latent sanity

The emperor's new clothes

2012-02-02T16:54:00.000-08:00

A lot has been said and even written, behind closed doors or at least far from the madding crowd ... "Where is the anger?" Why are not the people up in arms about everything?
But it really was a stroke of genius, whether deliberate or otherwise.
Everybody knows about Weimar, everybody knows about the Zimbabwe hundred trillion dollar bill. Everybody knows about the emperor. But nobody fliches, not even
the little boy.
Why not?
Of course, the little boy is far too busy trying to get away from Jerry Sandusky.
As for the rest of us, well, it just so happens that we are all clothed in the very same material as the emperor. Between veterans, federal employees, federal retirees, contractors, SNAP, section 8, social security, disability, etc etc etc, that's pretty much all of us, isn't it .....

Can't wait to see what happens next ....

Computers

2012-01-27T14:45:00.000-08:00

Its kind of a shame, in my little opinion, that young people today have never had a chance to do this ... when I was in high school, in a simpler time, I built a little counting machine. I had an old telephone rotary dialer. I went up to Radio Shack (which, in those days, actually sold parts that you could use to build radios) and bought the requisite transistors, resistors, capacitors, wires light bulbs, and so forth. I put everything together with my own soldering iron. The little light bulbs were lined up in the front so that they could display the count of the pulses coming out of the dialer (using the binary number system, of course, which is still the one they have to use even if people don't, anymore).
Somewhat after that, computer manufacture changed in two ways. The circuits that they relied upon got smaller and there got to be more of them in a single machine. That's pretty much it.
No one would ever, ever imagine that a bucket could think. Well, if you had ever built one of these little counting things, then you would understand. Modern computers are nothing but a bucket of on-off switches. Granted, there may be several billion of them in a single unit nowadays. But that's still all that's in there. Absolutely, that's all they can do. Computers are no more capable of thought than they are of sex. Which, by the way, is still the number one thing that people think about, isn't it ....

Persia, part one

2012-01-23T05:28:00.000-08:00

In ancient times, there arose a man from mean beginnings who was a man of wisdom, of discernment. Most of those rough people around him spoke of many gods, of inanimate gods made of wood or stone or, sometimes, gold. But he spoke and sang to them of the One God, the God of heart, who entreats all of us towards righteousness and best thinking and best faith, the God who at the end of days will judge all of us and find some worthy of reward, while others, captured by demons and the dark and the weaknesses of their own bad faith, will perish. He spoke of the continual struggle of the faithful against "the lie". Many people were charmed, fascinated, and won over by this new belief, but others were not so pleased and towards the end of his days he was put to death.
His death, however, did not end the quest. One of his disciples, one of his students, went on to preach his truths and to preach the advantages of brotherhood and cooperation over battle and strife, and this man traveled with his message extensively, uniting diverse people across the whole of the civilized world.
His name?
He is called Zoroaster, or sometimes, Zarathustra. Not so much is known about his life, not even the exact period of time or birthplace. Somewhere near to the banks of the Caspian Sea, sometime perhaps adjacent to the time of David.
His disciple? He is better known, as Cyrus the Great, King of Kings. Though at first known as an illiterate barbarian, he came to unite the diverse kingdoms of the known world, more through diplomacy than through battle. He was the very first to do so. He came to persuade all the other peoples who surrounded the one great kingdom of the time, the Medes, the Lydians, the Chaldeans, the Elamites, the Phoenicians, some of the Ionian Greeks, that they were all better off trading with their neighbors than fighting them. Finally, after the death of Nebuchadnezzar and a quick succession of weak sons, he persuaded even great Babylon to join with him in his empire. And they opened their gates without a single battle.
In the process, as you may remember, Cyrus became aware of a captive people inside the kingdom of Babylon, a remnant who worshiped a different God than Mardauk and the others. And Cyrus recognized the great advantage of respecting every peoples' their own religious beliefs. He gave those people their freedom, their leave to return home, and even the funds and permission to rebuild their temple, the temple of Jerusalem. And so return home they did, but not before considerable learning and respect paid to the beliefs of Cyrus, the beliefs first presented by Zarathustra, some of which in time they adopted and claimed to be their own.

(to be continued ...)

PopQuiz

2012-01-16T16:27:00.000-08:00

Okay, this one gave me some pause.
Most of the people around me probably understand that the earth rotates around its axis (the imaginary north-south line), and the moon orbits around the earth (although, to be more precise, the earth/moon pair actually rotates together around their common center of gravity, which is actually located inside of the earth but seriously distant from the earth's center), and the earth/moon system orbits around the sun.
I was reading about the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian mathematicians and astronomers, who made astoundingly careful and accurate measurements and analysis and predictions despite having no telescopes and only dripping-water clocks with which to measure time intervals. They knew the earth was round 3000 years ago, had a pretty fair idea of its size, and they knew that the moon's orbit around the earth was not a perfect circle but had an apogee and a perigee which they measured to an accuracy which is downright astounding. They knew that the earth's orbit around the sun took somewhere between 365 and 366 days and they could accurately predict the change in the time of the sunrise from day to day as winter passes to summer and back. (They also knew Pythagorus' theorem when all the Greeks were still living in caves and wearing animal skins.)
I got to thinking about this and that day thing ... that the day is 24 hours long and the year is between 365 and 366... and then I realized that what we call a "day" is not exactly a 360 degree rotation of the earth around its axis but something just a little bit different than that, on account of the action of the earth orbiting around the sun.

So your pop quiz today is this: how much difference in time does this orbiting have and does a 360 degree rotation of the earth (so that a star, other than the sun, has returned to its exact same longitude in the sky as the night before) take a little longer or a little less than 24 hours?

I never learned this. I had to compute it. I'm lazy, I only worked it out to the minute, but if you get the concept right then you can find the numbers and plug them in to the formula and get it right to nanoseconds if you wish. But I do find its interesting, just a little bit more than Jerry Springer ....

