Bailout Brou-ha-hah
This smells to high heaven.



Image: Huffingtonpost.com.


Like Lazarus when risen from the tomb, this Wall Street bailout "stinketh."

The greater majority of U.S. citizens who are aware of the situation are opposed to this sleight-of-hand; then there's the rest of us who are either narcotized by the corporate media shills and apologists, or who have other things on their mind, like the bank taking their house.

But my big question is this: will either of the two sitting senators who are candidates for President, bother to show up and vote? McCain hasn't made a Congressional vote since April 8, and Obama on July 9 -- to renew FISA (!)

McCain has the dubious distinction of being The Most Absent Congressman of the 110th Congress --not there to participate in Senate functions about 64 percent of the time. Obama is a little better--having missed some 45 percent of the votes. Don't take my word for it, read here.

Sure, they've been busy. But this is only the fate of the nation we're talking about.

If these two who have made so much hay over this thing cannot take time out of their campaigns to do the job their constituents sent them "down to Warshington" to accomplish in the first place, why should we even be considering giving one of them the highest civil office in the land?

Just asking.

For some rational insight to all this, I direct you to Becky, Just A Girl In Shorts Shorts Talking About Whatever, who is always good for some smart observations and plenty of sass, here.

She makes this critical point:

"We are really not in danger of the ATM's running out of money or our credit cards being denied. My cousin is a banker in Seattle. He specializes in small business loans. I was talking with him on Friday, and he had just got home from doing a three million dollar loan to a new customer.

There is much greater panic in the Halls of Washington than on Wall Street or Main Street.

As smart as they are, Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson are not the repository of all wisdom in the world. One hundred economists, from various universities, are on record opposing this bailout."

Read it all here.

Jim Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation is, well, at his best when events are at their worst.

He writes:

"What we're seeing in this fiasco, among other things, is a lesson in the diminishing returns of technology. This is a train wreck of investment vehicles so complex that they could only be created with the aid of computers. The result is that hardly anyone -- perhaps even nobody in or out of Wall Street -- really understands what they represent. In fact, this alphabet soup of engineered securities -- CDOs, CDSs, MBSs, SIVs, etc -- was cooked up from a recipe of Ponzi algorithms.
They were designed to be mathematically indecipherable, except by computers, in an alternative universe of model-making that bore only a superficial relation to the real world. That was their dirty secret. And the dirty secret of the Great Bail-out is that, in the real world, we will never be able to discover the actual trading value of these things at any number above zero. This is why they are called "toxic."

Get it all here.

Financial sector contributions to Congress: Opensecrets.

Andrew Cuomo, Fannie & Freddie and the slippery slope into this mess in the Village Voice.

And Bush signing the The American Dream Downpayment Act in 2003.

For The Want of Rivets The Great Ship Was Lost
Mis-allocation of resources cause disasters: news and notes
[Additional material added, April 20, 2008]

The Titanic, via the Associated Press/New York Times.


This morning, as survivor Jack Thayer described, the world "woke with a start" to realize that the largest moving object ever made by the hands of man had struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and plummeted two and a half miles deep beneath the frigid North Atlantic. The wreck resulted in the deaths of some 1,500 people. Or, as The Onion said in its headlines of "Our Dumb Century" : "World's Largest Metaphor Strikes Iceberg, Sinks."

And the Titanic just keeps producing Thoughts For Our Epoch; as in, how making do with shoddy workmanship and inferior materials in order to complete a project often leads to the effort's failure when that lack of care meets with an unforeseen event.

Item from the New York Times:

"...While some ships of the time were built entirely with steel rivets, the Titanic used a mix of steel and iron rivets. In the bow, where the Titanic hit the iceberg, weaker iron rivets were used.

In the book "What Really Sank the Titanic," the researchers Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Tim Foecke argue that the rivets were the Achilles' heel of the Titanic and that the problem was worsened by poor manufacturing; high variability, because of the large number of suppliers; and a rush to complete the ship."

Or; in computer programming terms, garbage in, garbage out. The question isn't what did builders Harland & Wolff know and when did they know it; but knowing what they knew, did The Man-agement just hope nobody would ever find out? After all, this was toward the bow. What could happen?

After all, her second sister, the Olympic became known as "Old Reliable" and served her line, passengers and crew quite well for 26 more years. She never struck a berg, either.

From the story by William J. Broad:

"Researchers have discovered that the builder of the Titanic struggled for years to obtain enough good rivets and riveters and ultimately settled on faulty materials that doomed the ship, which sank 96 years ago Tuesday.

