April 2015 – Page 7 – The Burning Platform

MY KIND OF FUNERAL

China has toxic smog, a massive stock and real estate bubble, the worst corruption in the world, dreadful poverty for hundreds of millions, and an economy in freefall. But they are focused on stopping strip shows at funerals. It sounds like their priorities are misplaced. I certainly would be more likely to go to the funeral of someone I didn’t care for, if I got to see a strip show. I think this is a great business concept. I’ll be contacting llpoh to bankroll my new business venture. Stuck could be our pimp.

China cracks down on funeral striptease

By Laura He

Published: Apr 24, 2015 1:26 a.m. ET

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — In rural China, funerals often feature young women performing a striptease for the guests, seen as a way to get more people to attend. But as common as the practice is, the government isn’t happy about it.

The Ministry of Culture announced Thursday on its website that it will launch a strict crackdown on the “illegal but common” strip shows at countryside funerals, as such shows “degrade social values.”

The ministry said its push had already resulted in two raids on such funerals, with police detaining the events’ managers and charging them with “organizing obscene shows,” punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

A Wednesday report by the Beijing News newspaper said in some rural areas, people use “sexy and stimulating” entertainment to draw more guests to the funeral and as a way to indicate family prosperity.

Nor are such shows tame — funeral striptease services typically cost over 2,000 yuan ($320) per show, often a high price for a rural family, and the groups offering these shows compete with each other by “pushing the limit” in order to drum up future business, according to a 2006 special video report by China’s Central Television.

A report by the Tencent Holdings news-portal site earlier this week criticized the practice as representing a “culture deficit” in rural China due to a lack of other cultural and recreational activities. It also blamed local officials for giving “tacit permission” for such illegal shows.

TULIPMANIA 2015

“In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”― Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Human nature doesn’t change. It is the same across the world. We are driven by fear and greed. Overconfidence, lack of reason, poor math skills, herd mentality, and delusional thinking lead to bubbles. When the bubble reaches a tipping point, fear takes over and the herd all try to exit at the same time through a narrow pathway. The Crash ensues.

It happened in the 1600’s.

It happened in the 1700’s.

It happened in the 1800’s.

It happened in the 1920’s.

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Why Is Yemen Our War?

Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan

For a month now, the Saudi air force has been bombing Yemen to reverse a takeover of that nation of 25 million by Houthi rebels, and reinstall a president who fled his country and is residing in Riyadh.

The Saudis have hit airfields, armor and arms depots, and caused a humanitarian catastrophe. Nearly 1,000 dead, 3,500 wounded and tens of thousands homeless. The poorest nation in the Arab world is near collapse. Dependent upon imported food, Yemen faces malnutrition and starvation.

And the United States has been an accomplice in the Saudi bombing of Yemen.

Why? Why is Yemen’s civil war America’s war?

What did the Houthis ever do to us?

While they bear us no love, their Houthi rebellion was an uprising against a pair of autocrats who had been imposed upon them, and against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

The Houthis’ main enemy, AQAP, is America’s worst enemy.

Why are we then making ourselves de facto allies of al-Qaida?

For while the Saudis have been bombing the Houthis, easing the pressure on al-Qaida, AQAP effected a prison break of 270 inmates, including scores of terrorists, and seized the port of Mukalla.

The Saudis claim the Houthi rebellion is part of an Iranian Shiite scheme to overrun and dominate the Sunni Middle East.

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CRASH BOYS

By Michael Lewis, originally posted in Bloomberg

Crash Boys

The first question that arises from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s case against Navinder Singh Sarao is: Why did it take them five years to bring it?

A guy living with his parents next to London’s Heathrow Airport enters a lot of big, phony orders to sell U.S. stock market futures; the market promptly collapses on May 6, 2010; it takes five years for the army of U.S. financial regulators to work out that there might be some connection between the two events. It makes no sense.

A bunch of news reports have suggested that the CFTC didn’t have the information available to it to make the case. After the flash crash, the commission focused exclusively on trades that had occurred that day, rather than orders designed not to trade — at least until some mysterious whistle-blower came forward to explain how the futures market actually worked. But this can’t be true.

Immediately after the flash crash, Eric Hunsader, founder of the Chicago-based market data company Nanex, which has access to all stock and futures market orders, detected lots of socially dubious trading activity that May day: high-frequency trading firms sending 5,000 quotes per second in a single stock without ever intending to trade that stock, for instance. On June 18, 2010, Nanex published a report of its findings.

The following Wednesday, June 23, the website Zero Hedge posted the Nanex report. Two days later the CFTC’s chief economist, Andrei Kirilenko, e-mailed Hunsader. “He invited me out to D.C. and I talked with everyone there (and I mean everyone — including a commissioner),” Hunsader says. “The CFTC then flew out a programmer to our offices where we showed him how to work with our data. Took all of a day. We sent him back with our flash crash data, and that was pretty much the last we heard about that project.”

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five