Internet Censorship

2012-01-14T16:40:00.000-08:00

We have all heard about the government of China censoring the Internet. The first time I ran across anything in my own experience was when I posted something on the Yahoo finance message base about the seventh planet of our solar system, which yahoo dutifully rendered as "Ur$#@&".
Well, the first time it was funny. but within another year, my friends and I found the censorship so dire that it was necessary for us to move our conversation to a private venu. Yahoo took to blocking links to certain other sites which might conceivably be competitors of theirs. and this phenomenon increased and increased, til we found them regularly blocking mere financial/political opinions which did not fully swing with theirs.
On my personal machine at home I have found that for many years it has been a pitched battle for ownership and control of my machine -- the disk space and the CPU processor. The advertisers and commercial interests encroach further and further. At best, it takes longer and longer time for internet pages to load the content which I am looking for, after ads and scripts and tracking software and cookies and who knows what all else comes down the line. I have to take more and more time clearing out the junk they send my way, unbidden and unpaid for.
My internet provider sees fit to put several layers of click baiting in between me and my email ... even though this is my address and the only way many folks know to reach me I may have to change it soon because the junk pile is getting so high.
In rewards for all this new stuff they send me, they raise their rates every year by 10% or more.
Now we have this:

https://www.eff.org/issues/coica-internet-censorship-and-copyright-bill

The commercial interests do not seem to understand that every new invasion is just one more straw, or maybe a better analogy is, one more globule of cholesterol. There will come a time, without warning, when it will be too much. I gave up tv 30 years ago and somehow I don't seem to have lost a thing. More and more folks are joining me on that one these days. In its inception, the Internet was the arena of smart, gifted people who just wanted to show off and give away their expertise. There were mathematicians, scholars, geniuses. It was truly the most democratic device ever devised. I suppose that's why, eventually, they have to kill it. Along with that golden goose ....

Queen Nephretitty

2012-01-10T16:11:00.000-08:00

okay, I remember now ...

We were talking about titties and I said that there was some word that had titties in it but I couldn't remember what it was. If I could come up with the word, maybe we could get the domain site or something where we could put our art work up for sale.

But you missed this part. A friend of mine came over several days ago, and she got really plastered. Really. From her neck down to her, um, yes. That far. We were just making a prototype (or is that prototitty?). You all need to stay tuned, to see what we all come up with, Bari and Star and Sandy are all just sparkling with ideas for this project.....

Anyway, I don't see my wordsmithing as being a main pillar of my indentitty,
but I will contribute this anyway in honor of my father who would never ever read this and his father, who wrote a newspaper column back in the day but he's been dead now for a very long time.

So it took me a few minutes to recover. My mind must have been preoccupied. But I finally came back with the information that there really is a large quantitty of words with titties in them. Proper words. Even, ahem, some rather uptight words. Like, for example, chastitty. Or even (in deferernce to my pastor) sanctitty.

And that pretty much rounded out the conversation.

the U.S.A will lose.

2012-01-07T10:40:00.001-08:00

I feel like Cassandra ... though my predictions have been on the mark time after time after time, people would rather rape me than to listen.
I feel like Berenger in Ionesco's "Rhinoceros". Everyone around me is choosing, deliberately, to think and act like a dumbphuque. Its very lonely here.
Even the peace-love flower children liberals don't get it. The issue here is not whether or not war is right or wrong. The issue is not whether or not we are doing for their good or our own good or the good of humanity. The real issue, as I see it, is whether or not the US has any chance of winning any war with Iran.

Is there any doubt that, as soon as the first shot is fired, the prices of gasoline will immediately go to $10.00 per gallon? Is memory of the occupation of Iraq fading already?
Is it not general knowledge that air craft carriers, those huge floating cities, are a relic from WW II which are totally inappropriate for today's warcraft ... that every major nation, including Iran, has missiles which can evade radar and sink one of these floating ducks? Or all of them? At what cost, both in terms of dollars and broken marriages, lost fathers, lost skilled workers, lost friends?
Do people not know that oil is fungible? When you look at a gallon of gasoline can you tell where it came from, west Texas or Angola or the Alberta oil sands or Iran? Do people not understand that the world supply of oil is critical, that if the U.S. military deliberately acts to reduce it that this will harm nations all over the planet? That many of those nations, in fact, will come to the aid of Iran and line up against the U.S?
Do people not understand that having the biggest, baddest military in the history of mankind does not protect you at all from snipers, suicide bombers, terrorist attacks, lone gunmen, crazy people, and others who, right or wrong, just hate you? The straits of Hormuz are only 30 miles wide and every day, for quiet, peaceful functioning of the world order thirteen sitting-duck oil tankers must maneuver their way through there. You can have all the destroyers, bombers, missiles, drones, fighters, tanks, rockets, cannons, grenade launchers, satellites, in the whole world and you will not be able to stop some people from sinking some of those tankers if they want to. I mean, get real about this. And if you are the one who owns those tankers, would you even risk it?
What if you had a nine-year-old daughter and she was beautiful and a thousand men in your town told you they were going to "get" her? Exactly how many bodyguards would you want to have before you send her to school? Think about it, think about it hard ...
Does no one understand China's "nuclear option" in the financial markets? Do you understand what would happen to ALL money in the USA if China were to sell all of its $1,000,000,000,000 worth of US Treasury notes, all on the same day?
Is the majority of U.S. citizens prepared for gasoline quotas? For gasoline lines? For a limit of 10 gallons per person per month, with no exceptions except for congressmen, lawyers and mafia chiefs?

What is wrong with me that I have common sense, when apparently nobody else around me does? Do I need pills or a good psychiatrist? What can I do about this terrible approach I have to reality when everybody else around me prefers total hallucinations? Any help?

Information

2012-01-03T13:24:00.001-08:00

you can click on the above image for an enlarged view.

I created the image above today, Jan 3, 2012, using Google Earth.
It is a view of the western side of Singapore Harbor.
The virtual altitude is approximately 10 miles.
All of the little grey and the red streaks are freighters.
Almost all of them are oil tankers.
If you zoom in much closer you can see that they are parked, they are not moving,
they have no wake.

I did this for the first time three years ago.
I did not save the image, I am sorry.
My memory tells me that the situation then was highly similar to what it is today.

You all can speculate among yourselves as to what those tankers are doing there,
or who owns them,
or even as to whether they are empty or full of oil.

A few different “inconvenient truths”

2012-01-03T04:48:00.000-08:00

Many Americans noticed that between the years 2000 and 2006, the price of a gallon of gasoline rose from around $1.00 a gallon to around $4.00 a gallon. Fewer noticed that during the same time period, the price of natural gas rose from around $2.00 per therm to around $16.00 per therm. In other words, the price of NG went up twice as much as the price of gasoline.
From 2006 to today, the price of gasoline has dropped from $4.00 to $3.30. Wow.
The price of natural gas, however, has dropped from $16.00 to $4.50.
Why? Because of fracking. It is that simple. The process of fracking has started to supply the United States with cheap, reliable, locally-available energy.
By the way, in terms of available energy, Calories or BTU’s or however you want to measure them, a therm of natural gas, at $4.50, provides about three times more energy than a gallon of gas. And just for comparison sake, so that you understand how valuable this is, a therm can deliver the same amount of work that a strong young man can perform in … 1200 hours, or over 8 months of hard labor …

How is natural gas used in the United States?

A very small percentage is used in cars, buses and trucks, even though it costs less than 1/3 of gasoline or diesel fuel … the two fuels are not interchangeable but it is not terribly complicated or expensive to build a vehicle that runs on NG since it is much cleaner than gasoline.

