Rant

[Leiberman, Frist, McCain, Kennedy -- notice the identical grey suits]

Larry:

Biden is on the radio talking about Leiberman (?) and letting him keep the chairmanship on the HOmeland Commish.

What's your thought on that one. L.

Jack:
Contrary to popular impression, the president is not the government, the Congress is. Any legislative program of reform has to go through the Senate as well as the House. The evolution of the institution is that filibusters, which used to be reserved for extreme situations, are now routine and a given on any bill whatsoever. The number of senators needed to close off a filibuster is 60.

The Democrats have 57 seats. There are two independents - Leiberman and Sanders. There are three unresolved seats -- in Georgia, Minnesota, and Alaska. Leiberman and Sanders both caucus with the Democrats -- which means they vote with them on all routine matters and in return their seniority on committees is the same as if they were Democrats. Which gives the Democrats in effect 59 senators. With Leiberman they need to win only one of the the three unresolved seats to be able to pass legislation. Without him they need to win two.

The purpose of the recent election was to be able to institute reforms. If the Democrats do not get 60 votes in the Senate that won't happen. The victory of 2008 will be hollow -- form without substance.

Name any thing at all that you hope the new government will do differently than the old, and I can guarantee you that without 60 senators voting as Democrats, it will not happen. Are you willing to throw away this historic opportunity to change the direction of the whole society, to begin to reverse twenty-eight years of regressive social policy, for the sake of political correctness? Is the urgency of redressing Joe Leiberman having disagreed with the left wing of the Connecticut Democratic Party so great that we are going to throw away the future of our country for it?

But the Fundamentals are Strong

And the Beat(ing) Goes On

[Vanguard Extended Market Fund]

Last	Today's Change
29.31	–1.85 –5.95%

1-day high	30.69
1-day low	29.27

52-week range
52-week low	28.50
52-week high	55.00

Volume	1.0M
10-day average	389.6K

Water-Ice on Mars

This is a photograph taken by the Phoenix Mars Lander in October. The white patch near the center of the picture appears to be water-ice.

The discovery of water-ice on Mars is A Big Deal. It makes the existence or prior existence of life there a near-certainty.

The Peace Process

Rumsfeld said that any country that you can see three sides of from a good hotel room should think twice before giving away territory.

.

Request for Captions

So far I've got -

"C'mon, tell me where you hid the launch codes and the button."

"Do I have to wear this suit and blue tie the whole time I'm president?"

"No, being a legacy admit at Yale is NOT the same as being an affirmative action admit at Harvard."

"I'm sorry I called you a bummer. I meant boomer. Really."

"You're kidding me, sir. It's this long?" -- Anonymous

"Damn...you do look like Alfred E. Newman." -- Harvey

"Don't worry, we've blocked public access to your Kenyan birth certificate until 2012." -- Nick Danger

Exportng Democracy

[the 46th president]

Declining demand for Chinese goods has led to factory closings and rising unemployment there. And, it is assumed, to political and social unrest. The government of China, after consistently denying that the world economic downturn would affect China, has announced a $586 billion economic stimulus package.

Apparently the Politburo, seeing that the economic downturn led the Americans to change their government, have decided that is a bad precedent and are doing their best not to follow it.

When I was a youth gerontocracy seemed a terrible idea. Now it is starting to make sense.

Now that Gen-X is in power, we have dodged a bullet in that the president is black. Blacks do not tattoo well. But our luck will not hold. It is just a matter of time until a Gen-Y president is inaugurated with a butterfly on her breast and a ring in her nose.

More Lines Limerical

That rake left his home and did galavant
To a place seen by most as extravagant.
The advantage he took
Of the femme he forsook
Did confirm his fears that he's irrelevant.

More Poesie

Junction City was Jack's destination.
Owhever, t'was not a vacation.
He toiled and he talked
While the City folks balked
At his thoughts that became an oration.

Learning How to Use HTML Tags - 2

Apples
Bananas
Cherries

Learning How to Use HTML Tags - 1

someheader	someheader
sometext	sometext

Post-mortem Haha's

[the 45th president]

The New York Times--

PHOENIX — As a top adviser in Senator John McCain’s now-imploded campaign tells the story, it was bad enough that Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska unwittingly scheduled, and then took, a prank telephone call from a Canadian comedian posing as the president of France. Far worse, the adviser said, she failed to inform her ticketmate about her rogue diplomacy.

As a senior adviser in the Palin campaign tells the story, the charge is absurd. The call had been on Ms. Palin’s schedule for three days and she should not have been faulted if the McCain campaign was too clueless to notice.

...

One of the last straws for the McCain advisers came just days before the election when news broke that Ms. Palin had taken a call made by Marc-Antoine Audette. Mr. Audette and his fellow comedian Sebastien Trudel are notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state.

Ms. Palin appeared to believe that she was talking to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, even though the prankster had a flamboyant French accent and spoke to her in a more personal way than would be protocol in such a call. At one point, he told Ms. Palin that she would make a good president some day. “Maybe in eight years,” she replied.

The Imelda Marcos Defense --

Ms. Palin has defended her wardrobe as the idea of the Republican National Committee and said that she would give it back.

“Those clothes, they are not my property,” she said. “Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the R.N.C. purchased.”

If convicted Alaska Senator Ted Stevens is re-elected, as he apparently will be, and is removed by the US Senate, as he apparently will be, there will be a runoff election for his seat. Palin is considered a shoo-in in that runoff. She will be in the US Senate for the next 40 years.

