Guesses At Nothing

I think my friend Julie took this picture.  Looks like postcard material to me. 

I found a bunch of old pictures from our whitewater rafting trip in 2004 (I think).  Here are the better ones. 




This was actually not a gentle ride as it appears here.  The Nolichucky boasts a quarter-mile stretch of class 4 rapids, in which the raft we were following got pinned on an outcropping and we rammed into it sending its passengers flying out of it like children being tossed in a taut blanket.  We then played rescue crew and managed to pull a few survivors from the swirling abyss.  The raft was lost and we spent several hours on the side of the river waiting for another raft (which never came). 


A good shot of the crew.



My wife.  We were mere acquaintances then. 

May we pay heed to the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," speech:

"Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

"Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts....Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of me

[via MoJo Blog]

From Wikipedia

The earliest megatheriid in North America was Eremotherium eomigrans from 2.2 million years ago. With more than five tons in weight, 6 meters in length, and able to reach as high as 17 feet (5.2 m), it was taller than an African Bush Elephant bull. Unlike relatives, this species retained a plesiomorphic extra claw. While other species of Eremotherium had four fingers with only two or three claws, E. eomigrans had five fingers, four of them with claws up to nearly a foot long.

These behemoths even walked in my home state of NC.

"Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to silence those who have criticized her lack of foreign affairs experience Tuesday by announcing plans for a weeklong, 10-nation tour of Walt Disney World's Epcot." [from The Onion]

As much as I bitched, I think the thing really needed to happen and hopefully congress will get something done about it.  On the brighter side, I now have a lawn in which I can grow tubers and vegetables.  I can also catch earthworms for bait.  As a close friend said, "Think about it, all you really need is air, food and water," and I really think there is some comfort in that thought. 

Rushkoff on the bailout failure/financial meltdown:

If you've got no money and no debt, then just go about your business normally. I think the smartest long-term positioning is to begin looking at the goods and services you can provide to other people in your community without involving long distance transport or complex supply chains involving multiple creditors and borrowers. In other words, try to make what you do as real as possible.

If you do have money, well, either sit tight through the "capitulation" or do some bottom feeding of favorite underpriced stocks in industries that provide real goods or services to real people, and that don't need to borrow lots of money to do it. If you've got more than 100k in a single bank account, you might spread it out.

Scary shit.  He goes on to say:

The bigger fact, though, is that even with a short-term bailout, the underlying mega-economy is in the dumps. Government can help lubricate the gears of the economy by utilizing its capacity to engage in longterm investing, as with the failed bailout bill. But this entire effort was really just a balance sheet adjustment. Unless we are also investing our time, energy, and remaining money in productive industries, education, and renewable resources, we will not have changed the real economy at all.

Some things we should have been doing in the first place.

Even if the economy is shit, I still find beauty that it snows on Mars.

Before:



After:

Phish Timber Lyrics

I'm gonna pull this timber `fore the sun go down
Get it `cross the river `fore the bars come down
Drag it on down that dusty road
Come on Jerry, let's dump this load

I said "Timber, ho!", timber, woah this timber's gotta roll
I said "Timber, ho!", timber, woah this timber's gotta roll

My old Jerry was an Arkansas mule
Been everywhere and he ain't no fool
Weighed nine hundred and twenty-two
Done everything a poor mule can do

(chorus)

Jerry's shoulders stood six foot tall
Pulled more timber than a freight could haul
Workin' heavy old Jerry got sore
Pulled so much he couldn't pull no more

(chorus)

The boss said "Jerry" and it made him jump
Jerry ran and kicked the boss on the rump
My old Jerry was a cool mule
Had it been me I woulda killed that fool
Boss tried to shoot old Jerry in the head
Jerry took that bullet and he stomped him dead
Stomped that boss til he heard him scream
Sure don't care he was so damn mean

In regards to last night's debate, the candidates seemed to say a whole lot of nothing.  Both were on their tippy-toes and nobody said anything meaningful about the bailout plan.   In any event, the debates have historically had little effect on the polls: 

"...historically the best a candidate can expect to get coming out of a debate is a 2.25 point bounce. When Bush lost 2.26 points coming out of the first 2004 debate with Kerry, it was the largest single-debate swing since 1988.