Roughly 1/3 of NG is used to generate electricity. It is more expensive than coal for this process but it is cleaner.

Roughly 1/3 is used to directly heat homes and larger commercial buildings with a tiny bit more for water heat.

The other third is used to manufacture nitrogen fertilizer. Almost all nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured using natural gas. In the last 60 years, crop yields per acre have more than doubled in the U.S., and good cheap fertilizer has made a great difference. Take away natural gas and the world food supply would be cut in half overnight. Millions upon millions of people would quickly starve to death. The production of ethanol for fuel would have to stop because the price would quickly rise from $5.00 per gallon to $25.00 per gallon.

Why?

Why do I present these “inconvenient truths”?

Because certain people, people who would stand to profit from suffering and tragedy, are targeting fracking. They are trying to convince the American public that fracking is bad for them and should be stopped.

Just today there is an article in the news about earthquakes in Ohio being caused by fracking. These terrible earthquakes have, um, caused no property damage or any distress whatever. They are so small that most people haven’t even noticed them, the ground has actually shaken less than when a freight train rumbles past. But the people are being frightened anyway. Manipulated by the press.

I realize that some people do not like being bothered with facts. If you are one of those and you have still read this far, then I certainly apologize to you. Please go back to watching Jerry Springer and waiting for your lottery number to hit. For the rest of you, I appreciate your attention and know you will act accordingly.

Glass

2012-01-01T14:01:00.000-08:00

U.S. Department of Redundancy Department, April 1, 2012 -- AP Mews

Yesterday, with full support of a large majority of the taxpayers of the nation, the U.S. Military turned the country of Iran into a glass table-top.

This morning, Cyrus Aran, a high-school student in Peoria, IL known for an affinity for computer technology, pocket protectors, and libraries, made a stunning discovery while perusing Google Earth. He found that although the satellite photos displayed clearly were obtained prior to the bombardment, that much of Iran ALREADY WAS GLASS!

In an email to his local paper, Cyrus pointed out that millions upon millions of dollars of high-tech weaponry had been expended to make large areas of central Asia which have been uninhabited for millenia, to be uninhabitable.

click on image to enlarge

Independence

2011-12-31T10:48:00.000-08:00

Well you do have to give Obama credit for at least one thing.

Every US president since Johnson has promised the people to do something about our dependence on foreign, imported crude oi. Few americans may realize that our largest supplier is Canada, but they do understand that crude oil is the #1 ingredient for our economy and there's nothing quite so good as having your own.

Well, but during every presidency since Johnson, the amount of crude oil that has been imported into the US has only increased ... until now.

Yes, its true.... by persuading over 12 million formerly-working people that they no longer need to work, or look for work, or even consider themselves to be unemployed,
those people have stopped driving around quite so much...

According to the figures of the weekly petroleum status report from the Energy Information Administration, crude oil imports have declined by almost 8% this year alone. They have declined by 20% since the years of the Bush Administration. This is a larger decline than anyone thought possible.

Who knows, maybe, if everyone stops working, we can cease to need to import any oil at all! What a concept!

On Strike

2011-12-29T04:34:00.000-08:00

This is a very simple concept.

Even a politician, or even a super-wealthy man, can grasp it, if he tries.

Virtually all of the common people, the laborers, workers, blue collar or no collar folks,
they are all on strike.

They have had it with their wages being forcefully and deceitfully taken from them.
Most of them do not understand how it was done, but they do understand that it was done.

There is no organization, no union, no union bosses. We have workers anonymous.
Some of them collect unemployment, food stamps, section 8.
Some of them camp out down by the river or sleep in their cars in urban parking garages. Some of them live with their parents, their friends, or in houses destined for foreclosure.
Some of them call in sick, then apply for disability.
Some of the better-educated go to work but they spend all day writing long reports about all the work they have done or are going to do, instead of working.
Some of them do odd jobs for cash, no taxes, no banks, no plastic.

They are going to stay on strike until the bankers and the politicians relent,
even if it takes demolishing the entire system.

Which it will.

Zero

2011-12-26T16:31:00.000-08:00

God spoke out to me recently in a more forceful fashion than He has for many years ... I have regretted the distance between us and ascribed it to 1) my sins 2) His insistence that I use more of what He has already given me 3) He want me more deeply grounded in this physical world with the other people in it and less with Him 4)
the end of my idiosyncratic psychotropic drug withdrawal creating hyperawareness.

He brought the number "zero" to my attention.

I guess one thing He was trying to say to me was just that He is very much still there in my life ... He has been telling me that my life is a reduced, slimmed-down, steamlined, simpler, more relaxed version of what I was living before. But that does NOT mean that my tasks are done, as I have been contemplating.
I'm still here.

You will have to bear with my understanding of His language to me ...
very private and personal, always found in events which are surprising to me, sometimes literal scientific miracles other times just very remarkable ... but furthermore they are all laced with a "halo" that I cannot describe to another person which further identify them as "sendings" or "communications" ... He is the living God ...

(I am not going to get into a debate here over elements that other people may ascribe to hallucinations, illusions, delusions, or just loosing it ... I'm happy for them to think what they will.)
I started to play a computer game. Which I do a lot. The game hesitated a lot in starting up. when it did start, it immediately returned a score of zero to me without giving me a chance to make one move. That doesn't happen, it just doesn't.

He's just asking me to meditate on the subject of zero ... it is round ,
it is the most important of all numbers, as a placeholder it enables addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, if you don't understand what I mean then just try, for a minute, to add or multiply a few roman numeral numbers.
The earth is round. Most everything in nature goes in cycles, up, down,
around and around, night and day, summer and winter, birth and death. I just finished reading Joseph Felser's "The Myth of the Great Ending", full of philosophy, paranormal discussions, dreamwork, out of body experiences, rebirth experiences, other stuff that I'm somewhat familiar with already. Felser has a nice website to promote the book and on the website he says "everything is round" and has a picture of the earth. His premise is that we are not coming to a great ending.

I am coming to similar understandings ... these days I find myself to be less and less perturbed about the cliff that we are all headed towards ... I see it as a pretty cataclysmic change for mankind, maybe on the same scale as Noah's flood or the burning of Lot's home town ... but not, not, not anything like John's dream in revelations ....

I don't expect to hang around for this, but I see a great cleansing coming at us, a washing away of a great many strong beliefs and activities which are sinful
and have made this result inevitable. Because human beings don't like being forced to change, and maybe also because quite a few folk are going to die "unexpectedly" as the population reverts to something more reasonable for this poor old planet, there will be some hardship and hard feelings and misunderstandings about it,
which will make no more difference than a grain of sand in the Taklimaken Desert.

