Here are some excerpts of an email I sent out Saturday:

Every six to eight weeks we hear all this about the Fed (really the Federal Open Market Committee) changing interest rates. Some get confused as to what this means, and others just seem to have a weird interpretation. They get these strange idea that the Fed is setting the rate on government debt or something. Those are all set by the market, but here's a quick description of what the Fed actually does.

There is essentially only one rate (and others that are keyed off of it) that the Fed can set by fiat, the discount rate. That is the interest rate the Federal Reserve Bank charges member banks to borrow money overnight. However, this isn't the rate you usually hear being talked about. But it does bring up one important question of why a bank would borrow money just for a single night?

Every day banks need to meet reserve requirements. That is, they need to have part of their deposits covered. Currently that is 10 percent. That means if a bank has $100 million in deposits, it must have at least $10 million to cover potential withdraws. (In practice, this is more complicated. Some types of deposits have no reserve requirements, and smaller banks have lower reserve requirements.) This prevents the bank for taking the $10 I deposited and turning around and loaning it all out to somebody else. It can still loan $9 out, though. If that bank didn't have $10 million to cover its 10 percent of $100 million in people's accounts, it would need to borrow to cover the reserve requirement. It could just go to the Fed discount window and get a loan there from the big man himself.

This gives me a good oportunity to commend Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger for his choice of the John Miur state quarter design. In my book, this gives Arnold a little bit of spare credibility that he can cash in on when he makes a poor decision later.

The world would be a worse place if John Muir had never found Yosemite. I'm an avid rock climber so Muir has had a tremendous impact on my life. A few years ago I spent the entire summer (shhh) in the Yosemite Valley clumbing and visiting the Mecca of modern rock climbing.

[editor's note, by jjayson] I come back here after being gone for almost two weeks, and all I find is a bunch of whining about "reign" versus "ring." Somebody remind me why I came back.

My religious and spiritual life (and lack of) has been all over the map. In many ways it mirrors my physical life having lived in eight metropolital areas. I went to Catholic School, but wasn't very religious, and not Catholic at all. The football team had to go to mass before games, but that was most of my attendance. (I played inside linebacker.) I was involved in a strong church boys choir that toured when I was young too, but I only really considered it vocal and social. I ran around under the church before and after performances and practice. It was fun, but then your voice changes and you get kicked out, so I stopped going there. My father also had strong ties to the founder of a national Protestant church that some of you know about and some might actually attend.

I've read the Vedas, Mahabharata including extensive commentary on the Gita, Ramayana, Puranas, other primary and secondary material, and taken various classes at Berkeley that covered them as literature. But I have never considered myself Hindu, unlike Frederica Matthewes-Green for anybody who's heard of her. However the reading is great and the story more engaging than the Bible. Gambling, treatchery, shooting arrows down with other arrows while riding into a massive battle, turning into a woman only to be widowed -- it doesn't get much better than that. I've even read translated sections of the Koran, but that is because I don't read Arabic.

I've also done the Atheist and agnostic things. While not Buddhist, I did and still do practice Zazen meditation. In fact the first story I ever posted over at Kuro5hin was about Zazen. I started Judo when I was young and that was how I was first introduced.

One. The Ottawa Citizen has an excellent article about the imprisonment, torture, and murder of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi in Iran's infamous Evin prison. The author Michael Petrou went to Iran under a tourist visa to secretly interview other Evin inmates there at the time Kazemi was beaten to death and the following cover up. The story is just very well researched and written. Go read it.

Two. Why is everybody going after the Chalabi-Tehran connection now? Not like, why are people making a big deal out of it at all, but why now? The first time I read the accusation in the press was about a month ago, and I had heard something about it a little before then even. I know the DIA just chimed in, but there doesn't really appear to be any new information. And with the way rumors are so quickly turned into fact this year, you would think last month's breaching of the item would have attracted more attention.

In my previous diary entry I called Juan Cole a "tool," and many here kept mistaking that for an ad hom argument. It was entirely invective, an insult, or simple abuse. The difference isn't in the word, but in the usage.

Calling dKos patrons tools is invective. Saying that you don't understand the difference between invective and ad hom because you are dKos patrons is ad hom.

A classic example of an ad hom is from Juan Cole himself when he claims that somebody "doesn't know anything about Iran" because "He doesn't speak Persian, and I believe he has never been there." Instead of actually forming a substantive argument, Cole attacks the person. More specifically, this is an ad hom of circumstance.

It is a rational statement that somebody who speaks the local languages might would be better equipted to understand the region, but it isn't proof of anything. If speaking Persian gave the professor a better understanding, it would come out in his ability to make more forceful arguements and speak about the issue with deeper knowledge. It simply cannot be used as a reason he is right.

When I say most of you are all a bunch of flaming morons incapable of either forming a cogent argument or evaluating one, that is strictly an insult combined with a statement. If I am using the fact that you people are flaming morons to back up the observation that you are incapable of discourse, then that is argument by ad hom.

Do all of you understand it now, you tools (invective)?

