Well now....

The government of Ukraine's breakaway territory of Crimea said Thursday that it will hold a referendum on whether to formally secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation, dramatically escalating tensions as the West tries to negotiate a withdrawal of Russian troops from the region.

The announcement of the regionwide vote—which was pushed forward two weeks to March 16—comes as Western diplomats are huddled in Rome with their Russian counterparts to end the standoff and just two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin said the country was not interested in annexing Crimea. On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had said although talks had been fitful, he was hopeful a settlement could be reached.

Now we find out whether the governments involved will honor the people's desires or whether they will invade.

We know what happened in the United States in the 1800s.  

This has the potential to get quite interesting and not in a positive sort of way either.  I think it's reasonable to assume that given the Crimea population they will vote to secede as it appears the Crimea Parliament has already done so.

The market this morning is remarkably calm in this regard; it may be that it is seen as an "already done deal."

In any event in just 10 days the people will vote.  There will apparently be two questions; one on joining Russia and the second on remaining an "autonomous region" as is currently the case.

The complacency factor on this is remarkably high; while it is certainly possible that this will be a mostly-bloodless transfer of allegiance that seems, given the stakes, to be a rather high-risk bet.

I wonder, really.

Go over to eBAY and type in "bad esn" in the search field.  I just did and came up with ~3,500 listings.

Every one of those is a listing for one or more stolen or "lost" mobile devices.

Let's not mince words -- "bad esn" means that the device is on a carrier blacklist because it has been reported lost or stolen or the ESN has been deliberately tampered with and is invalid.  All of those mark illegal conduct, either in theft, trafficking in property that was "lost" (and not returned despite the carrier being able to identify who the device belongs to) or in violating US law as modifying ESNs is an unlawful act.  There is no reason to modify an ESN other than to try to get around the ability to trace a stolen one back to you!

For those who wish to claim that this may be becasue the "owner" didn't pay off his bill on a contract the fact of the matter is that with a subsidized phone you pay for the device during that contract term.  Therefore it is not owned free and clear by the person holding it until said payment has been made!

Pawn shops cannot knowingly accept stolen merchandise.  They do end up taking stolen property all the time by accident, of course, but they're required to submit to regulation in an attempt to prevent them from being used as fences for thieves -- never mind that they're subject to having that property recovered from them.

There is a serious problem with smartphone theft and there is pending legislation (and threats of more of it) in several states driven by the rise in these sort of "snatch and grab" crimes.  ESN/IMEI blocks are a legitimate attempt to make the value of a stolen device zero, and thus reduce the impetus to steal them in the first place.

In most states that I'm aware of knowingly trafficking in stolen property is a crime; in Florida it's a felony:

(1) Any person who traffics in, or endeavors to traffic in, property that he or she knows or should know was stolen shall be guilty of a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in ss. 775.082, 775.083, and 775.084.
(2) Any person who initiates, organizes, plans, finances, directs, manages, or supervises the theft of property and traffics in such stolen property shall be guilty of a felony of the first degree, punishable as provided in ss. 775.082, 775.083, and 775.084.

Other states have similar laws.

It would be trivial for eBAY to demand that only clean ESN phones be sold, to refuse listings that are not, and to require sellers to certify that they are clean and, if found not to be that the seller is held fully liable for the transaction along with being criminally referred.

So why don't they?

Really Kevin?  Really?

Glenn Beck once said Obamacare would mean "the end of prosperity in America forever." But so far, it turns out President Obama's 2010 health law is actually putting money in Americans' wallets.

To be exact, President Obama's 2010 health law was responsible for about three-quarters of a surprising January rise in U.S. consumer spending and American income growth, according to calculations by the Wall Street Journal.

While not exceptional, the gains were significant: a 0.4 percent rise in consumer spending ($45.2 billion) and a 0.3 percent rise in personal incomes (up $43.9 billion), according to new figures released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The growth came in spite of the expiration of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed and all that horrible winter weather.

Oh really?

That was where it came from eh?

So what exactly did the Obamacare rollout do to cause such a rise? For one, it expanded the Medicaid program, a critical and highly controversial aspect of the law, by adding up to a $19 billion in benefits in January. On top of that, health care enrollees additionally received another near $15 billion in the form of tax credits as a result of the rollout, according to the BEA.

So let me see if I get this right.

After goverment either (1) takes more tax revenue from you or (2) dilutes the value of every dollar by emitting more of them in credit (borrowing) and from these two sources, which are the only two sources of funds the Government has, it expends $34 billion in additional dollars. Note carefully that in both of these cases the "funds" came from you, either direct via taxation or indirectly via destruction of purchasing power from the funds you already had earned.

This is approximately 3/4 of the alleged "increase" in personal income (and spending.)  The rest, it would appear, was in fact from economic expansion.

From this slight-of-hand Kevin Short and The Huffington Post states that "(Obamacare) is actually putting money in Americans' wallets."

So Kevin and the Huffington Post have defined the act of removing $20 from your left pocket and placing that same $20 your right pocket as putting money in American's wallets.

I suppose in a sick sort of way that's true; after you remove the $20 when you later (even if one second later) place it in your wallet you did indeed put it in your wallet.

But Kevin, and the Huffington (idiot) Post seem to (intentionally) forget to report that one second earlier you took the same $20 right out of your wallet!

This, my friends, is what passes for "Journalism" these days.

But Obamacare wouldn't impact the economy -- especially not services, which is the majority of the economy and where the lower-paying jobs tend to be concentrated -- right?

Well, how's that working out?  Non-manufacturing ISM is down substantially and employment literally fell apart, dropping to 47.5 from 56.4.

