stocks represented thirty seven percent of all shares traded Tuesday.
Tuesday 3,162 different stocks traded on the NYSE. These four represent 0.13% of the total, yet they comprised 37% of the volume. That’s an over-representation of nearly 300 times the average.
Now folks, let’s be straight here. Do you believe for one second that this is “great liquidity” added by the “high-frequency trading” computers that are almost certainly behind the vast majority of this volume?
This isn’t the first day with this sort of abnormal trading and volume pattern either. In fact it has been going on for the last week, with AIG making a frequent appearance on the list as well.
If there was ever an argument to be made for the NYSE having turned into a gigantic “hot potato” parlor game, this is it - in your face in an impossible-to-explain-away fashion.
NYSE Euronext, of course, derives a fee from each share traded, so they have to love this sort of thing. The ordinary investor who has a brain sees it as an amusing sideshow, but the unfortunate fool who gets sucked into the maelstrom is going to get destroyed when the computers move on to some other issue and the price collapses as there is no authentic bid out there for any of this crap.
Beware. This is the sort of cheap parlor game that our capital markets have turned into as a direct and proximate result of our so-called “regulators” turning a willful blind eye while supposed “improvements” in liquidity and “customer access” are put in place by those who have one singular purpose in mind - find a way to steal a fraction of a penny at a time by playing “hot potato” with a handful of issues (sometimes starting a nice juicy rumor to go with it, aka the one last week about BAC allegedly being taken out by Goldman just to prime the pump a bit!) hoping that you will be the bagholder upon whom they can unload.
The wise trader and investor who does not possess a colocated server sitting three feet from the backbone network that runs up and down the NYSE would be well-advised to stay away from this modern version of Three-Card Monte.
Finally, let me remind everyone that the tape does have both red and green arrows in the printing mechanism, and that which can be run up by these games can also be run down with equally-frightful speed. Speaking of which, doesn’t anyone remember last fall and this spring during the crashes with all those nasty rumors about various firms that turned out to be not true?

I keep trying to tell the local dittoheads that their best economic collapse play is Vaseline. Not only will the demand skyrocket, but they’ll also find an intimate and personal use for it as they ook and bend over for another couple of hours of being told how PETA is taking away their jobs, houses and cars.

Today’s BOTD is actually a pair of similarly titled books on architecture, although certainly not about all that artsy-fartsy, namby-pamby ultra-modernist folderol that passes (not unlike gas) for architecture these days.  Our most practical tomes are Poultry Architecture: A Practical Guide for Construction of Poultry Houses, Coops and Yards (1910) by George Burnap Fiske and Poultry Architecture: How to Build Handsome and Convenient Fowl Houses Durably and Economically (1879) by H. H. Stoddard.  Both are profusely illustrated with a veritable plethora of those marvelous ink drawings that were the hallmark of such books of the time, and at 130 and 56 pages, respectively, neither has room for the sort of philosophical balderdash that bloats most such things these days. Fair warning should be given to the interested, though.  Raising chickens is one of the fastest growing hobbies/avocations/etc. in the USofA, which will lead to inevitable backlash from the more anal members of your local neighborhood association, as they turn angrily from their altars to the god of property values and temporarily remove the rods from their asses to smite the unbelievers. Yet another reason to live in a shack in the west and do all your business by mail.

The annual trek to the marvelous summer climes of central Ohio is accompanied by the annual update as to just how much further the greedy bastards in charge of enriching themselves, er, developing the former Rickenbacker Air Force Base have gone towards vanishing my home town of Duvall.  This year I find a shiny and colorful document telling me how 65% of those involved favor the Duvall destruction option.  The document does not say, of course, exactly what constitutes the voting group of “those involved.”  I might venture a guess, however, after seeing they have a “Stakeholder Committee” and discovering that neither my father nor anyone else who will actually lose their homes is a member of the ”Stakeholder Committee”. 

The basic gist is that the greedy bastards built a huge railroad yard on the Duvall side of Rickenbacker, albeit before they had a road infrastructure sufficient for moving hundreds of large trucks in and out of said yard on a daily basis.  The options they’ve now ”discovered” and outlined in their shiny pamphlet are basically: (1) a new road directly west from the railroad yard to the nearest large byway (Route 23) that is the most obvious and direct route and will displace the fewest number of people; (2) a new road swinging further to the south through where Duvall now sits which will displace the maximum number of people.  What’s the hidden card?  The greedy bastards already own most of the land for the most direct route, but it is zoned for commercial use and each square foot of it they use for a road is a square foot they can’t use to buy themselves another vacation home in the Caribbean or Colorado.  The less direct route through Duvall will allow them to maximize the commercial potential of the land they already own. 

Their whore on the civil engineering commission for Pickaway County is their official mouthpiece and has provided his email address on the propaganda pamphlet.  I’m going to at least make that soulless bastard’s life a bit more uncomfortable. 

Today’s Book of the Day is R. P. Hearne’s Zeppelins and Super-Zeppelins (1916), in which he summarizes his point thusly:

Boiled down to the facts, my main argument is that if we are to save this country from Zeppelin raids we must fight the Zeppelins with super-Zeppelins.

History has taught us, of course, that if only the naysayers and nattering nabobs had listened to Hearne, we wouldn’t have had WWII, the Korean War, or even those filthy hippies pissing on our manicured lawns in the 1960s.  That we would have had to create super-Devils to pilot the super-Zeppelins might have proved a bit tricky down the line, but there’s nothing technology causes that technology can’t cure.

So it only took me a couple of months to get this machine back on the net - i.e. running the properly configured versions of Apache and PHP - after it was hacked.  My handful of readers must be crushed.