The builder’s own archives, two scientists say, harbor evidence of a deadly mix of low quality rivets and lofty ambition as the builder labored to construct the three biggest ships in the world at once — the Titanic and two sisters, the Olympic and the Britannic.

Now, historians say new evidence uncovered in the archive of the builder, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, settles the argument and finally solves the riddle of one of the most famous sinkings of all time. The company says the findings are deeply flawed.

Each of the great ships under construction required three million rivets that acted like glue to hold everything together. In a new book, the scientists say the shortages peaked during the Titanic’s construction.

“The board was in crisis mode,” one of the authors, Jennifer Hooper McCarty, who studied the archives, said in an interview. “It was constant stress. Every meeting it was, ‘There’s problems with the rivets and we need to hire more people.’ ”

Apart from the archives, the team gleaned clues from 48 rivets recovered from the hulk of the Titanic, modern tests and computer simulations. They also compared metal from the Titanic with other metals from the same era, and looked at documentation about what engineers and shipbuilders of that era considered state of the art."

If you're a Titaniac, you know this charge has been zinging about the Titaniosphere for years; that the vaunted Harland & Wolff construction cheaped out on the very basic component of their huge ship and, when sufficiently mismanaged to get it wrapped around an iceberg on a cold April night, those bad rivets burst out of the ship's seams like machine gun bullets.

These unearthed records, and scientific tests, have proved--to the satisfaction of the book publishers, anyway--that the ship was undone, yes, by nature, but also corporate avariciousness and neglect in detail.




Speaking of disasters that could have been averted, I direct you to this piece in The Guardian by George Monbiot about how the rise in fuel prices, causing an increase in food costs, is assuring that millions of people who are balanced on the edge of subsistence, will go hungry, and probably starve. You can read the dreary forecast here.

As usual, the problem isn't that there's not enough food, but that allocation is beyond criminal, its genocidal.

"Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession that is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch. You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters over the past year, that of wheat by 130%. There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices.

But I bet that you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, the global grain harvest broke all records last year - it beat the previous year's by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation, will feed people."

This reponse, by Rashers101, though, drives the dismal point harder home:

Rashers101 April 15, 2008 12:59 AM

2.8 billion people - nearly half of the world's population - live on $2 a day or less. When you are living on $2 a day, most of your income is spent on food - not processed chicken dinners and frozen pizzas, but the basics: flour, corn, rice. This is what keeps you and your family alive.
When you spend $1.50 a day out of your $2 income on basic food, you don't have much wriggle-room. So when food prices go up by 75%, or 130%, its not a matter of cutting back in other areas. Instead it means that you and your children will eat less, and go to bed hungry at night.

2.8 billion people - nearly half of the world's population - have been put in this situation during the last year.

If you've ever gone on a strict diet, or fasted for a day for religious reasons, you might have an inclinling of an idea of what hunger is like. But you know nothing of days and weeks and months of hunger - you can't even really conceive of it.
Haitians use the expression "grangou klowox" or "eating bleach", to describe the daily hunger pains they face as a result of rising food prices, because of the burning feeling in their stomachs.

That's why they riot.

Fear of inflation, fear of a house-price collapse, fear of interest rate increases - these are notihing when compared to fear of hunger, and it is that fear that is rapidly spreading around the world as prices rise.

And why are prices rising?

Because you drive and fly.

A big impetus behind rising basic food prices is the rise in the price of oil due to supply scarcity (and a lot of oil goes into mechanised agriculture) combined with a widespread swich of agricultural land to the biofuel crops that are more valuable than food crops.

In other words, as we reach and pass peak oil, oil prices are inexhorably rising as people compete for the remaining oil production. On one side of that competition are the 15% of the world's people who drive and fly and waste beyond the wildest imagination of our ancestors. And on the other side are the 45% of the world's people who live from day to day on $2 or less.
On one side you have the shiney new Terminal 5, and on the other hungry children. On one side car trips to Tesco to buy food flown in from the other side of the world, and on the other the feeling of "eating bleach".

So next time you're filling up your petrol tank (one person's food for the year) or flying off for a weekend break (a year's food for a village?), spare a thought for some hungry person in Cote dIvore, or Haiti, or Mexico, or Egypt, because that's who's dinner your burning.

And get prepared to either harden your conscience or change your behaviour because, unfortunately, this is a story that is not going away.

Then there are these comments:

tomper2 April 15, 2008 1:24 AM
So, 78 million more people on the planet each year has nothing to do with it?

bannedbycastro April 15, 2008 1:31 AM
Could you please explain to my why I should give up eating beef so as to provide food for people who have large families and destroy their environment ?