I shouldn't call him uninformed. He clearly isn't. He has a tremendous amount of knowledge floating around in his head. However, I think his ability to take that knowledge and form arguments that are strong, coherent, and useful isn't very well established. That is a skill though that not everybody has, and it is as much innate as learned. I think his critical thinking skills are underdeveloped, and parroting back what he's read in the press if often the extend of Cole's best analysis. Related to that, I think Cole gets easily convinced by similarly weak arguments based on skewed rhetoric.

I may be a little too hard on the professor (that picture really bothers me), but even when I agree with him, sometimes I wish he would just keep his mouth shut. He has a gift for making the argument most likely to lead nowhere -- or worse -- make your shared position sound foolish. I first began to notice disagreements with him when he didn't make critical distinctions between the different forces inside Iran and treated the rulership as of a single voice. Some other links he gave to poorly argued positions were also disheartening. However, Cole's latest is his post in gay marriage. As he says "sometimes readers complain if I stray into other subjects." I'm not complaining that he does stray into other areas, just that he doesn't do it very well.

The supply-side ideas were never a new branch of economics. They had their foundation in classical economics. It was the economics of those from the far left like Karl Marx to the far right like Adam Smith. The roots can even be traced all the way back to a 14th century Arab philosopher, ibn Khaldun, who Reagan liked to quote, such as in a 1986 speech:

The effort is designed to be revenue-neutral, so if a large number of people and businesses are paying less, some people and businesses will be paying more. But those whose taxload will increase are those who have made extensive use of tax shelters and other schemes and have not really been paying proportionately a fair share of the tax burden. However, lowering the rates does not translate as tax shift. Lowering the rates and broadening the base will actually add to government revenue. As far back as the 14th century, a Moslem philosopher named ibn-Khaldun observed, "... At the beginning of a dynasty taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments."

Jude Wanniski, one of the early supply-siders, has expressed amazement at ibn Khladun's clear thought and how he could have never heard of him until Reagan had mentioned the philosopher, historian, and politician.

However, it now looks like there has some supply-side success at changing orthodoxy. A recent survey of economist explicity names the supply-siders as one reason minds are changing.

First, the good news about jobs. I haven't really heard much negative from people today, except for the odd person that was looking for another 300,000-plus payroll additions and saw it as a necessity of job creation proof (I was looking for a hair above 300,000 too, but I would have accepted anything above 250,000). We did get 288,000 and an upward revision of March to 337,000. (I guess the 29,000 revision plus this month's gain gives us 317,000 from the report, so I can be happy with that.) Besides that, long-term unemployment was down too.

And this is one of very few months recently where the household survey and payroll survey are in line with each other. The household survey showed an employment increase of 278,000 (last month when the payroll shows a 308,000 increase and the household actually showed a 3,000 drop). And once again unemployment and labor force participation would be showing ever better numbers if 16-19 year-olds were ignored.

I'm still in a good mood from the weekend. This Sunday we had one of our friendly investment brunches. We had a few new people too (well two were not entirely new). Even though it is Thursday, a little late in the week, I hope everybody had a good last weekend. One of the big topics Sunday was the jobs report tomorrow.

My thinking about my investment portfolio can sometimes be a little twisted. But I'll let you in to see just how bad it can be sometimes. I rarely write about my investment decisions in public spaces (mostly because of embarassment), but I've actually had a couple people from dKos ask me in email about some things, so I thought I'd let you into my thought process, no matter how embarassing it may be. Of course I'm wrong often, so never ever take my advice (I beg you to not do it -- as you might actually do better going the opposire way from me). Also, much of my time has been consumed lately so I haven't had much left for dealing with my own financial affairs. However, Sunday, this week's Fed announcement, and tomorrow's job report pushed me into action.

The set-up for what many consider to be the first declaration of human rights is conquest in the city of Babylon by Cyrus the Great in 538 BC. Nabonidus ruled over the Babylonian empire with terror. He stripped religious freedom from his people, brought violence down on them, and forced them to work. He enslaved and brutalized minorites and dissenters. When some of the population tried to revolt, they were put down, but at that time the people were so miserable, they welcomed Cyrus and his army, the story goes, in a bloodless triumph.

Upon taking the title of King of Babylon, Cyrus gave a proclamation of his benvolence. He returned all the images of the gods of the people taken by the former ruler, and released all the slaves, including 50,000 Jewish third-generation slaves. He even financed the return of the Jews to their homeland and the rebuilding of their temple. For this, the Bible proclaimed him God's shepherd and His annointed one. This proclamation was chisled onto a 9-inch cynliner in Babylonian cuneiform.

Sorry, Armando, I wasn't able to scrounge around for as much as I wanted. But here is a couple links. Next time I'll translate some of the rumor mill stuff, but not this time (that and I'm pretty bad at it).

