Jay Carney

He simply got tired of having to lie.  Day after day after day.

What's not to like Meg Whitman?

Hewlett-Packard shares gained 5.5%  in intraday trading following news of additional 16,000 layoffs.

That's some great news for America.  Not!

Common Core Math

Common Core Math is the new math taught in schools under Obamaism.

Here is the gist of it.  You work your ass off and get an "A".

The kid over there does diddly squat and gets an "A".

There....we all get "A's".  

Mark Cuban says that isn't racist either.

Life in America on Memorial Day

There is so much change and pain being done to the fabric of this great nation by the Obama Administration.  The race-baiting and class warfare is all about the political process

It's hard to imagine how this President and his minions have been able to inflict so much damage against our financial condition.

May God bless the United States of America and may God bless each and every military man and woman who has served our great country.

May we never forget the greatness achieved by this nation and those who gave the ultimate sacrifice.

And now, from the Bill Clinton School of Economics..............

As Bloomberg reports, "Italy will include prostitution and illegal drug sales in the gross domestic product calculation this year." Yup: blow and hookers. And that, ladies and gents, is how it's done.

Sicko's..............

It’s shameful that the president of the United States, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the leaders of the country’s surveillance agencies refuse to accept consensus reforms that will keep our country safe while upholding the Constitution. And it mocks our system of government that they worked to gut key provisions of the Freedom Act behind closed doors.

- Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, original cosponsor of the USA Freedom Act

Soft Dollar Payments and Payment for Order Flow

We have NEVER believed in "soft dollar" payments.  Never.

Commissions are paid to brokerage firms out of clients assets.  For THEIR benefit, not ours.

If we need research, conferences, phones, rent and fancy lunches we pay for them ourselves, not with excessive trading with clients assets.

Wall Street is still controlled by the political elite which is funded by Wall Street itself.

In the same vein, why would we want to do business with asset custodians who "sell" order flow to the highest bidder to the detriment of market structure?  

Briefly speaking...........

What people fail to understand is that the life of freedom and decadent prosperity that they now enjoy was bought and paid for by millions of men who ran into gunfire, bayonets, canon fire and swords over the centuries so that the cause of righteousness could advance.  You agree right?

One need to look no further than a local VA Hospital to see the price of freedom.

Go take a look.   And thank a vet. 

If you call yourself a fiduciary..............

When will money managers demand from their custodians that they no longer sell order flow?

When will managers have the ability to send orders to IEX exclusively from custodians?

Theodor Seuss Geisel and Ben Bernanke

Dr. Seuss moved to LaJolla in 1948 and it was always a pleasure to see him around town back in the 80's.  What a colorful character in his hats!

The only other person that comes to mind that can tell stories with so much flair and outright non-truths is Ben Bernanke.  Am I the only guy besides Jimmy Rogers and my pals at Zero Hedge who think Bernanke has never once  glanced at the $17 Trillion in debt, the historically low labor participation rate or the ridiculous inflation rate that Americans live with in 2014?

Too good not to share.......

James Kunstler penned the following piece............great message for sure..........

Funny how, in the current national rapture of techno-narcissism, it is harder than ever to do something that for generations used to be as simple as pie: to get somebody on the telephone. It’s especially funny in a time when phones have become a prosthetic extension of every human hand and pretty much the be-all and end-all of human culture. I hold a phone, therefore I am!

It’s not so funny that the places where it is most difficult to connect to a live human being are among the most critical activities, most particularly every branch of health care. Hospitals now operate under the entirely false and obviously dishonest premise that a robotic phone routing system is the best way to handle communications. Notice that, in the logic of this system, no distinction is made between mundane business and medical emergencies. Everybody who calls get’s the same perky robot —always a woman, by the way, in a dishonest attempt to provide false reassurance that a “caring” presence (Big Sister) is at the other end of the line. Whether you call about a billing error or having just shredded your foot in a rototiller, the message at the other end will always be democratically the same: “Your call is important to us.” (Not.)

I dwell on these matters because I spent an inordinate amount of time last week calling around to several hospitals and doctors offices to get some of my medical records for a lawsuit I am prosecuting against the manufacturer of a defective hip implant that gave me cobalt / chromium poisoning. Note also that we have contrived to make it nearly impossible to obtain our own medical records.

Now I am going to reveal to you why it is so difficult to get a live human being on the telephone at these important places: because the more of a racketeering matrix medicine becomes, the more it seeks to evade responsibility for the consequences. That is, the more medicine becomes a criminal enterprise, the less it wants to hear from its client/victims. The same ethos is at work in just about every other realm of corporate enterprise in the USA. Our problem in the USA is not “capitalism,” it’s racketeering. Why we fail to comprehend it is one of the abiding mysteries of contemporary life.

The biggest offender after medicine, of course, is banking. They don’t want to hear from you either. They enjoy the privilege of swindling you by both tiny-and-large increments on transaction payments and near-zero interest rates and mortgage contracts where no title record of collateral can be located, and that all works very nicely for them. But they’re too busy creaming off profits to talk to their customers. In both medicine and banking, even the few remaining human secretaries to whose answering machines calls are torturously routed will not return those phone calls. “Your call is important to us.” (Not.)

Now all of this raises a couple of questions. How did we get to this sorry place? And why are citizens not violently angry about it?

To some degree, this situation represents the sheer diminishing returns and unintended consequences of technology. In a nation infatuated with technology, these entropic effects are always ignored. We just don’t want to hear about it, and our related infatuation with feel-good public relations bullshit spews a fog of concealment over it. We apparently like being deceived and don’t mind being tortured.