.

How Nuts Can the World Get?

[la grand-mere]
I don't know if they're kidding, but according to Le Monde, Sarah Obama Onyango, an 87 year old woman living in Kenya, has celebrated the election of her grandson as President of the United States by sacrificing a cow.


http://www.lemonde.fr/web/son/0,54-0@2-829254,63-1115361,0.html

.

Our Town

[Levittown - 1948]

Doctor Johnson once observed, "Who tires of London, tires of life." The same cannot be said of Grand Junction. Nevertheless, when examined minutely, as by a canvasser who walks obscure neighborhoods distinguished by nothing more than their containing actual or suspected Democrats, it can be interesting.

It is superficially homogeneous, being for instance all white. Nevertheless there is diversity here. There are large numbers of Mexican Americans. There are Native Americans. There are lots, LOTS, of rednecks. There are neighborhoods of rundown single famiy houses, many of them vacant. The people in them seem as dispirited and disheveled as the houses. They are the people missing teeth, with marginal literacy, and correspondingly slight ability to understand the world around them. Most drive to deadend jobs in pickup trucks.

Within a bottle's throw of those neighborhoods, shiny new subdivisions have just been built. Some of the people in them are genuinely well-off. Approaching a large new house with an open garage, I was impressed with the huge shiny Ford F-350 pickup truck in front, other cars, a dune buggy, a complete home gymnasium, and more such. When I spoke to the voter, he said he owned his own business and made more than $250,000 a year. He was for McCain because Obama would raise his taxes. That was a pretty good argument. I tactfully omitted to mention the McCain campaign's slogan, "Country First". (Isn't there something about the "last refuge of scoundrels"? But never mind.)

Other subdivisions are even newer, even less landscaped, and the houses not as large nor as expensive. These are too new to have become rundown yet, but one can hear their fate in the ignorant twang of the occupants. It is just a matter of time.

Sadly, Grand Junction's sole concession to politically correct land use planning is the requirement that all new houses have exteriors of dun stucco, and that it be the same dun throughout any given subdivision -- the bureaucrat's passion for uniformity. I am sure the reader can imagine without effort how unfortunate the result is.

I had been congratulating Grand Junction on housing even its working class in single family detached houses and not in apartments. Until today. Today I canvassed a packet of rundown apartment buildings in the bleakest of environs -- the parking lot of K-Mart on one side, their own littered, greasy parking lots on the other.

There is also the obligatory historical district near downtown of the mansions and near-mansions of the rich and near-rich of the inter-war period. Seventh Street in Grand Junction is The Esplenade in Chico. No amount of urban condescension can obscure the elegance of such a place, especially in autumn when the leaves are falling. The leaves move in a wave behind a passing car like a wake behind a motorboat.

Grand Junction shares the floor of Grand Valley with the Colorado River. It is surrounded by distant high sandstone cliffs. Last night as the sun was setting the golden light of late afternoon made the cliffs radiant. An hour later, after the sun had set, the red light of sunset mixed with the purple light of mountains seen at a distance to produce a true vermilion. I have heard of vermilion cliffs before but have always assumed it was hyperbole. It is not.

So Grand Junction, like an interesting person, has its parts. Not all of them are admirable or even likable, but they make the whole engaging and worth knowing, even if only briefly.

It is an odd reflection on my odd agenda item in retirement to get to know the streets and layout of various world cities -- to have a favorite coffee shop in Helsinki, to know my way around Buenos Aires. The towns I have gotten to know lately have been Ellensburg, Joplin, Fairbanks, Anchorage, and now Grand Junction. Ah well.

Democracy in Grand Junction

The realization sinks in hard and fast -- almost all registered Democrats here have bad taste and small yappy dogs. How can we seize power when we are watching daytime television on Saturday afternoon?

I got yelled at by more than one McCain-nik, who told me that our boy is a communist, a socialist, a Muslim, and wasn't even born here. Worse yet, they were talking about Joe Biden, they hadn't even gotten to Obama yet.

There is still more to learn about politics, no matter how jaded one thinks he has become. I was listening to a long book on CD about the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 on the way here. The author in an aside suggests that President Wilson's erratic behavior at the Versailles Conference and his incapacitating stroke were precipitated by a case of influenza. Which is how I happened to be thinking about what happened while Wilson was incapacitated. His vice-president did not assume the powers of the presidency, Mrs. Wilson did.

It is considerably more likely that if something goes wrong with McCain's health during his presidency, that he would be incapacitated rather than just cleanly keel over dead. So the woman whose qualifications to be president we should be considering are not Sarah Palin's but Cindy McCain's. She may not be as malign a personality as Nancy Reagan, but to my knowledge she has never done anything in life
but be a rich man's daughter and John McCain's wife.

Barack Obama is 47 years old and apparently in good health. His risk of incapacitation is vanishingly small. Even so, Michelle Obama is a successful attorney and appears intelligent and level-headed.

The second notion that occurred to me was how a Bradley Effect election would affect the winner. In 2000 and 2004, however much one may object to the particulars of the outcome, I think everyone can accept that Bush received roughly half of the votes each time. Contrast that with a Bradley Effect victory for McCain. He would not only not have a mandate, he wouldn't even be legitimately in office. Even Republicans of good conscience would have to question such a result. How could he govern when he had no moral claim to the office at all?

More Lamerhicks

A middle-aged gal from Lynn, Mass.
Had a lovely, enticing big ass.
Not rounded and pink,
As you'd probably think.
But was brown, had long ears and ate grass.