If I am not allowed to decide what family size there should be in the third world, why should I ship food to them?

akewashington
April 15, 2008 1:59 AM
If the West sacrifices to allow for cheap food for the world's poor, their number will just keep increasing. It would be better, in the long term, to provide free birth control, rather than cheap food.

harlan April 15, 2008 2:13 AM
What insipid rubbish Monbiot continues to spew. My mum has been a vegan for half her life-she is now 68, has a ruddy complexion, is active, fit and healthy, still full of life. Much of the world's population live largely vegan lives, albeit not of their own choice.

Eating animals for increasing numbers of newly rich Chinese, Indians and others is an aspiration to presumed higher status. Whatever we in the West attempt to do to cut our consumption will be dwarfed by these future inheritors of world power dominance.

If Monbiot took the trouble to learn more about how to balance various food-groups, if he was prepared to put the effort into preparing meals that incorporated many and varied vegetables, he would be able to live most healthily as a vegan.

Monbiot betrays a flaw that so many of us possess: what was once mankind's major purpose - to find food to sustain us - has become for us Westerners an incidental thing, taken for granted. Until Monbiot adjusts his values, his priorities, to take more account of this most fundamental component in human and animal life, his pretensions to saving the planet will continue to be little more than ignorant simplistic hypocrisy.

tv603 April 15, 2008 3:48 AM
"There was a thread on this a week or so ago. An economist (KatieL, I think) pointed out that something called Jevon's paradox would come into play when people stopped eating meat. When some people become vegetarians, this depresses the price of meat, enabling those who still eat meat to afford to consume more, and those who couldn't previously afford it to begin.

The world is densely populated with what I would call 'economic vegetarians': people who would like to eat meat but can't afford it, along with people who would eat more meat if it was cheaper. This is true of rich countries as well as poor countries. About twenty years ago a survey in the US asked what people would spend an extra $100 a month on if they suddenly received that amount as a pay rise.

Most people said they would eat more steaks.

I live in India where about a third of the population (Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and scheduled-caste Hindus)have always eaten meat. The practice is now spreading among the upwardly mobile caste-Hindu population, many of who are shedding the traditional taboos on meat eating. I was genuinely shocked a few years ago when I walked into a five-star hotel in Chennai and saw a pig being barbecued by the swimming pool. Beside it, a long queue of well-fed, upper-middle-class Hindus were lining up to receive their portions. If a hundred million Hindus join the meat eaters in the next few years, they will more than compensate for westerners who reduce their consumption on moral grounds.

If 10% of westerners reduced their consumption of meat by a third, individually they would probably be a bit healthier. However, I don't think that their actions would reduce the amount of land and grain being allocated to meat producers. The meat they have denied themselves will end up in the stomachs of other people."

"Do be a good chap and try to forgive them for their incessant pain and misery." -- Jedmed, on Digg
Death On A Pale Horse --JMW Turner, ca. 1825-1830, via staroilpainting.

[Update: The New York Times, April 18, 2008: The Grey Lady rubs her eyes and realizes about half the world is starving and angry and rioting for results.]

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti’s presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country’s prime minister packing.

Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments. More here.

These comments followed a posting of the piece on Democratic Underground:

cliffordu

Fri Apr-18-08 03:27 AM Response to Original message

1. I fully expect starvation on a global scale in the next five years.

I live in western Washington...80% of the honeybees are gone in places - just disappeared in the last two years.... I read they are down 25% nationwide. If they go critical, 1/3 of all our food is history. And then we're done. The folks examining this problem don't have a clue as to how it's happening.