The best a candidate has ever done over the course of an entire debate season (there are, as you almost certainly know, two or three debates every campaign), is a 3.5 point bounce, which Bush got in 2000 after his three debates with Gore. The average swing after a debate season, dating back to 1988, is a paltry two points. And there's nothing to say that that two point bounce isn't wiped out by the events of the campaign's homestretch.

Analysis of the debate is of course welcome. But when the talking heads reach into their bag of sports analogies and tell you that one of the candidates "landed a knockout punch" or "hit a home run," don't believe them. It's a safe bet that both candidates did well enough to reassure their supporters but not well enough to swing an appreciable number of undecideds."

[via Mojo Blog]

A wellness guru has maintained a Mickey D's hamburger for twelve years with no preservation, and it looks remarkably like a "fresh" McDonald's burger.  Anyone who has found a fry when cleaning under the seat of a car is familiar with McDonald's remarkable resistance to decay.  [via Kottke.org]

If you scroll down long enough, (way down) you can now see my shared items from Google Reader and my Twitter tweets in the left hand column.  I dunno, if you're into that sorta thing anyway. 

I posted this comment in response to my Best Thing to Come Out of Nazi Germany post and thought it deserved its own post:

I should state, that this is in answer to the hypothetical, "If you had to pick something good to come out of Nazi Germany then what would it be?" question; which is a stupid hypothetical anyway as the answer to "What came out of what?" is a damn complex task. Take for instance, a recent dinner with my mom, my wife Meghann, and my two sisters, Sarah, and Becca. I wouldn't have been sitting there with Meghann, if she never met Sarah, and we wouldn't be at that restaurant, if Sarah hadn't married Dave, who she wouldn't have met if I hadn't become his friend and then of course none of us would have been there if not for my mother (who picked up the check by the way). Also, my mother narrowly made it here when my grandfather survived stepping on a mine in WWII. So the best thing to come out of Nazi Germany, is my mother, me, my marriage, my siblings, and a free meal.

From The Onion:

There's nothing quite like a rock concert. I remember how exciting it was to sit in a packed stadium, watching four or five young men with indistinguishable haircuts run toward the stage and grab their instruments. And then, then they'd start playing—and boy I'll tell you, that's when those haircuts would really start moving. Swaying to and fro at equal lengths above their shoulders, shimmering in the same tones of brown, black, or blonde. That, my friends, was true rock and roll.

My guess is that the mop-top and other hairstyles shared by band members were part of a natural evolution from the uniformity of the 1950's (think of the iconic crew-cut) to the wild individuality brought on by free-love, drug culture of the 1960's (long haired freaky people, need not apply).  It makes me wonder, if there is any school of thought on hair theory.

Edit:  This is the best list I can come up with for hair theory:

Hillary's Hair Change:Hair Theory and Black Culture
The Art of Barbering
History of Hair

and this all encompassing list of hair related links.

"For anybody out there living in cave, let me just say this. Congratulations. You've apparently made the soundest real estate investment possible." — Jon Stewart

 From the 25 Harshest Reactions to the Wall Street bailout. Unfortunately I think that it is inevitable. I just hope not with the "whenever we need it" provision from my last post.

That's a lot of zeros, and if this bailout doesn't work, we may be obligated for another one.

Treasury Sec. Hank Paulson's $700 billion bailout plan now has a name: the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. But even as Capitol Hill debates TARP, few seem to have noticed the proposal item that puts taxpayers on the hook for future bailouts. It's in Section 6, and the key phrase is this: "The Secretary's authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time."

What does "at any one time" actually mean to economists? It means that if everything we American taxpayers buy re-evaluates down to zero, we get to buy more. That's hardly taxpayer "protection."

In answer to my last question, I have found this post on why the meltdown might not be bad for most of us, written by the same author quoted in my last entry, Douglas Rushkoff.  I must say, though,  that it sounds pretty damn scary:

The problem for us is that if the Fed doesn’t bail out banks and insurance companies, we all lose our money. But if they do bail out the banks and insurance companies, we all have to pay for it. If the Fed runs out of money to do this, they have to print more money. So the money they insure our bank accounts with ends up worth very little. That’s not good.