Beyond it I see a great, peaceful pastoral time/place ... life will be simpler and easier and a lot less "stressful" for a long time to come ... for all the strife near-term, this is not to be feared ....I'm even having a few delightful moments of "jumping in the puddles" like a three-year-old boy, instead of fretting about the cold and wet and the mud on their new shoes like someone believing themselves "more mature"....

my favourite joke

2011-12-26T16:30:00.000-08:00

Really, there are only 10 kinds of people in this world:

those who understand the binary number system, and those who don't.

words

2011-12-25T10:26:00.000-08:00

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read?
Hamlet: Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled and that they have a plentiful lack of wit ...

John:
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through Him all things were made, without Him n9othing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness but the darkness does not understand it.

It seems to me, me who lived through the richest of times and born into
the best of gifts and opportunities, me who is witnessing much of this come down
to dust with the promise of starvation, thirst, bloodshed and plague heavy in the air,

it seems to me that there is a powerful want of people
to understand the difference between symbol and substance
in these terrible times.
It seems to me that nearly all of us were born with that gift --
how else could any of us learn how to speak and to listen? --
but that a fair number of folk abandon it, some indeed at a quite young age,
and they learn to mimic and copy their way through every situation
as if they were parrots or monkeys.

It seemed to me that the negroes, the black people of america,
and indeed, the recent and current slaves of every civilization,
are a bit more apt to be more aware of their environment and their world
and hence this distinction. And maybe that is so
but certainly there is a plenitude of exceptions on both sides.
Anyway I have made a lot of choices betting on that distinction
and I do not regret any of them.

Hello?
The USA is going to being suffering
until a leader arises who understands
that wearing a cheap painted metal pin, made in China,
which happens to be in the likeness of a piece of woven tapestry
first created by Betsy Ross,
is not an act of bravery, or power, or courage, or strength, or patriotism.
Not one iota.

And maybe a whole mess of symbols need
to go into the trash bucket or the ash heap.

Maybe USA'ans need to remember,
on their own without using GPS,
that the first Aryans
lived in the ancient city of Rage,
(of the ancient Media empire)
which is now known as Tehran,
just southeast of the Caucasian mountains.

Or maybe they just need to forget everything they ever learned and start over.

I don't know.

but God knows.
The coming years and decades and generations will not be so pleasant
as the recent past. No indeed.
Some housekeeping is going to take place.
He knows who and He knows when and He knows how.

After its done, life will be a bit nicer here, I think.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Power

2011-12-07T03:59:00.000-08:00

In 2001, in the regular conduct of my career as journeyman computer researcher, I made the acquaintance of one "Martin Artiano". Together we concocted a scheme for his benefit, mine, and I hoped, my organization. I was unable to deliver my end of the bargain and the relationship ended.

If you Google this name, at least at the present time, you will find that it is quite unique; all links lead to the same individual. Quite the opposite of my given name, of which there are three just in my local phone book and hundreds and hundreds across the country.

However, the material you will glean from such a search will not tell you much about him. The most telling is a single veiled innuendo in regards to the Iran/Contra affair of Reagan's presidency. The reference, however, reveals little.

I came to know enough about him during our relationship to realize that for a time, he had been the most powerful man in the world. I am fascinated that so few
common peoplle have ever even heard of his name, and apparently nobody on the whole
Internet knows much of anything about him.

Having a preference to remain above ground, I'm not going to tell you all anything about him either. I just want to mention that real power is quite different from either fame or money. Artiano had the power to move mountains, to redraw national boundaries, to start or end wars. Clearly, he also had the power and good sense and ability to keep his own name unknown.

By the time I met him, he was douwnsizing gracefully yet still keeping his fingers in the world pie. Once he learned that I have a taste for chocolate he offered me a blind date with Condi, and I'm sure he would have delivered if I had only kept up my end.

The only reason I mention all of this is to remind you all that what you read in the papers and history books and here on the television news is a far distant cry from what is really going on.....

Wealth

2011-11-09T07:26:00.000-08:00

with the market now down 270 pts, this seems like a good time to tackle this subject ... as faithful readers can appreciate, I have shorted and shorted this market over the past several years and been burned pretty badly, finally reaching the point where I simply could not afford to do so any longer ... and I am quite certain that numbers of other folk find themselves in very similar circumstances ... the market, as always, hurts the most number of people; now that most shorts have finally capitulated the market can collapse ....

I read web site after blogs, etc on the subject of what money is and what wealth is and is gold money and so forth, all the time. Though I'm just a bit player I think I have a few noteworthy ideas to add to the conversation. Here is one example:

http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/11/moneyness.html

Most of these discussions represent "money" as being a storehouse of wealth,
in much the same way that a gallon of gasoline is a storehouse of energy.
Discussions of gold do not generally raise this point, but it takes a huge amount of human labor to raise and refine every new ounce of gold coming out of the ground ... in fact, 99% of all the physical gold now available for trading is "old gold",
the amount of new gold produced each year is trivial in comparison with what's already been extracted, refined, and stored for safekeeping.

Other discussions get into the subject of "symbol versus substance". I could devote numbers of blog entries to that subject but I don't. There seem to be a whole lot of people who just don't "get" this distinction. I tend to think that my own people in my own time are particularly foolish in this but I could be biased. Certainly authors ever since antiquity have railed at those who don't understand the difference. Obviously a piece of paper, or worse, a digital entry on a ferro-magnetic hard drive is not an item of substance but only a symbol for wealth ... and people can change their general opinion about the meaning and value of a symbol, sometimes very, very quickly.

So what I want to add to the discussion is a reckoning of some of the items which I count as making up my personal wealth, some items which are not generally discussed in any of these pontificating discussions. I suppose that they are not discussed because none of these additional items are fungible. They cannot be duplicated and they cannot be traded. However, these non-tradable items constitute the vast majority of what I consider to be my net worth.

To start off, very simplistically, I wish to enumerate a pair of 34-D's.
I don't actually "own" them, legally I am technically "married" to the owner,
but that can change. I list them because I have experienced them, and much much more, for the person who sports them is one of the sharpest and most cunning, most versatile and flexible, and when she chooses to be, one of the sweetest and most affectionate human beings that I have ever had the honor of knowing. I count myself as being very, very rich to have had the experiences that I have had with her and to know that whatever happens between us she will always respect me as the one who rescued her and effectively gave her life.

fungible? no.

tradeable? no.

priceless, it goes without saying.

Next, I wish to relate a parable that I hear some years ago and began to apply in my own life, and the more I apply it the more wealth I believe I accumulate.
Again, not tradable.

A banker, recently completing a multibillion-dololar deal, finds himself lying in bed that night still in angst and actually praying to God for some answers.
The archangel Urial hears his plea and actually responds... he brings him above and he explains to him that he is going to show him two rooms, one of which happens to be a room in heaven and the other is a room in hell.