Lamehericks

There once was a lady from Fresno,
Who had one helluva libido.
Since no one was home,
She came on her own.
And soon fell in love with her dildo.

At Last! A Cultural Reference to El Cerrito!

There once was a lad from El Cerrito
Who said “Rosita, this idea is quite neat-o.
Let’s combine salsa and chips
With handcuffs and whips,
I’ll eat your taco, you suck my burrito,”

Limberick

On checking beneath her large thigh,
The old broad did let out a cry,
For Jack had been blown
To a place not yet known
By his mind, his libido, and I.

What Happened Today

The Dow went up an unthinkable 900 points today, almost 11%.

What happened today was apparently a market-wide "short squeeze". Here's how it works: When you are confident the market is going down, you borrow shares from your broker, then sell them. On an agreed-upon date you go into the market and buy the same number of shares and return them to your broker. If the shares went down, the difference between what you got for the shares you borrowed and what it cost you to replace them, is your profit. That is called a short sale. The arrangement with your broker is a short sale contract.

[The broker doesn't care that you are doing this. He gets a commission when he buys the shares to lend to you. He gets a commission when you buy the shares to return to him. He gets a commission when he sells them back to the market. He gets a commission for setting up the short sale contract. You are betting against the market, not against your broker.]

Consider what happens if you guess wrong and the stock starts going up instead. You want to buy stock to return to your broker as soon as you can before it goes up more and costs you even more to buy the stock you need. You have to buy right away to limit your losses. That is called covering a short sale. If lots of other short sellers are forced to buy at the same time for the same reason, the sudden buying pressure forces the stock's price to shoot up suddenly. That is called a "short squeeze" in that stock.

Now consider a plummeting stock market such as we have had this past month. It has been a near-certainty that any stock you borrow and sell will be lower by the time you have to return it. There have to have been tons of short sales contracts bought and sold and tons of money made on them. The more the market fell and and the more certain it became that it would fall further, the more the short sales contracts multiplied, and on virtually every stock.

I should add that no one leaves matters to chance. The signal to buy to cut losses is set to go off automatically at a price selected by the short seller when he starts the contract. That is called program buying.

Today there was an upward blip because of the expectation the Federal Reserve would lower interest rates. It started to trigger buy orders to cover short sales contracts. The increased buying forced prices up, which triggered still more buy-to-cover orders, which forced the market up still more, until it became a chain reaction.

The SEC has rules limiting program selling which can drive individual stocks or the whole market down ruinously and provoke a selling panic and a crash [which is what happened in 1929]. Apparently there are no SEC rules limiting program buying, because the market going up is generally considered to be a good thing. And everybody loves seeing bears (AKA 'vultures') getting their asses kicked in the market.

Anyway, apparently that is what happened today. There was a market-wide short squeeze.

While it is wonderful news that so many speculators lost so much money today, it also means the run-up does not reflect any fundamental recovery in the market. It was just another episode of speculators manipulating, and occasionally being manipulated by, the market.

Limherick

There was an old Hebrew named Jack
who for libido never did lack
they would wax his candle
and suck on his handle
while flat on his or her back.


.

Bachelor Stew

is made in a slow cooker so I don't have to remember anything and can't burn anything.

beef stew in whatever size package Safeway or Lucky has,
slice stew cubes into smaller cubes
pearl barley, about a cup or cup and a half
split peas half a cup
chopped onion or chopped cabbage or both
garlic powder
one or two tablespoons olive oil (optional)

and here is the coup de cool -
chicken or beef stock

toss with large spoon to mix ingredients
fill to within 1" of rim

cover and cook overnight



.

The Fruits of Privilege

SF Chronicle --

A cascade of retirements by GOP members, many demoralized by their minority status, left Republicans defending 29 open seats, while Democrats have just six seats to guard.

Those of us whose minority status is permanent can almost sympathize. But maybe being an entitled little prick who sulks and quits when he doesn't get his way shouldn't be a qualification for their party's nomination.....?



.

It's the Di-Lithium Crystals, Dammit!

[Why do I need captions for Mao and Ben-Gurion but not for the Enterprise?]

Deathwatch
My retirement nest-egg is now down to 40% of what it was last year.

Meanwhile the candidates trade smears and misrepresentations about how much they will each cut income taxes. What freakin' difference does it make how much the income tax will be when our incomes are vanishing?

Could we please get somebody in there who has some notion of what the problem is, let alone what to do about it?

The time for tax cuts and regulation is past. Speculators to the gallows!


.

Imminent Collapse of Volunteerist Freebyism

[David Ben-Gurion]


I used GIMP to select the white background around Chairman Mao's head, then painted the selected area red. The result stinks. It might have worked better by manipulating layers and opacity but I don't know how to do that yet. There is also something in the instructions about the selected pixels being selected along a gradient of the degree selected. The gradient is a settable parameter. I understand what the words mean but not what that means in practice. One would think a pixel would be either selected or not selected. But apparently not.

If I could do the same with selecting candidates, I think I would select an image composed of about 72% Obama pixels and 28% McCain pixels. Maybe 1% Nader pixels -- Director of Consumer Affairs, with instructions to everybody else in government not to even accept his phone calls. 1% for Buchanan to say insulting racist pixels about Arabs but not about Jews.

Then I would use stacked layers to create an image of 70% Joe Leiberman pixels, 20% Joe Biden pixels, and 50% Joe David Ben-Gurion pixels....