lissa

Fri Apr-18-08 04:22 PM Response to Reply #1

15. I agree.

Re: starvation. I'm expecting things to happen very quickly. I think by this summer, we're going to see things spiral out of control in many countries. And I think it's going to be massive. Add to that drought conditions in many countries. Also, water seems to be short in many places = an absolute disaster. That's why we are stocking up as quickly as we can before prices go out of control. Washington: your state is awesome. I'm sorry to hear about the honey bees. Washington is an amazing producer of an enormous amount of Agricultural products; in my opinion they are the best in the country. The wine coming out of the Grandview-Prosser area is turning into one of the best in the world. I'm in Oregon, and I think WA has better products than even us. In fact, I export WA state apples to other countries (the best in the world). If anything happens to our crop, we're toast. More_liberal_than_mo Fri Apr-18-08 09:43 AM Response to Original message 10. Results of over-population. The future is here now. One of the worst aspects of Global Warming is that sudden changes in rain patterns disrupt the farming of staple crops. It takes many years to readjust to the new patterns and since us humans need a steady stable source of food we should be prepared for more of this. I just read yesterday that the longest drought in Australia’s history has wiped out 98 per cent of its rice production. Food crops are going to fail in areas of the world that have traditionally produced them. It will take decades for farmers to move production to northern parts of Canada and Russia, while millions starve. When people starve on a mass scale such as this there will be more wars. Competition for water and food will soon thin out the over-population of our planet. Earth simply can’t handle 6 billion people’s hunger during a world-wide climatic cycle change. noMoreMyths Fri Apr-18-08 10:05 AM Response to Original message 11. When you create a universal, one-size-fits-all world You're going to end up with universal, one-size-fits-all world problems. In the quest for the most efficient single way of organizing life, when that one way no longer works, there is no place left to turn. Until things find a balance, but that process isn't going to be easy. We live in a globalizing world built on very concentrated, cheap(economically, not environmentally), non-human energy. Most of the people alive today wouldn't be here if we only used our species fair share. Most of us are a burden on the ecological system, whether we consume massive amounts of resources or not. I know that I'm part of the problem. I don't have a car, and pretty much walk everywhere I go, but I still buy food that I had no physical link in getting, and my clothes are most likely the product of some 7 year old girl, whom I will never meet, in SE Asia. It's a hell of a reality we've built. There is no simple answer either. We can't stop doing what we're doing, as that would kill billions voluntarily, but we can't continue to do what we've been doing, which is trying to have all 6.5 billion+ people have everything that everyone has access to. We want everything, but don't want to pay the price for it, which only ends up making the environmental problem worse.

more_liberal_than_mo

Fri Apr-18-08 11:13 AM Response to Reply #11

12. Well said!

We are trapped by our own devices. We have never gone through a major climatic change such as we are just now starting to experience. Even without climate change 6.5 billion people are way too many for the earth to support. I just saw a report on ABC with the National Geographic channel http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/human-foo... / that the population of the USA which comprises only 5% of the world’s population use 25% of the world’s resources. That worked ok for a few decades while the rest of the world struggled just to feed itself. Now that India and China are literally taking over production of almost everything we use they now have the wealth to try and match our greed. If we were able to maintain our current overuse of resources and they managed to match us it would take 4 earth sized planets to satisfy all of us. Ain’t gonna happen… we Americans are going to have to lower our standard of living and lower it fast to make room for the rest of the planet’s peoples. The alternatives are not pretty either,,,, war and famine. Then there's these two polar opposite comments on Digg that summarize why there just isn't much movement on the global starvation issues, and why policy here is schizophrenic, and the fundamental reasons millions of innocents die daily: Deezee "This is such a load of c***. Why is it people people living in villages feel it's their entitlement to produce five or more children when they have no running water, hygiene, medical care or economic base? Answer? It's everyone else's fault, particularly, America's. Let the religious groups who spawn this thinking pick up the tab. Parents that love their children don't intentionally plan miserable lives for them. Overpopulation is the root cause here, not a food shortage." Jedmed Hello? Do you really believe that these people have any clue as to what you are talking about? They are living hand-to-mouth because this is the world that they were born into and they possess no physical resources. You and I, however, have so much of everything that we are free to pontificate about topics like personal responsibility and social values while they starve to death. Do be a good chap and try to forgive them for their incessant pain and misery. In the meantime I'll keep trying to forgive myself by writing useless crap like this.

Further in the Disasters Waiting To Happen--and I'm not speaking about the failing U.S. commercial aviation industry, which is heading the way of the Penn Central Railroad (the ENRON of its day) and CONRAIL that begat Amtrak which is funded with grudging cheapness by the government and bullied by CSX -- no, this latest sound and fury about what Barack said and what he meant to day and whether he's an elitist, which, of course, both Democrats are.

They both want to be one of those figures that come out of the Rathaus clock every four years, bang each other over the head, switch places, and the clock keeps ticking and nothing changes except for the rotating figures' entry and exit points.


But you got to get placed into that exalted tower, so everybody can see what time it is. [Image of the candidates via the LA Times and townhall clock, Land of Fairy Tales.]

Fact is, whoever goes in the out way this time around is inheriting a rasher of excrement.

From James Howard Kunstler:

" Barack Obama caught hell last week for daring to tell the truth about the ragged thing that the American spirit has become. He said that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” to work out their negative emotions. He might have added that the Pope wears a funny hat (see for yourself this week), and that bears shit in the woods (something rural Pennsylvanians probably know). Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed for those who slip up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to the reigning delusions), Obama was pressured to apologize for his statements.

