House Aristos

M3 is being discontinued. This is somewhat disconcerting; I hope that an explanation will soon emerge.

Update: The consensus seems to be that M3 figures have decreased in relevance. An unspecified UW professor suggests the Fed feels assets not included in M2 are more accurately classed as investments than money.

This post is about a month late, but I don't think that matters much. (This software wasn't running then, anyway.) I'm going to make a call on the real estate market. As anyone who's been paying attention should know, real estate replaced the Internet bubble as the "next hot thing". Over the past few years, property prices in major Metropolitan areas have skyrocketed, along with a complete abandonment of caution.

There are a number of indicators which suggest such growth is unsustainable; the real question is how a correction will be manifested. Looking overseas, such corrections have recently occurred in Australia, and seem to be ongoing in San Diego. However, I am mainly concerned with the San Francisco Bay Area market, so unless otherwise noted, this article will be restricted in scope to that area.

The other night I was talking to an old friend, and one of the topics of conversation was a football game she is attempting to organize. This was largely a question of equipment, as all the players would be blind and in need of some sort of cues for orientation and navigation. By sheer chance, CNN was running a story about MIT's Fabrication Labs, and I happened across it at that exact moment.

This is an incredible development; for essentially the first time in history, the ability of any person to create whatever they wish is constrained only by a need for raw materials and a sufficiently precise description. The technology is primitive; we are still not fabricating items molecule-by-molecule, but this is where the future begins. Humanity has created an abstraction between inventor and invention; an abstraction that in a single instant has cast aside the old requirements of specialized machines and years of study.

Today I read a diary entry about the Christian opposition to an HPV vaccine. Today I read a news article about a little boy in desperate need of surgery. The first moved me to tears, and the second to anger. The stories are not that different; it is only that in the second, the person is still alive. What connects them? The forces at work in these stories represent two of the three pillars of the modern "conservative" movement; fundamentalist Christianity, and profiteering.

In The National Review, William Buckley sets pen to paper:

The importance of the law against revealing the true professional identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted.
-- William F. Buckley

George Friedman | Austin | October 18
Stratfor - There are three rules concerning political scandal in the United States. First, every administration has scandals. Second, the party in opposition will always claim that there has never been an administration as corrupt as the one currently occupying the White House. Three, two is almost never true. It is going to be tough for any government to live up to the Grant or Harding administrations for financial corruption, or the Nixon and Lincoln administrations for political corruption -- for instance, was Lincoln's secretary of war really preparing a coup d'etat before the president's assassination? And sex scandals -- Clinton is not the gold standard. Harding was having sex with his mistress in the Oval Office -- and no discussion was possible over whether it was actually sex. Andrew Jackson's wife was unfairly accused of being a prostitute. Grover Cleveland had an illegitimate child. Let's not start on John F. Kennedy.

I just happened across this little gem. Someone really wasn't thinking on this one.

My colleagues and I agree that any federal common-law reporter’s privilege that may exist is not absolute and that the Special Counsel’s evidence defeats whatever privilege we may fashion, we need not, and therefore should not, decide anything more today than that the Special Counsel’s evidentiary proffer overcomes any hurdle, however high, a federal common-law reporter’s privilege may erect.
-- Judge Henderson (DC Appeals Court, IN RE: GRAND JURY SUBPOENA, JUDITH MILLER, 2005)

Last Friday's news of only a single indictment against I. Lewis Libby may have come as a surprise to some. Given the rumors floating around Wall Street, a number of people were expecting more exciting news on "Fitzmas Day" (a term sighted on no small number of blogs). The content of the indictment was more in line with expectations, focusing on perjury and obstruction of justice charges rather than more serious violations of the Espionage Act.

I suspect that this is not the end of the case. From a purely technical standpoint, either Rove or Cheney are still valid targets. From a practical standpoint, this is a very delicate case, and if Fitzgerald is indeed targeting them he will have to build a case very carefully. Libby's indictment may simply be the next logical step in this process.

Each time I have made a change to my site I wondered how to handle updates; some snippet of recent news, projects I'm working on, and so forth. That would soon lead to questions of how to archive the older information as well as to make it somewhat accessible for later reference.

Eventually these things called weblogs started to appear; they seemed the instrument of choice for amateur journalists, as well as for trendy hipsters who could sip their lattés and record their every passing mood (usually "angsty"). More to the point, they provided ready solutions to most of the above questions. While I felt a need to avoid falling victim to the herd mentality, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I put up my own.

So, here I am. I hope to collect a few of the more entertaining rumors, as well as the occasional essay. Topics should cover technology in education, geopolitics, some market issues, and the culture wars of science and religion.

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1800

Mood: bemused.