China's Economic Turmoil Could Lead to Political Unrest

[Chairman Mao]

the NY Times --

The results were the same in markets across Asia.

Hong Kong stocks crumbled, closing down 12.7 percent as investors unloaded billions of dollars worth of shares of banking and finance companies. Banking giant HSBC was down almost 15 percent after falling 12 percent on Friday. The operator of Hong Kong's bourse, Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing, plunged almost 14 percent.

Stocks in China fell about 6 percent, with the Shanghai Composite Index slipping to the lowest level in more than two years. The index has fallen backward by about 72 percent from its peak last year.

The Industrial & Commercial Bank of China dropped 11 percent. The bank, the mainland's biggest lender, announced larger-than-expected losses Friday, raising new worries about how long China will be able to sustain its economy amid the global financial turmoil. China's government took additional steps on Monday to try to ensure the stable operation of its economy. The People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, said it would deposit the equivalent of about $4.4 billion with commercial lenders for loans.

The downward spiral of capitalism in China raises fears the Communists could seize power there. No, wait. The Communists are already in power. Maybe if the Communists were in power in the United States this wouldn't be happening here either.

[Sarcasm too veiled? How about -- This crisis isn't about which party is in power. It's about capitalism.]
.

Depression

Reasons for Being Depressed

Raiders embarrassing themselves 29 - 10, now 2 and 5
49'ers losing on turnovers to a 1 and 5 team
market down the dumper
having to vote for a shagetz for president again
two-buck Chuck no longer drinkable
unable to parse limerick
Leno's monologue no longer funny
Jeopardy questions about television programs I have never heard of
Arnold Toynbee turning out to be a fraud
Finding the same person in mirror as always -- bored with being me
RV a useless millstone
worthless tenant being a passive-aggressive butthole
healthy diet tedious
life passing me by
booze boring
sobriety boring
boredom boring

I need a vacation...

One Measure of Whether You Have Been Wiped Out

in the stock market is when you have less than half of what you had last year. I have lost 55% of what I had last year. I have been wiped out. But not completely. There is still the remaining 45% to lose. There is still no sign that half of the remaining less-than-half won't vanish in the next few months. I have lost 35% this past month alone.

The Republicans are running around repeating the same economic nonsense as always -- that the problem is too much government and we need more tax cuts for the rich. They seem unable to learn. One can hope Republican numbers in the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives go the same way my money has gone. Maybe their getting wiped out will help them learn. The Democrats won't solve the problem but at least we'll have a different set of assholes to screw things up.

Once Again, You Heard It Here First

[Nostradamus]

On 27 January 2008 I wrote in this blog -

I am sad to have to predict that the Democratic nominee and the next president will be Mrs. Clinton. The Clinton campaign will be more professional and organized, staffed by many of the same people that worked on the last two Clinton campaigns. The inspiration campaign Obama will have to rely on will be less effective. I predict too that if McCain is the GOP nominee, he will be a latter day Bob Dole and suffer the same fate.

I went on to predict that in a year Barack Obama would be a minor bump on Bill Clinton's road back to the White House.

I hope my prediction about McCain is better than about Clinton and Obama.

Wasilla

limric

An orthodox Jew named Harv,
For sex he was willing to starve.
He'd rather have nookie
Than candy or cookie,
And fortunately pussy is parve.

Self-Congratulation

So far this month I have made up the word 'matriotism', coined the expression 'Great Depression 2.0', and been the first to observe that GOP stands for 'Grind the faces Of the Poor'. Does anybody invite me out to dinner? Name an outhouse after me? No, they do not. I labor in obscurity. Oh well, I might as well please myself since nobody else is paying attention. Sigh. Is anybody out there?

Silly Porpoise Tricks

A Separate Peace

[Tom Dewey. Defeated Harry Truman in the 1948 election. US President 1948-1952]

The Campaign is Over

For me at least. I just voted with an absentee ballot.

I have a confession to make. I went to a McCain-Palin rally, or was dragged to one, but the result was the same. It was a small meeting in Fresno. It was so small that at the end of the speeches they took questions. McCain had earlier said, with doubtful sincerity, that no one should be bailed out of the mortgage market collapse. So I asked the speaker if that meant that a McCain administration would permit all the banks to fail. He floundered and denied and said this and that and people in the audience became uncomfortable.

I almost felt some sympathy for him, because if McCain's position had been to vote for the bailout (as he subsequently did) my question would have been whether he was really willing to give three-quarters of a trillion taxpayer dollars to the very bankers who had brought on this crisis with their greed, dishonesty, and incompetence.

[McCain had earlier said that he was against the government bailing anyone out, except in special circumstances where they were so big that it would harm the economy not to. Since this was after the Bear Stearns bailout which McCain had not spoken against, it meant in effect that he would bail out bankrupt banks but not borrowers being foreclosed out of their homes. This was consistent with GOP policies down through the generations. In fact GOP itself stands for Grind the faces Of the Poor. But I digress.]

Anyway they gave me a red McCain-Palin ballpoint pen. Later I realized why those political giveaway pens always write in black ink. Ballots must be marked in black. Clever. I used my McCain pen to vote for Obama. That felt great.

Why Campaign Finance Matters

Freebies

[Bread line in Times Square]

In keeping with the mood and needs of the Great Depression 2.0 I have found two bits of software that are quite good, and relieve the user of the inconvenience of paying for them.