Robot phone answering systems also allowed corporations to off-load the cost of doing business onto their customers, mostly in the form of wasting vast amounts of their customers’ time. Included in the off-load was the cost of paying receptionists (as telephone answerers used to be quaintly called) and all their medical and retirement benefits — just another manifestation of the vanishing middle class, by the way, since a lot of women used to be employed that way (let’s skip the gender equality side-bar for now). After a while, the added privilege of companies being able to evade responsibility for their actions hugely outweighed the cost-saving advantage of firing some lower level employees.

It ought to be self-evident that this could only happen in a profoundly corrupt, dishonest, and degenerate society, because it took the form of a social compact that accepted this sort of behavior as okay. Doctors especially don’t want to be accessible to their customers. It enhances their aura of supernatural authority to be as unreachable as possible — and most of them these days are safely embedded in the protective corporate matrix one way or another as well. I suppose you can always pray to them and hope for a reply, since that is obviously the system they are trying to emulate. And, after all, this is an especially pious society. But try asking a plain question like, “how come you charged me $34,000 for four hours of anesthesia?” and you will be hung out to dry until the end of time.

As for outrage, I am frankly amazed that the various armed lunatics at large in America are so busy shooting up schools when many more people are actually being harmed, indeed ruined, by the health care “industry” and the banks.

California Dreamin'......................

 

The sights and smells of LaJolla never grow old.  What's not to like?

Lake Lanier Bass Fishing

We hit the lake yesterday morning at OH DARK THIRTY.

He caught 16 bass.  I caught ZERO.

'Nuff said.

 

 

Jordan Parisian, #1 Draft Pick, 2014

Lompoc Fires

This was an amazing sight to see.   I was told that this load cost over $1 million.

Lompoc may have had a much different outcome if the winds hadn't shifted 180 degrees.

Be a good parent.........

So you think schools can teach your kids about taxes?   I doubt they do it.

I say just eat 30% of their ice cream. (Make that 50% for California residents) and they will learn better and faster.

On Obama's dire GLOBAL WARMING outreach to America

I love the smell of SCIENCE FICTION in the morning.............

Hunter Parisian. From Milton HS to GA TECH.

Milton High School in Milton, Georgia is a great school.  I like the attitude of the administration and teachers.   Life is about having good footing, good solid tools and a foundation on which to build.  Hunter made the best of his time at Milton.  A scant four years later found him graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.   The degree was awarded "with highest honors".  Here is a great educator in his own right, President G.P. "Bud" Peterson of Georgia Tech congratulating Hunter on his achievement.  How proud is Dad & Mom?

The Market is RIGGED!!!!

"The markets are not rigged," Mary Jo White told a House panel. "The US markets are the strongest and most reliable in the world."

“The game is rigged and the American people know that. They get it right down to their toes.”  - Elizabeth Warren

It is somewhat ironic, actually make that criminal, that two days after new SEC head Mary Jo White (whose conflict of interest list is so vast courtesy of her prior position as defending every Wall Street from their criminal acts she now has to recuse herself from virtually every enforcement action) solemnly promised Congress under oath that the "markets are not rigged", the SEC comes out swinging and slaps the wrist of the NYSE with an intolerable $4.5 million fine for allowing market rigging "for a period of time from 2008 to 2012."

From the SEC complaint:

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced an enforcement action against the New York Stock Exchange and two affiliated exchanges for their failure to comply with the responsibilities of self-regulatory organizations (SROs) to conduct their business operations in accordance with Commission-approved exchange rules and the federal securities laws.  Also charged was the NYSE exchanges’ affiliated routing broker Archipelago Securities.

The details:

“The order highlights instances where the exchanges conducted business without a rule in place due to weak or inadequate policies and procedures,” said Antonia Chion, an associate director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.  “In other instances, the exchanges did not operate in compliance with their effective rules.  Both failures reflect a troubling lack of compliance with the requirements and obligations imposed on securities exchanges.”
The violations detailed in the SEC’s order occurred during periods of time from 2008 to 2012.  The SEC’s order finds that the NYSE exchanges violated Section 19(b) and 19(g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 through misconduct that included the following:

• NYSE, NYSE Arca, and NYSE MKT (formerly NYSE Amex) used an error account maintained at Archipelago Securities to assume and trade out of securities positions without a rule in effect that permitted such trading and in a manner inconsistent with their rules for the routing broker, which limited Archipelago Securities’ activity primarily to outbound and inbound routing of orders on behalf of those exchanges.
• NYSE provided co-location services to customers on disparate contractual terms without an exchange rule in effect that permitted and governed the provision of such services on a fair and equitable basis.
• NYSE operated a block trading facility (New York Block Exchange) that for a period of time did not function in accordance with the rules submitted by NYSE and approved by the SEC.
• NYSE distributed an automated feed of closing order imbalance information to its floor brokers at an earlier time than was specified in NYSE’s rules.
• NYSE Arca failed to execute Mid-Point Passive Liquidity Orders (MPLOs) in locked markets (where the bid and ask prices are the same) contrary to its exchange rule in effect at the time.

In addition, the SEC’s order finds that NYSE Arca accepted MPLOs in sub-penny amounts for National Market System stocks trading at over $1.00 per share, in violation of Rule 612(a) of Regulation NMS.

The SEC’s order further finds that Archipelago Securities failed to establish and maintain policies reasonably designed to prevent the misuse of material, nonpublic information in connection with error account trading.  Archipelago Securities also violated and failed to give the SEC timely notice of its violation of the net capital rule – a critical federal securities law provision intended to ensure that brokers and dealers remain solvent and can meet their financial obligations.  

Or in other words, the SEC is claiming that for 5 years the NYSE was aiding and abetting the very same rigged market that the SEC swears does not exist.

It. Just. Does. Not. Compute.

They don't even care if you see through their lies and bullshit.  You can't do anything about it and they know it.

If they fool you, great.

If they didn't fool you, well fuck you anyway you fucking plebe, is their attitude.