The evermore loathsome and odious Hillary Clinton, co-owner of a $100 million personal wealth portfolio, seized the moment to remind voters what a normal, everyday gal she is -- who would never look down on the small-town folk of Pennsylvania the way her "elitist" opponent had -- forgetting, apparently, that the Clinton family's consigliere, James Carville, famously described the Keystone State as a kind of redneck sandwich with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as the bread, and Alabama as the lunch meat in between.

As I mull over all this, I begin to think that Hillary is exactly what the USA deserves and, that should she manage to winkle away the nomination and get elected president, the outcome would be instructive and salutary. For one thing, she will be buried under an avalanche of political woe, beginning with the basic financial insolvency of everything in the nation except the Clinton family. Then she would proceed straight into an oil-and-gas clusterfuck that could take this society back to the eighteenth century economically.

This would have the positive effect of forcing the American public to look elsewhere for governance than the usual parties in Washington, D.C. It's time for a national purgative, anyway. In fact, it's way overdue. Are the Democratic and Republican parties anymore necessary than the Whigs? Neither of them can really articulate the problems we face (and when their honchos slip up and come close to the truth, they're persecuted for it)."

But it isn't just Pennsylvanians who are harboring some bitterness these days, as this response by Riddick to Kunstler's remarks indicate:

"The USA is in an inevitable and inexorable decline just as the new world order is in ascendancy. Brazil is booming and now has a bustling middle class, China is squirreling away all the energy it can scrounge and especially right in the US backyard of South America. So much for the Monroe Doctrine I guess, the US is pre-occupied chasing "terrorists" in deserts 6000 miles away. India is about to cement a massive new trade initiative with China that when combined will make their economies ultimately dwarf the west and japan.

And, of course, as the energy supplies dwindle, these rising powers are working feverishly to undermine US access to energy so they can maintain their growth. Hugo Chavez is even helping the cause by sending his heavy oil shipments to China now and away from Louisiana. CITGO is building 3 major heavy oil refineries in China as I write.

All this portents a really bad wind down for the good ol US of A. Our distracted leadership (latter term used only for reference not quality)spends billions upon billions in the deserts of Babylon and Afghanistan; a place that has sucked more previous empires dry then one can imagine. Our economic and soon political foes are out-foxing us around the globe and all we can do is cry "waa" when big bad Obama calls it like it really is. Yep, we do deserve Billary alright.

Look at your life right now folks, expensive gasoline, stagnant wages and employers that will fire you in a heartbeat if needed. Truly, if you are trying to remain amidst the clueless masses and perhaps hit the lotto then perhaps you would be more prudent building the pine box your family will be using for you in the not so distant future."

Happy Abraham Lincoln Assassination-Titanic Disaster-Tax Day!


Dr. Evil's Radar Installation
Though I've written about this many posts ago, in view of this horrific situation in the world, I thought this 2006 piece from Brad DeLong's blog Grasping Reality With Both Hands is as good as any an indication of the warped-beyond-understanding consensus reality that the U.S. operates under in these critical days:

Nuclear Armageddon-Prevention Blogging

His name is Stross. Charles Stross. And he writes about the X-band radar system:

Charlie's Diary: Paging Dr Evil (or, Who designs these things, anyway?): The Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars" program) has, since Ronald Reagan announced it more than 20 years ago, cost the US government more than US $100Bn.... There are about ten interceptor missiles available, and the current goal of the project is to pop a cap in the ass of any rogue state that tries to destroy the United States by launching a single 1950s-vintage ICBM with a single warhead and no countermeasure capability.... However, there is one leetle weakness in the BMD program. To hit a missile with a missile requires fairly accurate radar -- it entails accurately tracking a target the size of a dustbin at a range of several thousand kilometres -- and so they've also developed an appropriate radar system. The sea-based X-band radar system... looks as if it sailed in out of a Bond movie: a $900M fifty thousand tonne offshore platform with a 1800 ton radar installation on top of it, it's designed to sit in the ocean near the Aleutian islands and spot incoming sub-orbital trash cans and guide the rocket interceptors into the target.

Unfortunately, there's a problem with it.... [A]ny budding Doctor Evil can ensure the success of his orbital mind control lasers or terrorist ICBMs by... sending... a 1950s vintage Whisky class diesel-electric submarine to poke a pointy stick through the eyes of the ballistic missile defense system. Which is, you will notice, not exactly mounted on a vessel that's capable of fighting off a bunch of Malacca Straits pirates.... I don't know about you, but I'm coming to the conclusion that the Pentagon subcontracted this job to the same guys that James Bond's enemies always hired to design their headquarters -- you know, the one with the prominently labelled SELF DESTRUCT button. (That would be Halliburton and Brown & Root, right?) I mean, what other explanation is there...?