But the money is itself crap. It’s based on a centralized lending scheme and has no intrinsic value. The Fed no longer even releases the metric telling us how much money is out there.

All this means is that you can’t count on capitalism anymore. Your wealth is not how many paper assets you have. It’s not even how much land you have (or think you have). It’s what you can do. It’s your value to other people.

 

But he goes on to say:

The opportunity here, while the big boys are down, is to rebuild the genuine, local commercial infrastructure. To make shoes, clothes, food, education, healthcare and everything else we can in a bottom-up fashion. While speculators enjoy the economy of scale, we inhabit an ecology scaled to the human being that was lost in the corporatist equation.

The sooner you “drop out” of the speculative economy and its abstract concerns, the sooner you will be able to create and provide real value for the people all around you, and the better position you will be in to get what you need for yourself and your family.

This is not bad; it is good. The pain that people are about to go through now is not the product of the speculative economy’s failure, but its former and intentional unjust success.

Perhaps most interestingly, this is all related to trickle-down "voodoo" economics.

Paulson emphasized that the U.S. would slide into recession without the mother of all bailouts.  But my question is, are recessions a normal corrective phase of an economy? It seems like it can't always be onward and upward.

As support for my thought that all this crap is imaginary, read this excerpt:
 

In brief, the money we use is just one kind of money. Invented in the Renaissance, and protected with laws banning other kinds of money, it has very particular biases that lead to almost inevitable outcomes.

I just finished a book (more on that later in the week), where I make the case that our highly corporatized society was really forged during the Renaissance. Aristocrats were losing power just as a new merchant class was gaining it. So they made a series of deals through which merchants' companies were granted monopoly charters from the monarchs in return for a sweet cut of the proceeds. Merchants got to lock in their status as newly rich, while monarchs stopped their own descent. Merchants supported the monarchs whose charters granted them exclusive access to new territories or industries, and monarchs got to do colonial expansion once-removed.

The invention of centralized, national currency was meant to support all this. Where localities had previously been free to mint their own currency based on the crops they had grown, now they were forced to borrow money from a central bank. This allowed the issuer of currency - the crown - to extract value from every transaction. Anyone who wanted to buy anything from anyone else had to run it through the central authority - coin of the realm - one way or the other.

This engendered competition for money, which was now a scarce currency issued at interest, instead of a local currency as abundant as the year's crop. Moreover, any business wanting to borrow money for equipment or development had to pay back several times what they had borrowed. This meant bankruptcy was built into the currency system. If a business borrows $100,000, for example, they'll have to pay back $300,000 by the time the loan is due. Where does that money come from? Someone else who borrowed.

Meanwhile, local currencies had the opposite bias of centralized currency. Local currencies lost value over time. They were really just receipts on the amount of grain that farmer had brought to the grain store. Since some of that grain was lost to rats or water, and since the grain store had to be paid, money devalued each year. This meant the money was biased towards being spent. That's why reinvestment in infrastructure as a percent of total revenue was so high in the late Middle Ages. It's why they built those cathedrals. They were local efforts, by people looking to invest their abundant wealth into real assets for their communities' future. (Cathedrals were built to attract pilgrims and tourism.)

Unlike local currencies, centralized currencies were biased towards retaining their value over time. Capitalism (in addition to being a lot of other things) is the way people get rich simply for being rich. Capital becomes the most important component in the capital/labor/resources equation. Since the purpose of the Renaissance innovations was to keep the currently wealthy wealthy, the currency was biased to favor those who had it - and could mete it out at high interest rates to those who needed it for their transactions.

Excerpt from Federal Reserve Skateboard: A Short Story:

Inside, Bernanke moved along the wall like a shadow, elongating and contracting as the light sources shifted around him. In the midst of a sea of filing cabinets, he froze. He sniffed the air, then dropped to his knees, licked the floor, and paused. Yes, he thought, Greenspan was definitely here.

Read it over here.

From BoingBoing and PublicMarkup.org, each individual's contribution to the bail out plan is $2,000. 