Open Office 2.4 is a big improvement on previous versions of Open Office, and is quite similar to Microsoft Office.  It includes Writer, a word processor, Calc, a spreadsheet, Draw, a drawing program, Impress, a presentation maker, Base, a database system (non-relational), and Math, a math thing.

Download it at 

http://www.openoffice.org/

Another freebie, one that will make you forget about Adobe Photoshop  and Adobe Photoshop Elements is the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).  It is the consensus of the dwellers in online photography forums and others with little to do, that the GIMP is not as good as Photoshop for those working as professional photographers and magazine layout artists.   For others it is hunky-dory.  The GIMP is generally conceded to be better than Elements, which is derided as a gelded version of Photoshop, shorn of some of its most useful parts.  

The newly current version of the GIMP is 2.6.  It will look quite familiar to anyone familiar with Photoshop.  Unfortunately the on-line user manual describes version 2.4, so some things will not match exactly.  This is an example of the difficulty of getting things done promptly if you don't pay the help.   

The primary shortcoming of the GIMP is that among the types of layers it has, it lacks Photoshop's adjustment layer type.  I have never had any more than the haziest notion of what adjustment layers do that other kinds of layers do not, but they sound useful for adjusting things.  My plan is to use the GIMP until I find out what adjustment layers are and the need for them becomes acute.  Then I will spring for the  $700 for a copy of Photoshop.  (Not!)  Sadly the days of software piracy of expensive software are as gone as Jack Sparrow.   Photoshop has to be registered with the company online before it will work.  You can't even break a window like Jean Valjean.

Download the GIMP at

http://www.gimp.org/

If your camera shoots RAW files, you can import them into the GIMP with UFRaw.  (Install the GIMP first.)

http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Install.html

Ah, The Injustice Of It All!

The Fighting in Acre

.

I don't get it. What possible reason could the Jews of Acre have for not liking the Arabs?

.

TV Shows I Missed

Vengeful Tooth Fairy? -

From TV Guide --

Darkness Falls
8:00pm KICU channel 6 120 minutes (2003) PG-13
A vengeful ghost posing as the Tooth Fairy terrorizes children in this atmospheric but ill-conceived horror flick. Cheney Kley, Emma Caulfield. Directed by Jonathan Liebesman.

Hair Show
9:00pm myKRON4 channel 4 120 minutes (2004) PG-13
A sassy Baltimore hairdresser (Mo'Nique) -- on the run from the IRS -- reunites with her stylist sister in LA. Kellita Johnson. Leslie Small directed, hoops star Magic Johnson served as executive producer.


Whacked Out Sports
8:30pm KGO channel 7 30 minutes TV-PG
Mud hole hunks; trouble in Turkey; Pyro Boy; out of control ATV's


John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars
9:00pm KGO channel 7 120 minutes (2001) R
Thriller about a police officer (Natasha Henstridge) who investigates a Martian colony inhabited by possessed miners. Ice Cube. Pam: Helena Grier. Bashira: Clea Duvall. Butler: Jason Statham. Descanso: Liam Waite.


InFANity
8:00 TVGN channel 11 60 minutes (2008)
Eli Stone
A behind-the-scenes look at "Eli Stone" as the drama gears up for its second season. Included, interviews with cast members Jonny Lee Miller, Victor Garber, and Natasha Henstridge. Also a tour of the courtroom set.

The Crash of 2008

[Wall Street]

The French finance minister Francois Fillon has called it "a crisis of unregulated capitalism". The word "unregulated" there is code for "American". Since the various regulated European economies seem to be going down the crapper right alongside ours, Fillon needn't have bothered with the phony distinction. It is a crisis of world capitalism.

Now that the world has rid itself of communism, wouldn't it be nice if we could have done with capitalism as well? I don't know what would replace it, but it would be nice to have a more stable and equitable system.

Doing the Language a Disservice

[Aztec earth goddess Coatlicue]

In these last days of the election campaign we have as usual descended to the candidates questioning each other's patriotism. Obama it turns out is a Muslim and a friend of terrorists. McCain turns out not to be a war hero but a PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) head case.

It is easy to do because the vocabulary of the English language lends itself to doing it. It is harder to question someone's sensitivity to environmental issues than his patriotism because it is a vague polysyllablic phrase, where patriotism is a single seemingly well-defined word. Now if the candidates were to question each other's matriotism we could get a mud-slinging contest going on that issue, possibly involving actual mud.

matriotism, noun, singular. Origin: I made it up.
1. Love of Mother Earth, devotion to one's home planet,
2. Concern for the environment,
3. A nurturing attitude toward other people and the world generally
4. Worship of an earth goddess
5. New Age space cadet ideology - pejorative.

You heard it here first.

The current sounding on the McCain campaign's confidence that they will win this election comes in the form of their latest campaign ad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9JNna5EmJg

This is not the kind of thing one says when you think you are ahead, or even think you have a reasonable chance. It is what you say when you are frustrated because you are behind and angry because you can find no traction against falling further behind. It is what you say when when your sense of entitlement is so great that you cannot be graceful in defeat.

For those of us who started this election cycle trying to maintain a non-partisan balanced and fair willingness to hear each party make its case, this is the final step in the Republicans having progressively alienated me.

The most damaging argument the ad makes against either candidate's judgment is McCain's, "I approved this message."