I am told that the vulnerability of the X-band radar to pretty much anything with explosives, and the absence of two rotating carrier battle groups to protect it would be a serious defect in the system--if it worked, and if it couldn't be spoofed.

But I am also told that it doesn't work. And that it can be spoofed. So the vulnerability of the radar problem is only a third-order flaw in the system as it stands.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

I've Just Been Busy
Birthdays, short stories, leaf sweeping, work, history, wondering if JPMorgan's purchase of Bear Stearns signals the collapse of the economy.


This is Amie and me at the New York Deli's photo booth during the wonderful observation of the annual anniversary of her birth this past week. I love photo booths. They are so retro, and you always look famous. In addition, I'm reminded both of Amélie and Paris, both of which Amie and I enjoyed in the recent past.

The weather here has been sunny, bright, breezy and a bit rainy in the evenings. I got some leaf sweeping accomplished during the weekend, from out of the stairwells to the basement. And the upright waste pan I use that saves untold suffering of my back fell apart during the process. My screws came loose.

The Late Henry Moss closed at the Firehouse Theatre Project and so goes an era at the company. This was Justin Dray's final performance on the Firehouse stage for the foreseeable future as he leaves this week for L.A. and director and actor Bill Patton returned to his new conjugal home in Maine. We were so happy to see our most civilized friends, the Cusacks, down from their home of about two years, near Boston.

I completed a short story and submitted it for a compilation volume; a day late, and not short, and perhaps not much of a story. We'll see. I wish I'd demonstrated some patience and gotten Amie to read the piece before I slung it through the cyber-aether.

At any rate, billion-eyed audience I'm a bit concerned--as many of you are, too , I wager-- about the financial future of the nation as today--Sunday--JP Morgan purchased the failing mortgage house Bear Stearns. I've navigated around various blogs from the sober probity of The Economist to the sassy libertarian (and pro-bankruptcy advocate, among many other things) Just A Girl In Shorts Shorts Talking About Whatever and I look forward to what Kunstler will make of the mess.

To quote Twofish:

"So what is happening is that the Federal Reserve is basically taking the role that would be played by bankruptcy court, it gave Bear-Stearns an emergency blood transfusion that could get it to the emergency room. This is quite unique and it is something that was done in the case of Long Term Capital Management. It’s really breaking new ground here, and what happens will be studied as a guide for what happens the next time this happens (which I hope will be a long, long time from now, but who knows).

One group that comes out of this looking really bad is CITIC Securities. JP Morgan ended up paying $200 million for all of Bear Stearns and total control, whereas CITIC was about to pay billions for ten (?) percent with no management control. It’s fortunate that the Chinese securities regulators failed to approve the deal otherwise, CITIC would have ended up burning $5 billion.

I think the one common thing that Spitzer, Tibet, and Bear-Stearns have in common is that it shows how quickly things can fall apart."

I watched Wolf Blitzer with U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and all I could think of was this Saturday Night Live character from years ago; he was the Corporate Spokesman, who smoked, and sweated and got visibly more nervous as he was asked questions by a Weekend Update reporter, and his catch phrase was, "Did I say that? I don't recall saying that."

"Remain not only calm, but convivial."

As Tom Hanks admonished patrons at the Byrd Theatre last week during a power interruption, so seems the grey Establishment faces and Voices of Reason pertaining to the financial crisis. As of Monday prior to lunch, the joggled U.S. markets were actually rebounding, but concerns that this is but the beginning of something worse has curtailed outright optimism. Lehman Brothers could be on the ropes.

Steve Duncan, a poster commenting on Kunstler's blog, makes the laconic observation that,
"Market trading in positive numbers. Bear meltdown but a blip. I think if NASA scientists announced concrete proof the Earth was getting sucked into the Sun on April 1st there would be a 500 point rise in the Dow. There is seemingly no such thing as bad news. And what we think is bad news produces positive trading action. Go figger........"

And this pragmatic assessment from Tanqurena reacting to one of Kunstler's observations:

">In addition to the financing the Federal Reserve ordinarily provides through its Discount Window, the Fed will provide special financing in connection with this transaction. The Fed has agreed to fund up to $30 billion of Bear Stearns’ less liquid assets.

So. In this week's Rodney Dangerfield moment, the Fed had to tie a $30 Billion pork chop around Bear Stearns' neck to get JPM to play with them.

And to think that JPM only paid $236Million for that $30Billion pork chop (it is a non-recourse loan, which means the Fed can't go after JPM if they default on it). Ain't corporate welfare wonderful?"

By the way, Kunstlers's posting this a.m. "A Real Freak Out," is well-worth reading and until the comments deteriorate into flame throwing--why, boys and girls, why?--they, too, can provide insights.

