Pastor Terry Jones

Pastor Terry Jones is a new kind of terrorist. Rather than create a spectacle of murder, this Faustian creature is far more subtle. He goes after symbols, which in the age 24/7 data streams, is far more potent. Following in the footsteps of the Taliban’s assault on Buddhist statues, the Neo-Nazis penchant for removing Auschwitz memorabilia, and the other foul creatures who out of meanness deny the Holocaust, Pastor Terry Jones has concocted his own special vitriolic sauce aimed at offending a quarter of the world’s population.

Unfortunately, this man with a flock no larger than 12 demented disciples – a Jesus in reverse, who operates a “church” out of a mobile home park, has garnished the attention of the Empire, who has proved more than willing to negotiate with his kind.

Anyone who believes that our Empire is run by an evil cabal of competent self interested elitists is sorrily deluded. Rather it is an autonomous machine, with self modifying code, staffed with opportunists bickering amongst themselves for petty positions of privilege. This sorry spectacle showed how easily our leaders were willing to grant attention to Terry Jones’ Faustian cause, in order to placate their broader audiences without having to make any serious decisions.

A thought comes to mind. Perhaps, the real weakness of the American Empire lies not at the periphery with the Islamic Fundamentalists or with the idealistic Marxists Revolutionaries. These can always be dealt with by a strong military, corrupt proxies, and crushing IMF loans. Rather it is with the parasites that lie within its very belly – with the brutes who increasingly do the Empire’s bidding – the new Visigoths. It is folks like Terry Jones, who publicly act out the feelings increasingly held by more and more Americans that terrifies the very foundation of our military industrial machine.

Faustian Dialectic

In the Faustian economy of the twenty first century, there is a new dialectic. That is between the deadbeats and the true believers. The deadbeats are essentially those people who have given up. They have given up on paying their mortgages, their credit cards, and their child support. They have also given up on trying to lose weight, or on trying to find a job, or on anything that will alleviate their condition. Their only quest is for an extension to their unemployment check, a stimulus bill, and another pill of Oxycontin or Prozac just to through another day.

The deadbeats are dragging down the economy by defaulting on their obligations and debts, which are held in the form of complicated financial derivatives by the remaining true believers. Unfortunately, more and more true believers are mutating into deadbeats, much like the fate of surviving humans in a zombie movie. Soon, we will all be reduced to a wandering mob living out our cars in a flea market nation.

Same ol-shit

What is the difference between mission accomplished in 2003, and end of combat operations in 2010?

Nothing but semantics…

Dudley replaces Dastardly

Sadly BP’s Dastardly CEO Tony Hayward was asked to leave in order to “get his life back.” This news greatly saddened us at Faustian.com and we were forced to liquidate our BP stock as a result. Fortunately, we replaced it with better valued shares in Helix Energy, which is being paid to clean up this mess.

Only a truly evil Brit, like Hayward, could steadfastly commit to paying out a blood dividend while the rest of the Gulf was awash in tar. Why this once mighty company would decide to throw its own Ebenezer Scrooge under a tanker to be replaced by the more affable Bob Dudley is a wonder. I guess that being “sorry” isn’t what it used to be.

What is to become these Oil Men and their amazing deep water machines? And what of top kill, static kill, and now the much vaunted “Relief” well?

Thank God for Obama, and for his thankless optimism, which in the end just made all the oil… well just sort of disappear.

Prediction

With the liability cap for deep water drilling raised to infinity and the moratorium on all new drilling, the price of oil should creep back up to $150/barrel.

Of course, oil companies could move offshore to African countries and risk outright nationalization once they hit the jackpot.

So much for American Free enterprise.

Microsoft

Everyone is down on Microsoft, but I am still a huge fan. I just bought a new Windows 7 laptop with 4 processors, 6 gigs of RAM, and a 500 gigabytes of Hard disk storage. Did I mention the 17 inch screen with 1920×1080 resolution. This cost only $1350! The closest thing from Apple is a 17-inch 2.8 Ghtz system for $2499.00 – about half the speed but twice the price! As of February 2010, Windows still commands 92.12% of the OS market share, compared to 5.02% for Apple, and 0.98% for Linux. The PC installed base is 1.1 billion. OK, so lets do the math, in the next ten years that entire installed base will have to upgrade at some time to new machines – we are talking over a billion machines for Microsoft alone.

The market cap for Apple is 204 billion, that of Microsoft is 259 billion, i.e. of the same order of magnitude. Apple machines are approximately two times as expensive as Microsoft machines, so are unlikely to grab market share away from the the cheaper incumbent. But Microsoft’s upgrade potential is twenty times that of Apple. Microsoft has 33 billion in cash – as opposed to Apple which has 24 billion. Now, I will be the first to admit that Vista was a piece of Junk, but Windows 7 is another story. This new OS fixes most if not all of the complaints about Vista and far exceeds the Mac OS in the areas of integration, ease of use, and programming tools.

At $28 a share, Microsoft is clearly the undervalued company here. I would absolutely expect their stock to double over the next year. As for Apple, I would expect it to crest at about $250 a share.

Faustian Health Care Reform

Let’s be frank. The idea behind health care reform is to monopolize purchasing power behind one entity – the government – in the hopes of bringing down costs. When one buyer – as in the case of Wal-Mart or the defense department – can dictate price, suppliers are forced to follow or be locked out of the market. Alternatively, the supplier side of the equation can be deregulated to such an extent that genuine capitalistic competition lowers the price of the item in question. Examples of the later include the airline industry and the telecommunications industry – prices of plane ticket are lower today than they were thirty years ago – even in nominal dollars. From an economic efficiency point of view, the second option – a deregulated supplier side approach – is probably the best alternative.

American health care as it stands today combines the worst of both worlds. First of all, it is a highly regulated industry – the average Joe is now allowed to practice medicine, hospitals must treat the poor and the indigent, and virtually all effective drugs must be dispensed (read marked up) by licensed physicians. Secondly, medical lawsuits virtually guarantee a market distortion of some sort. Thirdly, the purchasers of medical services – people and insurance companies – are fragmented, regulated on a State by State basis, and segmented by income level – the poor having little to no coverage whatsoever. The American medical industry is essentially a protected mercantile coalition.

Both the Democrat and Republican positions are idealistic in the extreme, in that any failure to adopt either of their solutions results in the current deadlock that profits no one. In other words, both extreme positions would lead to better outcomes than a compromised position. A single payer government monopoly or rampant deregulated competition would be preferable to the situation we have today.

Toyota’s Faustian Cars

The Camry that can’t stop accelerating…

And the Prius that won’t break

Are Ratzinger and Armin Mueller-Stahl Related?

I don’t know, but the similarity weirds me out…

Skype Baby

I just came back from CES, I only have one word for those technophobes – Skype.

Everyone is going on about the death of the PC, the real story is the funeral services being held in the South Hall for the cell phone, and the SMS services. That’s right – cell phones are dying, soon to be replaced by Skype enabled devices. In ten years times, phone numbers and area codes will seem as antiquated as vinyl 33 records, or fat ties and bell bottoms. The hoopla between the Android and the IPhone is as irrelevant as the great struggle between Netscape and Microsoft before the advent of Google. The real technology story of the day is that Skype is fast becoming the communications platform of the world.