The Woman Who Would Be King

This is an excerpt from an interview of Sarah Palin by conservative columnist William Kristol:

Palin said that she told [her son] that she had a debate that night. “And he says, ‘Yeah, I heard, Mom,’ and he says, ‘Have you been studying?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I have,’ and he goes, ‘O.K., well I’ll be praying.’ I’m like — total role reversal here, that’s what I’ve been telling him for 19 years.”

Nice.  A vice-president who says "goes" when she means 'said', and 'I'm like --' when she means nothing in particular.  This is the speech of not-too-bright teenagers in a seedy mall.  This is the woman who may soon be at the Helm of State, sitting in the place where Jefferson, Lincoln, and Kennedy have sat.

Where Am I Shot?

Soldiers in battle who may have been hit have to look for the bullet wound. You would think they could feel it, but somehow they can't -- at least not at first.

The bailout is like that. We are supposed to be severely wounded but so far we don't feel anything. It was rejected in Congress and the sky has not fallen. The market has fallen, but the sky, no. Maybe America and its economy can live without this immense looting.

The politics of it mystifies me. More Democrats supported the bailout than Republicans. Since the general impression is that it is a giant handover of government/taxpayer money to the business class and investors, most of whom are Republicans, this doesn't make sense. I have the sense that there is something fundamental going on here that I am missing. The Democrats appear to be trying to give a large amount of money to Republicans and the Republicans appear to be refusing it. The behavior of both parties is inexplicable.

The analogy would be trying to understand the Civil Rights Act of 1968 without knowing that there had been segregation. Without context it would be meaningless. I think there is some context here that I am not getting.

You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up

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I emphasize that the following is in today's Washington Post, not the Onion. I swear. I am NOT making this up.

Democrats accused Boehner of acting on behalf of GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) in trying to disrupt a developing consensus. The new proposal also displeased White House officials, including Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who chased after Democrats leaving the meeting and -- half-jokingly -- dropped to one knee and pleaded with them not to "blow up" the $700 billion deal, according to people present at the meeting.

Before the meeting broke up, President Bush had issued a stark warning about the impact on the nation's economy if the measure did not pass. "If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down," Bush said, according to one person in the room.

A Little Over the Top, but.....

The Joint Statement & Suspending the Campaigns

[President Gore]

Obama got rolled.   He just gave away the issue that would have swept him into the White House.  

Once again the Democrats have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/invite/bolatestremarks/

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How to Not Get Bummed-Out by the Election

The Baal Shem Tov was once asked a certain matter. He opened a volume of Zohar which was on the table, looked inside, and then told his listeners all about the incident involved. It later transpired that things had been exactly as he described them. So he was asked, "Is it by opening up the Zohar and looking inside it for a moment that you can tell what is going on at a distance?"

The Baal Shem Tov replied, "Our Sages teach us that the light with which the Almighty created the world illumined from one end of the world to the other; Adam too was able to see with this light. But when the Almighty saw that the world was not worhy of using this light, he hid away for the righteous in the World to Come.

Now," asked the Baal Shem Tov, "where did He hide it? -- In the Torah; and when a person studies the Torah for its own sake, a path is lit up for him, enabling him to understand and see from one end of the world to the other, just as things were before G_d hid the light."

A Message of Hope

Things will be different this time.
This year the candidate of hope, when elected will really do the things he promised.

Things will be different this time.
This year Lucy will not pull the football away from Charlie Brown at the last second.

And the Cubs will win the World Series.


I have realized from looking at the Rove polling maps, that while the outcome of the election in the United States is uncertain, the outcome in California is not. Since May the Golden State has varied between 12% and 21% blue. Casting a vote in an election with a foregone result is a waste of time.

My national service will be to pick up litter in a national park on election day instead. Also an excuse to have dinner in the magnificent Ahwanee Hotel dining room in early November, after the summer tourists have left but before the skiers have arrived. Patriotism doesn't get any better.
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Truth from an Unlikely Source

We keep reading in the ever-reliable American press that the election is close or a dead heat because opinion polls are coming out dead even. And that would be true if the public elected the president. But we don't - the electoral college does.

Applying polling data from who is ahead where, it appears that on September 17, Senator Obama was leading in states with 215 electoral votes, and Senator McCain in states with 216 electoral votes. The sampling method used has an uncertainty or error (if it was a lens we would say a resolving power) of 3% one way or the other. So states where the candidates are within 3% of each other are shown as unresolved -- a tossup. Unresolved states collectively have 107 electoral votes. 270 votes are needed to win.

The unlikely source, as the sharp-eyed have already noticed, is Karl Rove & Co. Yes, that Karl Rove. Their website has a slider which shows the maps and tallies week by week since March 31 so one can watch the states change color and the projected totals go up and down as opinion fluctuates. Obama has been as far ahead as 296 to 188, and McCain as far ahead as 256 to 186. Some blue states like Massachusetts, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, and Illinois are always blue. Some red states like Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona are always red. An astonishing number of others change color frequently. Of the four biggest states, California and New York are always blue, and Texas is always red. The fourth biggest state, and one which changes repeatedly is -- G_d help us -- Florida.

The conclusion is that the election is not so much close as it is uncertain. There is no reason at all to expect that the winner of the popular vote will take office in January, even without the Supreme Court prostituting itself again. The 2000 election proved that the integrity of the process is vastly more important than whether the winner of the most popular votes takes office. Fair and honest elections are more important than majority rule.

http://www.rove.com/maps/overtime

or click on the map.