That's raw contraction for February, which incidentally is after the usual seasonal firing binge in January.

New export orders and imports both fell also, and inventory sentiment remains exaggerated at 62 -- well out of the "normal" band (that ends in the upper 50s.)

I'm sure that this can all be blamed on weather, even though the weather only impacted services and not goods manufacturing.... right?

I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked

Iran may not seem the best vantage point to observe the convulsions in Ukraine and Thailand. But traveling through the country last week, I often thought of its constitutional revolution in 1906 -- one whose political legacy exceeds that of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and offers more instructive lessons than any European revolution in why democratic upsurges often produce mayhem, followed in short order by tyranny.

The effort, led by Iranian intellectuals and activists, to check a centralized, arbitrary and inept monarchy was one of the very first political movements of its kind anywhere in Asia. It succeeded in creating a constitutional framework -- a principle of republicanism and a vocabulary of civil society and democratic rights that remain relevant in Iran to this day.

But no working government emerged, and factional fighting doomed the revolution as much as the geopolitical rivalries of Britain, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. After much chaos, the proverbial "strongman" -- inevitably, a soldier on horseback -- emerged to reimpose order, and the sovereignty of the people was sacrificed to an even more centralized and powerful state.

Exactly.

The history books are littered with high-minded sounding words, but the fact is that it rarely works out the way those espousing them claim.

The challenge comes, however, from this:

Intense mass politicization caused in recent years by the venality and incompetence of ruling elites is turning millions of people around the world into rebels and secessionists.

So why do we have "ruling elites" in a land of alleged Constitutional Republics?

Hmmm... that may be the problem, and the first sacrifice these folks tend to make to their own power and venality is found in the Rule of Law.

Thus the focus of dozens of Tickers over the last years calling for restoration of same without delay.

In the end a just government is a referee -- and little more.  The problem with allowing "more" isn't that those who start such a movement are of impure thought (although some are) -- it's that as you aggregate power you wind up inevitably driving more and more actions that are simply designed to maintain and expand that power rather than arbitrate disputes and protect individual rights.

Unfortunately the cheap, easy and fast tonic that someone inevitably grabs for when the state reaches the point of gross over-reach and intrusion is agitation for violence.  This is especially true when people start talking about democratic "upsurges."

The problem is that democracy is simply a high-minded word for two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.  If you have an ounce of perception you realize that this is a recipe for violence in virtually every case; the sheep has only two choices but both are nearly-certain to end with him in the belly of the wolves.  

Why would anyone (other than a wolf, of course) argue for that?

I find it disturbing that so many people continue to focus on that word -- democracy -- and parade it around as if it was something good, especially those who know better such as our President (past and present!) and Congress.  It is nothing of the sort; democracy in truth is nothing more than the rule of the mob, and nobody in their right mind is interested in that sort of outcome.

The nuance is that what you're really looking for is a Constitutional Republic, a form of government where government is granted certain powers, and only those powers, by the people, guided by the principle that the people at-large are the source of and retain inalienable rights.

So long as a Constitutional Republic is retained there is no rule of the mob; you have the right to be left alone so long as you don't violate the rights of anyone else in what you do.  This, indeed, is what anyone who happens to be in a minority should want, and in a pluralistic society the sum of those minorities form a majority and thus can guarantee same.  It is this form of government that tells the sheep that they may arm themselves and, if necessary, defend themselves from the wolves, and equally important that should the wolves attempt to eat the sheep anyway the wolves will be the ones upon which sanction is brought irrespective of their majority status.

Incidentally if you're curious about how America came to be a Constitutional Republic that's the path and the reason for it.  The colonies were not homogeneous; there were fairly-serious divisions among the people in terms of religious and personal desire.  What the Founders realized, much to their credit, was that irrespective of those differences between all of those sub-groups together they were a strong majority, and if they stuck to the principle of a Constitutional Republic they gained joint protection against becoming wolf food where as a democracy inevitably most of them would lose the same and wind up as serfs -- or worse.

We should keep in mind that while many believe our nation was founded under unique circumstances the truth is that we're even more-aligned today toward a Constitutional Republic than we were 238 years ago.  There is in fact a greater spread of various minority interests today than there were in 1776 in America and as a result it is even easier to isolate, pick off and eat one of them through an aggregation of the others.

But in a pluralistic society such as America supporting that sort of action whether individually or by attempting to incite the population at-large is ridiculously unwise, simply on the numbers.  In a pluralistic society no matter who you are you're not a majority and the aggregation of minorities can always turn against you.  

History says that if you go down the road of democracy rather than that of a Constitutional Republic ultimately aggregation of power will do exactly that.

There are those who will claim that "white" is the majority race in America but you need to look more-closely.  Remove "Hispanic" from "white" (they are counted together) and it's 64%, not 72.  If you then start looking at ancestries you find that the greatest representation among Americans is Germanic at about 15% of the total population, and that's a far cry from half or more.

The challenge before us all is to have this discussion openly and push back hard against those who use the word democracy, as that is how we find both joint reason and purpose in returning our government to the primary role envisioned and laid forth by the Founders, removing from it the ability to reach beyond.

It's in all of our self-interest to do so as otherwise there is no means by which any of us can determine in advance if things go pear-shaped whether we will be in the majority, and thus a wolf, or whether we shall discover, much to our chagrin, that we're a sheep.

Leaving aside the moral and ethical arguments the practical simply cannot be debated.  There is one, and only one, sane path forward -- both for us and for those in other nations such as Thailand and the Ukraine.