Without saying which he wants to show first, the archangel leads the banker to a door and opens it. Inside, he sees a very large, round table. Around it are seated a large number of people. the banker can see that the people are hungry and very, very unhappy. In the very middle of the table, there is a depression and set inside of it is a large round bowl of savory soup ... there are large chunks of meat, and potatoes, vegetables, and a wonderful aroma fills the entire room.
The table is so large that the people seated at the table cannot reach the soup with their free hands. However, on one forearm, every single person there has had fastened securely to it a very long, large spoon. each person is quite able to reach the soup with the spoon and pick up a good spoonful of the tangy, inviting repast. However, this does them no good at all, because the spoon is too long for them to then be able to reach their mouths. So the people all sit around as despondent as Tantalus and misery prevails.
Then, the archangel closes that door and opens a different door to show the banker.
Low and behold, the second scene is very like the first. Here is the same large round table, the same folk seated around it, the same tureen of soup in the middle, and even the very same spoons. but, but, but ... here, everyone is laughing, everyone is happy and telling stories and talking and enjoying one another; the atmosphere is totally different. After watching for a minute or two the banker suddenly understand why: each person is able to fill his spoon and then reach over to feed his neighbor! By feeding each other, all of the people take care of each other and everyone is fed as much as they desire!
The banker came to understand where his angst came from and what he could do about it, and he went forth the next day and began to change his life.
(Most bankers are never so fortunate(!!!!!)

Here is a shorter version of the same parable, in a proverb:
The best place, the very best place to store your wealth, is in your neighbor's stomach.

Obviously, neither paper money, nor digital money, nor stock certificates, nor even gold coins, are fit for your neighbor's stomach. but all of them, even the gold, can lose their value in the sight of those you trade with and deal with to supply your needs.
So I count my friends and the people I deal with regularly as a part of my wealth, a big part. I attempt to take care of them as best that I can. Its not always food, there are numerous other "gifts" that I have that I can share with them, some of them unique to me. Sometimes confidence and firmness are asked for, too, though I am known as kind and generous, people who try to take advantage of me eventually come to think better of it.
If our government collapses, there is no finer storehouse for what I have than with my friends, no better protection, no better chance of our mutual survival. Many of the doomsday predictions going around, such as James Kunstler painst so vividly, point out that few will survive when the electric grid and the gasoline stations go down ... the anarchy will be beyond our imagining ... still, the best chances we all have is to be known widely as a trusted friend.
Related to that is another set of items wherein I have accumulated a great deal of wealth, what I consider to be far beyond most of the people I relate with and also those I read about ... my skillset. I have always had a natural curiosity about this world and a certain naivety about anything I have not yet encountered harm from. As a consequence I have got my fingers into quite a lot of different activities and disciplines. The sum is one of the most eclectic set of skillsets and knowledge that I know of, the quintessential "renaissance man". True there is a great deal that I do not know. But I am a passing plumber, electrician, structural engineer, designer. I can do all things with wood, cut, gather, split, burn it, make fine furniture or art, marquetry, dressers, tables, sculptures. I understand the basics of computers, something woefully lacking among our young people today,
I have built a simple electronic counting machine with wires and resistors, transistors, capacitors. I understand binary ....

scuse me. one of my favorite jokes:

There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand the binary number system,
and those who don't ....

I can count on my fingers up to 1023 and I can do it while talking with someone
or other similar mental activity. I understand that a computer is nothing more than a bucket of on-off switches connected with a system of relays which do exactly, exactly, what they are told to do with no deviation or motivation whatsoever.
That's a pretty valuable (and rare!) concept, these days.
In my day I have coded in Fortran, Cobol, C, HTML, XSLT, and other languages and could do it again in a pinch.

Navigating ... sine qua non. I've been around the world, canoe, bicycle, hitchhike, fly, drive, camel... am not afraid to go anywhere ... not the Pentagon library, nor the monasteries on the isles of Lake T'ana, nor the girls rooms in my junior high school ... I don't use GPS because God gave me a much better one than that. So far, the power has never failed on mine. never.

For many years God has protected me and showered me with wealth beyond imagining,
everything that I have wanted, save for a few select things that He knew better about ....

I hope this adds to the discussion about what money is, and isn't ....

Another Carrington Event?

2011-11-06T04:04:00.000-08:00

.....they say that a solar storm the size of the "Carrington Event" hits earth on the average, once every 500 years. They say not to worry about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

From spaceweather.com this morning:

Sunspot AR1339 is crackling with M-class solar flares, unleashing at least five of them in the past 24 hours.

Even bigger eruptions are possible before the weekend is over. AR1339 has a delta-class magnetic field that harbors energy for X-class flares. The sunspot is turning toward Earth, so the odds of a geoeffective flare are increasing.

A strong X-class flare, directed at earth, could have the following events:

frying the electronic circuit boards of a healthy percentage of all satellites in earth's orbit. this would effectively end tv and radio communications, military communications, many telephone communications, weather information, GPS communication, affecting millions of surface navigation devices including the instant position loss of all airplanes and most large ships.", and of course, all ATM machines and in fact virtually all "money" transfers and trades of any kind larger than, say, buying a pack of cigarettes ....

setting up huge arcs at many, many electric grid substations, effectively shutting down the grids all over the world and, in the process, damaging a healthy percentage of the very large, costly, and difficult-to-replace transformers which are essential for the whole system to process.

Here's what that can look like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=vqgNrj6oEdc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sngiPk6sTBs&feature=related

In effect, ending all electric use, worldwide.

These days, that could have "interesting" effects .....

OWS

2011-10-18T03:16:00.000-07:00

just a few comments ....

First of all, anyone who knows anything about my point of view will understand ...
I gotta ask "What took you all so long to start this?"

Second, yes, comparisons will be made with what we did in the sixties.
but there are critical differences. We all had a future to look forward to
if we dropped our protesting and cooperated with the system. We were not
hungry. It was just that, according to the rules that had been made by the authorities,
some number of us,. at random, would be coming back from extended vacations,
in a box.

Certainly Ron Paul bears an uncanny resemblance to Eugene McCarthy. Yes, the press
will succeed in scuttling his candidacy. But not his issues.

Finally, one can look back at the recent Egyptian governmental change, and a little further at the events of Thermidor, to see what's likely to happen. Yes, this
movement will grow in scope. Yes, it will get violent. Yes, at first the violence will seem random and disorganized, hitting wrong targets ... but in time opposition leaders will rise and the targets will be more thoughtfully chosen. Yes, the new leaders, as the consolidate their power, will reveal dreadful evil sidelines, along the great traditions of Robespierre and Adolf ....

However there's one thing that the kids and the movement will not easily understand .... they are angry because of everything that they thought was promised to them, which they won't ever be able to get ( a secure future, a wife and children, a nice white collar job, a home in the suburbs with 2.5 bathrooms and a lot of grass that must be mowed every weekend, etc etc etc).