So, the general idea is that Muqtada al-Sadr isn't taking all his orders from the hard-liners in Tehran (you don't need to give direction to somebody that is going your way), but that he is receiving material and diplimatic support from them, and they are trying to position him. Sadr and Tehran have a common interest; they want ot see America fail and an Islamic Revolution in Iraq, even if they disagree on the some of the details. Since Sadr doesn't have the religious clout of a Sistani, he needs to use the religious standing of others. Iranian Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri is one of those that provides this cover, calling Sadr his "representative" in Iraq. Haeri is very close to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Sadr, looking for more support, met with Expediency Chairman and former-president Hashemi Rafsanjani and head of Revolutionary Guard intelligence Murtadha Radhai. There he received the promise of support or Iran and terrorist surrogate Hizbollah. Since then, Rafsanjani has used his Friday sermon to support Sadr and diplomatic attempts have been made to get Sadr accepted by others in Iraq as the important leader.

Although I tried to keep any sources out that you might not find too redible, for just one piece from the right, here is one of Michael Ledeen's articles on the connection.

I'm a big fan of democracy. Ironically, while I am undoubtedly less of a big-D Democrat than almost everybody else on dKos, I am almost definitely more of a little-D democrat than all of you too. I love people &mdash I really like being around them &mdash and think they are excellent at governing themselves.

My biggest complaint is never too much democracy, only democracy that doesn't really allow the people to make decisions, too little democracy. When I look to other world democratic systems, I don't usually find much I think is better than the US system. However, the Swiss Cantonal System has a few ideas that I'm envious of and would like to see immigrate to the US, and Australia's Instant Run-off Voting looks appealing too. Both of these provide better ways to understand what the people want.

The basic idea is that Iraq will be broken in 30 or more provinces. Each of these provinces would be allowed to build a local government, and when a province has done that, it will be promoted and allowed to rule themselves. As more provinces progress, they would be allowed to join with other self-governing provinces and create sovereign states. These states could even take in provinces that newly graduated or join with other states.

This allows the people of Iraq to draw their own boundries, instead of trying to force everybody into a single solution that is acceptable to none. It also creates a way to allow parts of Iraq to progrss at their own pace. If some provinces remain hostile, that will not hold back the other provinces. And it would allow troops to move away from those areas that built their own self-governing and self-policing structures and into hot-spots, concentrating troop force where needed.

In the end, if the poeple of Iraq want to be a single state, they can be a single state, but if the Arab areas do not get along with the Kurdish areas, then they don't have to be joined. The problem with British partitioning of the sub-continent was that it wasn't democratic. It was dictated a top-down geography and that created the Kashmir problem.

The author calls it "Partition by Popular Sovereignty" and it is presented in The Case for Partitioning Iraq. It sounds interesting, and theoretically could be a good idea. However, politics would definitely block anything like it. I don't think it would be blocked by too many Iraqis, but Turkey and Iran would go nuts over the idea.

There's been a big thing about people dropping out of the labor force. I'm not quite sure if it as big of a problem as many people are making it out to be. Since the start of 2001, the labor force increased by 3.4 million people. In that same time, the 16 and older population increased by 8.8 million, but that doesn't tell you much. This has caused the labor force participation rate to fall to 65.9% from 67.0% when Pres. Bush took office.

But who's actually leaving the job market? There's been a couple theories proposed, like people retiring or maybe some just getting sick of not being able to find work and living off their savings. Neither one seems to be true.

And kind of unrelated, here is one of those quotes you read that kind of stuns you. One of those that you don't quite know what to make of it. It is both astute and a little scary for a 17 year old to be so into realpolitik (from an article titled Yassin's death exposes Arab-Iran divide):

The numbers were not cooked by the people at the BLS. The people there do good work, and I don't know of a case of that ever happening, but I'm not old enough to remember too many years ago, so I could be wrong.

The 308,00 number is the seasonally adjusted number, meaning that month to month changes that usually occur are factored out. On a not seasonally adjusted basis, meaning the literal job growth, was 1,007,000. Yes, over a million jobs. However, the seasonal adjustments are done by looking at the previous years, so it removes the average seasonal factors (it's done though auto-regression). Seasonal adjustments are not perfect. However, don't discount jobs because they may have a seasonal factor. A heavy Christmas season might have required more workers. Or good weather might have allowed more work to happen. Those both have a seasonal component, but are just as real as any other job. (But if that good weather is just pushing work into this month and will subtract from summer hiring, that isn't really netting jobs.)

Hiring has been across a wide range of sectors. The BLS's diffusion index of employment measures the breadth of labor change. Is jumped to 61.0 from February's 51.4. It hasn't been that high since July of 2000.

First, The O.C. is still the most entertaining show on TV. It's such a guilty pleasure. And they ended last night's show with a happy, normal moment, not more drama. I hope everybody has an excellent weekend. I will, so should you. But I always have excellent weekends.

The other half of of the proposal Sen. Kerry made last Friday, Jobs First.

The plan has three parts: a change in profit repatriation, a 1.75 percentage point reduction in corporate taxes, and a two-year employment subsidy. Last time I rambled on about the first two, now allow me to ramble on about the third and also about how the 10 million jobs number was derived.

While last time I babbled on anout some obscure and complex section of tax code, this deals with something everybody is familiar with, payroll and income taxes.