Unity and Shared Responsibility

In this video Barack Obama simultaneously takes the high road and the low road. He denounces the selfishness and irresponsibility of the Republicans while simultaneously appealing to the selfishness of what he calls "the middle class'. He even goes so far as to say, in effect, "If you vote for me I will give you a thousand dollars."

He illustrates that the problem with democracy is the 'demos' -- the people. We aren't any better than the greedy-pig selfish rich. We vote against our own interest time after time, not because we are altruistic, but because we are too stupid, ill-informed, and easily distracted not to.

Democracy is the right to vote for the scumbag of your choice.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/economyvideo

Politics as Unusual

Biden on McCain

click here:


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/26722398#26722398


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Down the Crapper

My stocks - mainly VXF, a broad-based index fund - lost 4.2% today. Curiously a small flyer I have in VEU, an index fund that tracks all major markets except the US, fell 5.2%. I suppose it is reassuring to know that the US continues to lead the way.

Cheap Irony

Whenever I watch television I see an ubiquitous series of commercials featuring adorable moppets who wake their parents up with financial worries about mortgages, insurance,  diversification, and financial planning.  At the end of the commercial, the child is mollified when the parents say soothingly, "It's OK, we're with AIG."   Relieved, the child then goes back to bed.  Today we learn that AIG is one of the Wall Street banks teetering on the verge of collapse.  Time for the moppets to begin waking up screaming and wetting their beds again.....

9-11

Today most of the country celebrates 9-11 as though it were a victory rather than a defeat for the United States. Congress has designated it Patriot Day.

In Berkeley and San Francisco it is "Stay in Denial or Lose Our Worldview" Day.

Movie Review

Ostensibly in honor of Fall Fashion Week, I rented the 'Devil Wears Prada'.

Stupid, predictable, and saccharine.

Anne Hathaway is the modern Robert Redford -- good-looking, likeable, can't act. This movie was a waste of Meryl Streep's time. And mine.

More Carrying On

No, I am not a vegan.  My gripe against meat is cholesterol, not the premature termination of the prior user.   I have nothing against eating domesticated animals.  In a very real sense the rancher creates them for the purpose.  We see that when the price falls.  The numbers of cattle and poultry decline because the market for them has declined.  

I grew up on a chicken ranch and I understand the process.  For that matter, knowing them intimately, I will dropkick a chicken as far as possible at every opportunity.  They are hateful little bastards.  I am glad to eat chicken because it means one of them was offed for my dining pleasure.  I knew cows too.  They are good-natured creatures but so stupid that the difference between a live cow and a dead one is considerably less than one would imagine.  With animals produced through animal husbandry, the "killing them to eat" claim is not a transparent lie, it is a reasonable market choice by the producer and a reasonable nutritional choice by the consumer.

Wild animals are quite different.  They are there for their own purposes, not because Old MacDonald bred them on his farm  (nowadays Old MacDonald Farms, Inc.).  They come into being independent of human purposes.  Their purposes in life are to eat, to enjoy what pleasures they can, to avoid predators, and to make little ones after their kind.  To pointlessly destroy them for the sheer pleasure of doing it is offensive to both one's moral and aesthetic sensibilities.  With a domesticated animal, its death is a feature of processing it for sale and  consumption.  With a wild animal, the hunter killing it is the end purpose -- it is killed for the sake of killing it.

As to our freedoms being taken away, do we have a right to deface national monuments?  To cut down trees in national parks?  Why should there be any right to kill somebody else's animals?  Forbidding vandalism and arson reduces no one's freedom because no one has a right to do those things.  Forbidding hunting is the same.  Even now, no one has a right to take deer out of season or to shoot fawns.  No one has a right to shoot polar bears.  

I have long intended to draft a private bill to require that hunting in California be done only with handmade stone knives.  Even spears and bows would be outlawed.  Then it would really be a sport.  Catching a deer would be a real trick.  I would use the license fees to fund a program to reintroduce the grizzly bear into California.  Anybody who wanted to hunt grizzly bears with a stone knife would be free to do it.  The program would include awarding a certificate suitable for framing to the hunter's widow.  If it were a particularly spectacular ending, the ears and nose might be awarded to the grizzly bear if they could be found. This would also help solve the overpopulation of hunters problem.  Since grizzly bears generally go around in deshabille, I thought it would be fitting for the hunters to have to be naked too.  But this could cause problems on the way to and from hunting areas and possibly attract a bad element to the sport.

Diatribe

[Sarah Palin teaching her daughter kindness and compassion. The Governor's pro-life stance apparently has some exceptions.]

I remember -- in a former life -- meeting a sheriff's deputy who was bringing a kid from a group home back to Solano Juvenile Hall. The group home had a pet deer and the messed-up little bastard had kicked it in the stomach his first day there. Which was fairly shocking behavior. So they sent him back in favor of "a more structured environment", i.e. a locked down one.

It occurred to me at the time that the affable deputy could go out and shoot a similar deer that weekend -- point a rifle at it, aim, pull the trigger, watch the jolt as the bullet crushed the animal, watch it bleed to death, then skin and dismember it -- and he would continue to be an esteemed fellow county employee. No structured environment for him. I knew the deputy. He was a good-natured reasonable guy, a family man, and not at all stupid.

The difference between the two behaviors is that one is socially approved, so much so that we are anaesthetized to what it is. Without the social labels, it is just the wanton killing of inoffensive animals for no reason. It is an expression of the same destructive impulses as drive vandalism and arson. The comedian Chris Rock called it "killing animals on a full stomach". It is part of the culture and history of Alaska, much as slavery and lynching were a part of the history and culture of Alabama. That was a grand old tradition too.