I quote from Kunstler:

"Things are getting very weird very fast -- and will probably get even weirder, faster, as the train wreck of bad debt meets the Saint Paddy's Day Parade of bacchanalian excess at the grade-crossing of destiny. The train is carrying America's financial system, but the engine driving it is peak oil, because declining energy resources necessarily means declining capital wealth -- and declining value of all the institutions, instruments, and markers that denote that wealth or hope to profit by trading in it. The fiasco leads straight to the necessary reinvention of American life on other terms and by other means....

I'm sure our political leaders will mount a campaign to rescue the futureless infrastructure of suburbia. It will necessarily be an exercise in futility. But it has already started. That's what the swindle of ethanol has been all about. And the touting of hybrid cars, and the flimflam of "energy independence." Even the "environmental" crowd" squanders most of its attention these days on how to keep all the cars running on something other than gasoline. They don't question the assumption that we will remain a car-dependent society.

As much as I loathe the suburbs in their grotesque late-stage efflorescence, I can understand why those stuck in them would wish to defend their misinvestments. I just hate to think of the political consequences when their disappointment catches up to the reality that the suburbs will not be rescued. And by that I mean not just the houses but the way-of-life associated with them and all its accessories, furnishings, and activities. Bewilderment will soon turn to rage out in the highway-strip-and-cul-de-sac empire."

l love that phrase "grotesque late-stage efflorescence." Kunstler is all about the peak oil business and if you read him every week, his message of The End Is Near gets threadbare as the End's goalpoasts, that seem to be getting closer, are instead moved down the field a few more yards. Being a Jeremiah has its risks because you end up sounding like a crank, but doom and gloom provides odd comfort to those who see nothing but a collapsing civilization all around--much like that crane in New York, or tornadoes in Atlanta (see below).

Kunstler reminds me of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), whose philosophy hinged on how life is in the crapper and you just have to realize this without expecting events to get any better. He was a best seller, in his day. (And, by the way, I'm not saying either Schopenhauer or Kunstler are wrong.)

Schopenhauer, not content to the detail the depressing nature of things, gave his readers the following advice for-- not quite happiness, but emotional maintenance.

• Live in the present, making it as painless as possible.
• Make good use of the only thing we can control, our own minds.
• Our personality is central to our level of happiness.
• Set limits everywhere: limits on anger, desires, wealth and power. Limitations lead to something like happiness.
•Accept misfortunes: only dwell on them if we're responsible.
•Seek out solitude, other people rob us of our identities.
•Keep busy.

He sounds almost Zen here: desire is the root of all unhappiness, or even Existential: recognize life is meaningless and have a good time, whatever that means to you.

I don't know enough about Schopenhauer's views on whether art or creativity mattered in all this (I think the importance is paramount), and he seems to prefigured Sartre in Nausea: hell is other people. Which, by the way, I believe only a few days out of the year.

And by the way, Kunstler's next book is coming out. World Made By Hand: A Novel of the Post-Oil Future. Listening to the "trailer" (Books with trailers!) I am reminded of The Postman, that called up a post-oil world, too, and focused on bands of survivors and zealots. The subject seems less far fetched today than when David Brin's novel was published in 1982. That was a time of nuclear immolation fears, Reagan and the "Evil Empire." Those were far off, innocent days.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road of 2006 is even more grim; and is set in the immediate post-collapse of Everything, what Kunstler is also discussing.


From CNBC:

"There's turmoil in all markets after Bear Stearns, and equities is not the place to be," BNP Paribas strategist Edmund Shing told Reuters. "Everyone's asking: Who's next? Is there a Bear Stearns in Europe, could investment banks start to fail?"

The shock news, the biggest sign yet of how devastating the credit crisis is for Wall Street, slammed the U.S. dollar to a record low against the euro and boosted gold and low-risk bonds.

"The fear is how many more skeletons in the closet are still there in the global credit markets?" said David Cohen, economist at Action Economics in Singapore. "This is another effort by the Fed to calm things down, but the cloud on the horizon is just how much more of these credit issues are still out there."


Tornado Hits CNN -- World Stops Spinning



CNN all the sudden became the Weather Channel on Saturday as its varied correspondents went scrambling through a few blocks of blasted wreckage following the work of a tornado roaring through during the night.

[The image is via Sansego's blog that has some other arresting images and good commentary. ]

We first heard the news on Colonial Avenue when Amie's dad, watching the SEC Tournament in progress on live television, observed how the Alabama v. Missississippi State matchup was interrupted when part of the Georgia Dome was ripped away.