But, but, but ...once they succeed in overthrowing the current government (and yes, they WILL succeed, mostly because it has already self-destructed, its just that nobody has figured that out yet.)

it will begin to become evident that the problems they wanted to fix, have not been fixed ....

basically, the money and resources that they thought they were going to get, which they realize Wall Street and the ultra-rich and the older generation have all stolen from them ....

that money is gone, gone gone with the wind.

Nothing, not all the kings horses and all the kings men, can ever get it back again.

The whole world and everyone in it is still going to be poor, no matter how many new governments are put into place or how they are structured ... there is just no way around the fact that the whole planet is overpopulated and cannot (anymore) support the number of people who are here, so many of us must die, in ugly, premature ways that we do not choose for ourselves ....

and thus, if this be revolution, then the wheel is going to just pick up more and more momentum, there will be many, many turns, and perhaps all of humanity will be "broken upon the wheel ..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_wheel

there is, still, hope ... its just so marvelously far off .... we really have done it to ourselves, this time ....

Solution

2011-09-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

One of my friends said, about taxes and the Federal debt:

The big boys aren't going to pay, no matter what. Suckers like us will get the bill.

I answered:

nope.
The bill is not going to be paid.
That's the whole point.

Beginning with Paulson's efforts back in 2008, TARP
and the other bailouts and Bernanke's expansion of the Fed,
the bankers have desperately been trying to save their own necks
at the expense of everybody else.
They are nothing but ignorant fools who have killed the golden goose,
trying to get at the source of the gold inside of it,
and they've got nothing for their troubles
but a lot of nasty entrails on their hands.

Fact is, if nobody has any money, then nobody needs bankers for anything. A world with no productive work, where only bankers can profit, is a world without any wealth, where no one profits.

Interesting case in point ... someone asked the Icelanders
how their country recovered so quickly from its crash
a couple of years back.
"Easy. We let the banks fail."

The level of debts worldwide are unsustainable.
Everybody knows that now, everybody understands.
None of these debts are going to be paid back. Not ever.
The Greeks will never pay off.
Neither will the Portuguese or the Irish.
Not the Spanish or the Italians. Not the French or the English.
And certainly not the Americans, who are all armed to the teeth
and planning strategic defaults all across the board.

There is no other solution but a total debt jubilee,
where ALL Debts are declared null and void.

The longer they put it off, the worse it is going to be for everybody,
including the bankers themselves.

At least, now, we are going to have worldwide collapse
of ALL asset classes, bonds, stocks, oil, precious metals, real estate.
Until the deed is done.
EVERYTHING is going down.
We will see just how long this takes ....

they may try to start a war here.
Be kind of interesting if they have a war and nobody comes .....

There is no other way ...

Luke 11 verses 3-5 ... KJV ... pay attention to these exact words ...

3. Give us day by day our daily bread. 4. And forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

Consumption

2011-09-09T05:11:00.000-07:00

Prior to my lifetime, this was the name of a deadly disease.
On second thought, maybe it still is ...

see!

2011-08-05T06:41:00.000-07:00

Its Friday.

Market is green, just like I said.

(Oh. sorry about that. did I forget to tell you about yesterday??????)

green

2011-08-02T12:26:00.000-07:00

I posted this over on Seeking Alpha last Friday.

Debt Downgrade Drama: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet [View article]
On the other hand,
when the "inevitable" deal is made,
which everyone has already bet upon,
that just could be when the "fun" selling starts ....

hmmm ... since then the Dow has dropped 300 pts.
so, while I am hot, lemme make another prediction:

this coming friday, the payroll numbers are going to be awful.
I mean, really, really bad.

and the market will close green ....

Genesis (cont.)

2011-07-19T11:46:00.001-07:00

Chapter 11

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of San Jose, and they dwelt there.
And they said, to one another, “Go to, let us make webs, and join them thoroughly”
And they said, “Go to, let us build a worldwide city and a network, and let us make a name for ourselves, and so they called their city “Silicon”.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the network, which the children of men builded.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language, for they have Google, and they have automatic translator algorithms.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
So the Lord created viruses and Trojans, and He created worms. The Lord brought spyware, and malware, and adware, and botnets. He brought “virus protection software” to steal resources and charge for the service, and He brought help desks and security czars to bog down, shut down, arrest and frustrate all those with imagination and vision. He brought hackers and leakers and service interruption attacks and identity theft.
So the Lord bogged down the network til the weight of the overhead brought all creative endeavor to a complete standstill.
And He brought crushing debt upon the region of San Jose until all city services came to a halt.
Therefore is the name of it Gaggle for it soundeth and meaneth like the calling of geese.
And he brought Menlo when the speed of all communications reached Park.

Genesis

2011-07-18T06:27:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1

In the beginning, God created Plymouth rock. And Jamestown.
And God said, “Let there be light” and there was Westinghouse.
And God saw the light, and it was good.
And God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the
Waters”, and He created US Steel.
And God said, Let the land bring forth profits, and there was
B & O Railroad, and American Tobacco, and Western Union, and Standard Oil.
And God said, “Let there be lightweights in the capital to divide
The people and their wallets” and he created the Presidency and the Congress.
And God saw everything that he had made, and told everybody
That it was very good.

Chapter 2

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
And the Lord God formed Woodrow Wilson and caused him to be elected
From the dust of the nation. And He gave him dominion over all the land
And all the citizens.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “of every effort thou art
Free to tax, but thou mayest take only what thou needest, thou mayest
Not create a central bank thereupon to take and keep and withhold from
The people, for if thou creates a central bank thou shalt certainly die.”

Chapter 3

Now the banker was more subtle than any beast of the field which the
Lord God has made. And he said unto Congress, “Yea, hath God said
Ye shall not create a central bank?” And Congress said, “We may tax any
Fruit of the garden, but God said we may not partake of a central bank.”
And the banker said, “Look ye, woman. See how the economy goes in waves
And in circles. See how the hard times follow the good times, see how
The citizens suffer joblessness and hunger, in cycles. Know you that risk
Can be mitigated? Did He tell you that you can take compassion on your
People, help them out, and buy their votes in the next election? Did
He tell you that you can have higher highs, whiter whites, and new and improved
nigh unto eternity? Perhaps He wants to keep all the fun and glory to
Himself? Have you ever thought about keeping a little reserve?”

Chapter 4

And Congress took a bite of the apple, and handed it to Wilson, and he also
Took a bite, and they found that it was sweet and juicy, and they wanted more.
And so they created the Federal Reserve. And henceforth,, when there were good times,
The tax receipts were plentiful. And when there were bad times, the Federal Reserve created more paper money and created money to be borrowed, and the losses were postponed, and the
Tax receipts were STILL bountiful.
And they created insurance companies and the FDIC and the SEC and Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac and Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and nuclear deterrents and all manner of protection against all manners of losses, any loss that anybody could think of or imagine.