I am not such a fool as not to realize that normalcy is socially constructed and that the deputy was not a psychopath. His behavior was normal because the society in which he lived had taught him the behavior and approved and accepted it as normal and unremarkable. Alabama slaveowners who beat their slaves were not psychopaths either, for the same reasons. My notion is that I want it to be seen as psychopathic, because without the institutional justification it would be. If either behavior is considered without the institutional interpretation and labels, then one is the pointless killing of inoffensive animals and the other is the beating of defenseless human beings.

The values and justifications for each behavior are widespread where the institution exists. It was no coincidence that abolitionist sentiment arose where the institution of slavery did not exist and had vanishingly few adherents in places where slavery did exist. Similarly, antipathy to hunting is primarily an urban attitude in our time, and is seldom heard where hunting is widespread.

I don't think antipathy to hunting is political correctness. I think of PC as the carrying a reasonable notion to absurd extremes, so much as to trivialize it. It is when one extends the idea that women should get equal pay for equal work and be free from sexual harrassment to the notion that they must also be exempt from hearing dirty jokes and that their gender should be spelled "womyn".

The right to own slaves was an expression of the institution of slavery. Similarly the right to hunt is an expression of the institution of hunting. If the institution were to become disfavored and eventually abolished, the right would be abolished with it. In any case it isn't a right. You have a right to kill your dog because it is your property, but not your neighbor's dog because it isn't.

Whose property is a wild caribou? Historically, wild animals belonged to the king. Hunting rights were given to nobles as part of their tenure as vassals. Which is why common people were not allowed to hunt without permission, which was rarely given. Poaching was severly punished. Today wild animals belong to the public generally and to the government specifically. All the more so because most wild animals are found on public lands. If you have ever had to pay to enter a national park, you already know that the government can and does set restrictions on entry and on use of public lands. Every state regulates and taxes hunting. Alaska too has elaborate and detailed hunting regulations. It follows that it is a revocable privilege.

It is not clear to me that anybody has a right to destroy an animal that doesn't belong to him. It is not the government that would be infringing rights by restricting it -- it is the hunter that is infringing on the public's property interests. Restricting and eventually abolishing hunting would simply be the end of the public's sufferance of a peculiar institution. Every argument in defense of it, and the fact that these wheezes are so invariably trotted out shows that even the goodest of good old boys feels defensive about what he is doing, is based on a fallacy or on an outright lie.

The classic one is that hunting is about getting free meat. Like these stupid bastards spend $55,000 on a Ford F-350, buy an expensive camper for it, buy an arsenal of rifles and shotguns, take time off work, buy gas to drive hundreds of miles, because they want to save money on groceries? I don't think so. And then they trot out the idea that it is a sport. In a sport either player or team might win. Does a caribou ever shoot a hunter? Which is it -- groceries or sport? They tell you both because they're lying about both. Or population control. The beast of the field and of the air got along for millions of years without any help from the hunters but now somehow they can't. The fact is that the hunters can't justify it even to themselves.

All of which is just arguing. The real reason is that I saw the stupid bastards chasing and killing caribou. One of them was limping in pain, doomed, if she was lucky, to bleed to death on the tundra. Or the agony might go on for weeks until the wound became so fly-infested that she died of infection. The caribou were bothering nobody, hurting nobody. Every sensation of order and decency and justice cries out, "Leave them the hell alone!" But the hunters just kept coming in their pickups and ATV's and airplanes and helicopters. They are not yet permitted to shoot from aircraft, but they use them to chase the herd toward the hunters. Some sport.

And who did the caribou have to defend them from these assholes? Why Governor Palin of course. Whose grinning picture and pandering letter in the hunting regulations booklet begins, "Dear Fellow Hunters..."

Pride

A lifelong second tier professional tennis player, Vitas Gerulaitis often got to the semis or quarter-finals, but consistently lost to first tier players. He finally beat Jimmy Connors at the 1979 Masters Tournament. After the match the interviewer asked him what had been different this time. Gerulaitis stuck out his chest and said defiantly, "Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row."

Advice

A Jewish lady dining in a fine restaurant is about to bite into her meal when she turns to the man sitting alone at the table next to her.

'Pardon me, sir' she says. 'Your napkin has fallen on the floor.'

'Oy! Tanks for dat. Vitout you, I vouldn't know. I'm blindt.'

He reaches down to find his napkin. Once it's back on his lap, he asks her if he has spilled any food on his shirt.

'Hardly at all,' she answers, 'just a few cracker crumbs.'

'Tanks, again, Missus,' he replies, brushing them off 'Vitout you telling, I vouldn't know dese tings.'

A few moments later, he inquires again, 'Do you mind I should ask a poisonal qvestion?'

'Not at all,' she replies.

'I don't do vell vit de ladies. Do you tink I'm ugly?'

'You're quite presentable,' she replies. 'That shouldn't be a problem.'

Smiling now, he exults, 'Vat a relief. I vas alvays afraid to ask. Again, I got to tank you.'

A few more moments pass and the lady speaks up. 'Do you mind if I give you a bit of advice?' she asks.

'Soitenly! Listen, I'll take all de help vat you've got,' he answers.

'Lose the Yiddish accent,' she replies. 'You're a Shvartze.'

Get Out the Vote

www.peteyandpetunia.com/VoteHere/VoteHere.htm


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