At least three are known to have died--a low number considering the thousands who were concentrated in midtown Atlanta that night. Stilll, behind every statistic is a tragedy, and no less so than in Atlanta. Bonnie Turner, a protector of animals, was taken by this force of nature. Many of the animals she'd rescued were loosed into the storm.

According to CNN's Wynn Westmoreland, Mrs. Tyler left this quote on her Web site, www.flinthillkennel.com: "Beauty such as this is a gift, and I'm often in awe of this world we've been given."

In other news, as they say, a gigantic construction crane operating in east Manhattan collapsed, causing wreckage that looked like that wreaked by a tornado, and killing even more than than what natural forces took out of Atlanta-- maybe four died as the device smashed to the ground. The construction of a 43-story building had been cited for 13 safety violations, five of which were pending resolution. In Bloomberg's New York, if it isn't getting turned into a Starbuck's, then it's a high-priced condo. Hizzoner never met a developer he didn't like.


The Duty Patriot

So we watched the first two episodes of John Adams tonight. The program does convey the anarchic quality of revolutions--what with goaded massacres and crowds gone crazy. That any kind of Declaration of Independence came out of such a cauldron of emotions is amazing.

McCullough was right to point out in his remarks that the 18th century was not a simpler time. From disease to the whimsical rules of a tyrant, life's qualities were far more challenging. Still, one does wonder: thinking of Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Ben Franklin...where is such brilliance in the public sphere today?

The lonesome whistle of a train in the distance, and the lateness of the hour, and work in the morning, hastens me to bed.

Placebo Nation
Denial is a non-prescription drug



Via ferristech.net, Nov. 29, 2003.

"In the '60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal." --quoted by "Mr. Purple" in the comments of James Howard Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation blog, and the citation is from another peak oil blog.


Except that research during recent years indicate that for many people, placebos are just as effective as Prozac.

Gary Greenberg, a therapist, wrote in a 2003 Mother Jones, "that in more than half of the 47 trials used by the Food and Drug Administration to approve the six leading antidepressants on the market, the drugs failed to outperform sugar pills, and in the trials that were successful, the advantage of drugs over placebo was slight.
As it would hardly help drug sales, pharmaceutical companies don't publish unsuccessful trials, so University of Connecticut psychology professor Irving Kirsch and his co-authors used the Freedom of Information Act to extract the data from the FDA.
What they found has led them, and other researchers who've investigated antidepressants' relatively poor showing against placebos, to conclude that millions of people may be spending billions of dollars on medicines that owe their popularity as much to clever marketing as to chemistry, and suffering serious side effects -- not to mention becoming dependent on drugs for healing they might be able to do without them -- in the bargain."

You can read the whole thing here.

If that's too lefty for you, this information has popped up in other places; at Science-A-Go-Go in 2002, here and from the British Daily Mail, just this month, here.

I've not yielded to the temptation of extensive therapy, though wondered at times if I should've given it a go, and my mood altering drugs of choice are coffee, Legend beer and the very occasional cigar that I often share with Amie.

The point here is, and we all possess an intellectual awareness of this: large corporations and marketing of miracluous cures are invovled, you can never trust them. They are no better than patent medicine hucksters. And this goes from children's toys, to automobiles, to government policies, and even up and especially including presidential candidates.

So many bloggists out there screaming about the end of the world as we know it, and pruporting to hold the truth, and bellowig that the "we the sheeple" need to wake up....but it's just bloggists bloviating to bloggists. The majority of the country gets its news predigsted from television and their preferred online sources, and not that many are over-adventurous because they might see or read something that frightens them.

Or, they run with glee down the various conspiracy theory sites because it is far easier to accept a globe-girdling group calling the shots for everybody than accept that humans are very smart about doing dumb things. But, this gives the conspriacists a ready-made excuse-- due to the immense size of Conspiracy, is impossible to take down short of some kind of violent overthrow, and that's never going to happen, because, well, violence gets people hurt and killed, and after all, would interrupt the next installment of Lost. Being Jeremiah has only one reward, that of being right, and when everything is crashing down on the heads of you and all you know, then there's no solace in rectitude.

As for the other aspect of that statement, the world is weird by its nature. Our constructs have rendered existence absurd. Again, I quote the poster on the Gawker site this past summer:

"If the mental health industry were honest, it would admit that the consequences of freedom are aimlessness and anomie, and that a consequence of the market economy is a lifetime of consumerism culminating in death without meaning. If this life is a hell for some, the world we have inherited is why...Of course, if the mental health industry were honest, nobody would buy their happy drugs anymore; and everybodies [sic.] gotta make a living - right?"

Besides aimlessness and anomie is art, though -- and that is a whole different world of issues.