On NPR today, even Newt Gingrich urged a cautionary approach that made a lot of sense (Heresy, from my liberal lips).  Gingrich even pointed out that Chris Dodd has received more money from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae than any other member of congress: 

But the idea, obviously, is that this goes to Congress and that provisions are written in — and that's just what they're doing now. Are you not reassured by what the debate is in Congress right now?

Well, the last time we were promised they were going to save us, it was $300 billion; it was a housing bill. Now we have brand-new liberal Democrats, many of whom — for example [Connecticut Sen.] Chris Dodd — was the largest single recipient of money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and he is the chairman of the Banking Committee. So the guy who got the most money is now going to write a bill to give taxpayers' money to the people who gave him money. Somehow, I am not reassured.

The statement may be a symptom of partisan finger pointing, but it is a good point. 

I don't know what it is, but it is definitely not the Volkswagen.  Case in point:  My wife's 2001 VW Jetta. It is a lemon.   And she is not alone.  It even has the dreaded crayon smell. So rule out the VW.

The obvious answer would be the Eisenhower Interstate System, but if you consider all the CO2 emitted by the motor car then perhaps we would have been better of with a system of rails.

I am at a loss. 

“The financial crisis looks like fire on a distant shore,” said Atsushi Nakajima, chief economist at the research arm of Mizuho Financial Group. “Japan has remained very calm and peaceful.”

Japan looks pretty good during this economic downturn thanks partly to their bubble burst in the early nineties due to a real estate meltdown. 

All of today's talk about a 700 billion bailout seems like a knee-jerk reaction to say the least.  With the national debt being nearly $6 trillion dollars, it makes me scratch my head and wonder whether all these numbers are just made up. Anyway, it doesn't give me much confidence in the economy.

Happy Vernal Equinox everyone! I did once learn from a science teacher that you can balance an egg on its end during the equinoxes, but from what I gather, that is a bunch of hooey.

O yjsml upi og upi jsbr yslrm yjr yozr yp dpabr zu dozqar vtuqyphtsz, og upi dpabrf oy, arsbr s vpzzrmy om yjr vpzzrmyd drvyopm!

Here are some interesting web cams of the internal workings of the LHC.  Not a lot of action at the moment, but that should pick up once they repair the transformers. 

More Great King Crimson lyrics from the brilliant album Thrak:

long ago and far away in a different age
when I was a dumb young guy
fossilized photos of my life then
illustrate what an easy prey I must have been
standing in the sun, idiot savant
something like a monument
I'm a dinosaur, somebody is digging my bones

ignorance has always been something I excel in
followed by naivete and pride
doesn't take a scientist to see how
any clever predator could have a piece of me
standing in the sun, idiot savant
something like a monument
I'm a dinosaur, somebody is digging my bones

I look back on the past
it's a wonder I'm not yet extinct
all the mistakes and bad judgments I made
nearly pushed me to the brink
it doesn't pay to be too nice
it's the one thing I have learned
still, I made my fossil bed
now I toss and turn

I'm a dinosaur, somebody is digging my bones

You can here the song here, but be forewarned, the audio quality is poor. 

Refreshing:

Katie Couric: Your vice presidential rival, Governor Palin, said "To the rest of America, that's not patriotism. Raising taxes is about killing jobs and hurting small businesses and making things worse."

Joe Biden: How many small businessmen are making one million, four hundred thousand—average in the top 1 percent. Give me a break. I remind my friend, John McCain, what he said—when Bush called for war and tax cuts—he said, it was immoral, immoral, to take a nation to war and not have anybody pay for it. I am so sick and tired of this phoniness. The truth of the matter is that we are in trouble. And the people who do not need a new tax cut should be willing, as patriotic Americans, to understand the way to get this economy back up on their feet is to give middle class taxpayers a break. We take the tax cut they're getting and we give it to the middle class.