Chapter 5

And one day it came to the attention of the man in the street that one loss, one little possible loss, had not been insured, contracted, mitigated, indemnified, incorporated, or otherwise protected against, and that was the loss of everything-all-at-the-same-time. The whole nine yards, the kit-and-kaboodle, the cat’s meow. And other people began to read and to hear and to understand and to fear, against this one little item. And a fifteen minute call to Geico went unanswered. And all of the preachers and the Pharisees and the Sadducees arose and penned opinion pieces for the local newspapers that such a thing could never come to pass and y’all need to quit worrying about it and go back to cheering for American Idol and the Pittsburg Steelers. But real estate prices fell and people lost their jobs and had their homes foreclosed upon and the dark clouds continued to build over Noah’s town and the people became more and more fearful…

{snip}

Chapter 7

…
He sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated. But the dove found no rest for her foot, and she returned to him. And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, that the waters were dried up from the earth. And God said, look okay, I did it again. But still I have not destroyed everything. I give you another chance. But please, this time, stay away from snakes and bankers!

Gold's Gym

2011-07-11T08:18:00.000-07:00

Patent medicine. The elixir of youth. Land in Florida. Penny Stocks.
Subprime Real Estate, ARM mortgages, chain letters, the eat-all-you-want-to-all-day-long diet, John Law and The Mississippi Company, and dutch tulip bulbs.

None can compare with this one.

You are going to do what? "Work out"? um, how much are they paying you????? Tom Sawyer would be so proud ....

Do I really have to say anything more?

Sitaka

2011-07-10T14:48:00.000-07:00

So many of my experiences in Ethiopia were of the kind that "you had to have been there." On the other hand, so many of my peers now suspect or accuse me of such dark pessimism, and they just don't know, so feeble as they may be I will make some attempts.

"Sitaka" means "gift" in our language. This was the name of the live-in servant girl of the family where I stayed on my first trip. Yes, there is that dirty little secret that the National Geographic and all of the "save an orphan" organizations do not want you to find out, namely, that most of the middle class in Ethiopia have live-in servants.

She must have been around seventeen. The occupation is a major alternative for a young woman who does not accept an early marriage (choices of schooling and other occupations are very limited.) She worked from around sunup to around sundown, seven days a week. Her pay consisted of her own little room, and food, the same as the
family, and a stipend equal to $20/month.
She had all sorts of activities and it seemed to me that she was always busy. She prepared most of the meals and she washed the dishes afterwards. There was a single faucet in the back yard, the extent of the running water in the compound. She did the dishes in the sun and let the brightness dry them. She swept out the entire compound every day. She fed the chickens and the cat. She washed all of the laundry, bending over two large pans on the ground that looked like the bottoms of oil drums, hung it on the line to dry, pulled it in before evening. She owned two sets of faded, raggedy dark outfits that she alternated; those were probably all
her possessions in the whole world.

Sitaka turned my whole understanding of the world completely upside down, as I spent weeks and weeks watching her, interacting lightly. She never worked hard but always went easily, lightly to her tasks. She sang, usually softly, sometimes more loudly, while she bustled about. She played, with Tadios, with the chickens, with the cat. She was ALWAYS smiling, she was ALWAYS happy; Nagast even said about her that she was the happiest person that he even knew.

This simple truth, that we tell each other, in church, and to our young people and in our greeting cards and our little sermons to one another, but none of us believe it for a moment and no one would dream of giving up anything they had to attain what she has ... but that is what you have to do, that is all you can do, put down your own stuff and trust in the Lord, and thank Him constantly
for everything He gives you. There is no other way to happiness.
If that is really what you want.

Sex

2011-06-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

I’d prefer for this issue just to go away, quietly. I’d prefer for me just to ignore it. But nearly everybody around me seems to be obsessing about it. Since, imho, they are all missing the mark by a pretty wide margin, I am impelled to shoot my arrow into the maw.

One of the important experiences in my past was a long-drawn-out negotiation of divorce and property settlement with a former wife, and her attorney, and my attorney. There really was not all that much to fight over and most of what there was the ownership was pretty clear. The main problem, as I see it from retrospect, was that the woman had an unholy desire to hurt and take advantage of me in any way that she possibly could find. This was coupled with an education and career in the twists and turns of the written English language. Bluntly, she employed every subterfuge and device that she could imagine. Actually, I suspect that she borrowed most of them from the real estate and mortgage industry of this great country. The long and the short of it was that we struggled for over two years, it became the major concentration of my time and energy and affected every part of my life. Even the lawyers, on both sides, got tired of it. At the end, she ended up having to pay me over twice what I had originally asked for, in return for the property of mine that she held back for herself.

Another set of experiences also has a strong impact on my point of view. During a period in my life when I was single and moderately wealthy, I had opportunities to idyll and play for weeks at a time under the roves and mingling with people in a very different and foreign culture, that of modern Ethiopia. I ate, drank, danced, partied, prayed and slept with natives. Previously I had had some vague suspicion that the prevailing attitudes, standards, laws, and mores of my own culture, having to do with sexuality, might be a bit twisted and perverted. The profound experience of being able to look back at it from the outside, has taught me a great deal that few around me can see.

Just for example, I remember a particular discussion I had with an older Ethiopian gentleman about the drug Viagra. I can still see and hear his belly-laugh at the americans who believe that such a drug could be beneficial or pleasant or helpful.

For the longest time on my bulletin board I had posted a quote from Bishop Desmond Tuttu descrying the ruckus about priestly pedophilia, in a world where problems of persisting violent struggles, starvation and disease plague large populations. Only in America, where anything sexual is perfectly permissible in public so long as it is used to sell something, but highly improper for pleasure, could such a brouhaha arise.

Where am I going here? The issue of the day, at least in the newspapers and the discussions at my church, is “gay marriage”. Maybe the tv too, I wouldn’t know. Is it right or wrong. I can envisage some pretty thorny legal situations arising. A same-sex couple can marry in one state, then move to another where their marriage is no longer accepted. Or a hetero couple can marry, then one of the members submit to medical science’s wizardy and physically and legally change their sex, in a state where even cohabitation in certain venus may be punishable by law. The variety and kind of ridiculous fabricated conflicts that could arise, boggle the mind.

We base our culture and our laws, to a high degree, on the writings of a misogynist from almost two thousand years ago, who spent all his time with other men, never married and barely tolerating others who did. He did, in fact, devote considerable discourse and energy on the subject of whether or not a grown man must have his penis mutilated in order to gain admittance, upon death and leaving his body, of the most hallowed permanent vacation place. It escapes me why his opinions are considered to be paramount, especially on this subject.