Found at MoJo Blog

Great King Crimson lyrics:

Sundown dazzling day
Gold through my eyes
But my eyes turned within
Only see
Starless and Bible black

Ice blue silver sky
Fades into grey
To a grey hope that o' yearns to be
Starless and Bible black

Old friend charity
Cruel twisted smile
And the smile signals emptiness
For me
Starless and Bible black

Lively discussion at Slashdot about a controversial study published in Science,:

Researchers writing in Science report that the political orientation of test subjects who have strong views is linked to how easy they are to startle. They found that subjects who were more fearful were more likely to have right wing views, such as being in favor of capital punishment and higher defense budgets. The researchers suggest that this psychological difference is why it is so difficult to change people's minds in political arguments."

So do conservatives act impulsively based upon their fears (some?), or do liberals lack the self-preservation (huh?) that makes an animal an animal?

Unfortunate loss, David Foster Wallace, and sadly I knew little about him until his untimely death.  Losing someone so revered by his peers for the tenacity with which he grappled with words and meaning is a great loss indeed.  I found this tidbit in his Wikipedia page : 

He goes on to say that we might have to accept that every now and then "a democratic republic cannot 100% protect itself [from terrorism] without subverting the very principles that made it worth protecting." By comparison, he continues, we accept the 40,000 highway deaths each year as the price we pay for the convenience of the motor car. Finally, he asks, in the context of Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act, and warrantless wiretapping, "Have we become so selfish and scared that we don't even want to consider whether some things trump safety?"

Of course, we more easily accept the 40,000 traffic deaths each year because they are tiny tragedies spread over time versus the singular exclamation point of a terrorist act and the following media coverage, but in that one sentence, "Have we become so selfish and scared that we don't even want to consider whether some things trump safety?", David says exactly what I struggled to find the words for as civil liberties eroded in the months after 9/11. 

Oddly, I miss him, even though I never even knew him. 

Bah bah, bah bah.....   bah bah ..... bah bah bah bah, doodoo.... doo.  Bah bah, bah bah, do do, shhhhhhhhhhhhhew.  Bun-nah, bun-nun-nah, naaaaaaaaaaah.  Budoodoo, budoodoo, waaaaaaaaaaaaaa, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, duh duh duh. bu-oo-doo-ooo- waaaa. 

Excuse my random rant, but over twenty-one dollars for an eight pack of razors is ludicrous. If I spend $100 dollars at the grocery store including an eight pack of razors, that means that one fifth of my grocery costs are for shaving my face. I'd rather grow a beard.

Here is a great segment from Fresh Air in which Thomas Friedman of The New York Times comments on the republican chant of "Drill, baby, drill."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94385403 In other news, I can't get the lyrics of Luther Vandross's What the World Needs Now out of my head:

What the world needs now
Is love, sweet love
It's the only thing
That there's just too little of

What the world needs now
Is love, sweet love
No not just for some
But for everyone

Lord we don't need another mountain
There are mountains and hillsides
Enough to climb
There are oceans and rivers
Enough to cross
Enough to last
Till the end of time

What the world needs now
Is love, sweet love
No not just for some
But for everyone
Lord we don't need another meadow
There are cornfields and wheatfields
Enough to grow
And there are sunbeams and moonbeams
Enough to shine
So listen, Lord
If you want to know

What the world needs now
Is love, sweet love
It's the only thing
That there's just too little of

What the world needs now
Is love, sweet love
No not just for some
But for everyone

I, unfortunately, watched Sara Palin speak last night and I can't help but to comment about how smug and disingenuous she was.  It is apparent that if McCain is to have a snowball's chance in hell, then he is going to have to run a nasty campaign, which he is doing.  He has even blatantly lied in commercials that Barrack Obama will raise taxes for the working man.  Barrack's tax plan is aimed at taking away loop holes from the uber-wealthy and making them pay their fair share.  I really believe that Barrack's brand of transparent politics makes this one of the most important elections in a looooooooooong time.

The convention-goers were even chanting drill-baby-drill in reference to off-shore and Arctic drilling plans, which will not have any effect on gas prices for at least ten years.  The answer is investing American resources (including our most valuable  -- ingenuity) into renewable resources.  The tag line drill more, drill now, pay less is misleading at best and more akin to corporate propaganda than anything else. 

Unfortunately, I fear that the country is still divided enough for McCain to win.