So the reason I am bothered enough to write is this: hearing and reading all the discourse, debate, and acrimony, on both sides of the aisle, I have yet to read or hear one person correctly identify, even mention, the root of the difficulty, the true foundation of the problem.
As usual, it is money. Not sex or morality at all, but lucre.

To go back to that failed marriage, I recall after that experience being truly regretful that no one in this culture will ever tell young people in consideration of matrimony, the nasty truth of what marriage (ANY marriage) really is about here in this land. It doesn’t matter if you pretend to do it in a church or synagogue or mosque or Las Vegas chapel, or just the office of the justice of the peace, or maybe even out in the woods. Before you can do it you have to get a license, that should be a clue. The plain fact is that making a marriage is an act of creating a contract. Most importantly, it is a three-way contract, between two individuals and the state. No one is told, in advance, that there is simply reams and reams of fine print which is written upon that contract and which both individuals must accept and adhere to. Obviously even fewer people ever actually READ the fine print. Not until one or the other actually finds themselves in a lawyer’s office discussing the opportunities of divorce, do they begin to understand the breadth and depth of all of that verbiage.

When you marry, it changes your financial status in all kinds of ways. It immediately changes your withholding and tax status. It affects your last will and testament, whether duly recorded or simply assumed. It affects all the contracts you have with insurance companies, health, automobile, hazard, whatever. Amounts of money that you pay to these various entities will change, immediately. Money, money, money. In most of these situations, you will find that you will benefit, financially (at least, until you show up in divorce court!)

People cannot rationally discuss whether or not gay marriages should be legal until they recognize and accept that society grants substantial financial advantages to couples who sign this marriage contract and agree to all of its terms.

The simple way (KISS) out of all this morass is to change all of the laws and regulations to be transparent to marriage. Make it a religious and only religious institution, which has no effect legally, has no affect on anybody's wallet. Then, all this nonsense about same-sex marriages would fade like the fog on a September morning. Ain’t gonna happen, is it. People just have to make drama, don’t they. Sigh ….

The economic death-spiral has been triggered.

2011-06-15T10:36:00.000-07:00

http://www.philstockworld.com/2011/05/30/the-economic-death-spiral-has-been-triggered/

yes, yes, yes, I know ....
I'm just another crackpot.
Please pay no attention to that man behind the curtain ....

total worldwide economic breakdown

2011-06-11T05:30:00.000-07:00

thermodynamics, or the laws of everything.

2011-05-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'm merely paraphrasing. These things are worth saying,
again and again and again, until we all get too cold.

from wikipedia:

* The first law of thermodynamics expresses the existence of a quantity called the internal energy of a system, and shows how it is related to the distinction between energy transfer as work and energy transfer as heat. The internal energy obeys the principle of conservation of energy but work and heat are not defined as separately conserved quantities.
* The second law of thermodynamics expresses the existence of a quantity called the entropy of a system and states that the entropy of an isolated macroscopic system never decreases.
* The third law of thermodynamics concerns the entropy of a perfect crystal at absolute zero temperature, and implies that it is impossible to cool a system to exactly absolute zero.

To restate more simply:
from Ugo Bardi and others:

1. You can't win
2. You can't get even
3. You can't quit the game

And, like the speed of light,
its not just a good idea, its the law.

ቀላል

2011-05-19T02:29:00.001-07:00

(The title of this post is written in "Fidel" script, an alphabet in use
throughout the horn of Africa, in the language of Amharic. the word is
pronounced "kel'-al" and translates to "easy".)

I just have one question for you all.
When did "easy" start having anything to do with "good"?

Just think back, to that one incident in your life, when you were ecstatic, jump-for-joy, hug-a-stranger happy.

Now think, for a minute, about what had happened to make you that way. What had you just done?

Did you like feeling that way? Did you enjoy it? Did the people around you enjoy it? Do you hope to feel that way again sometime?

Now, just ask yourself, whatever you did to feel that way. Was it easy?

Price Controls

2011-05-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

The US Government,
in cahoots with the COMEX and sundry other parties,
is attempting to manipulate the price of crude oil (downward!)
by manipulating the futures markets.
Its a more obfuscatgory tactic than Nixon's simple price controls
and its difficult to explain to the ovine --
they won't know who did it.

But the results will still be the same.
Within months from now,
The USA is going to start experiencing spot shortages
of gasoline and other crude oil by-products.

Hang on, folks.
Your life is about to get seriously ugly.

Nelson Bunker Hunt

2011-05-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

(just in case you have been asleep in a cave)

The recent run-up in the amount of fiat currency that people are trading for hard silver has been quite spectacular recently, from $17 to $49 in one year’s time. For at least the past several weeks this has been garnering widespread publicity. As can be expected, comparisons and contrasts are being drawn with an incident within my memory and that of numerous other market participants, namely the attempted cornering of the whole silver market by Nelson Bunker Hunt and associates during the decade of the 1970’s.

An article that appeared in 1980 in Playboy which detailed the machinations is making the rounds and being extensively quoted and paraphrased.

I am finding that there is a rather extensive omission in the information of that article. Yes, it says that for a brief time Bunker was the wealthiest that any single man has ever been, with a NAV north of $4B at a time when the advertising campaign at McDonalds was “a big mac, fries, a coke, and change back from your dollar!”

Okay, yes, the roof fell in on him. Yes, the tightening of margin requirements at the Comex had a lot to do with the crash. Yes, after the crash he was, if not left penniless, at least reduced back to human proportions. Okay, so where did the $4B go? Did it just vanish, as all the articles seem to imply? Did it (Ha Ha!) go back to "the people"?

I can’t offer cold, hard facts here, I seem to recollect a few admissions at the time which have since disappeared from print. Volker was of course involved; he backed up the project with the unlimited credit of the Federal Reserve. There were key players. Partners at the Comex. Large bankers who could not stand for inflation to get out of hand, let alone for it to be generally understood by the public for what it really is, grand theft by the bankers and politicians from everybody with a positive net worth. Partners such as JPMorgan. As I recall, the Comex changed its rules, somewhat illegally, to establish not only margin limits but position limits on longs (but those same limits have never been enforced upon shorts!). And NY megabanks, operating together behind the scenes, took out huge short positions.

So where did the $4B go, now? Well, of course, it all went to the banks holding the shorts.

And some of them remember. Greedily? Well you know about bankers by now, right?

Now I know you all are now realizing something. There is no NBH this time playing on the long side against the establishment. The situation is different this time. Its all of us, isn’t it ….
And all the talk, all the bombast, all the paper, all the contracts, all the fake news articles opining about bubbles, all the bamboozle in the world, cannot create one more dime of real silver.

Heart of Darkness

2011-04-21T05:47:00.001-07:00

I just may embody certain aspects of my personality in common with Kurtz.
And, more interesting, we share them with Almaz, my African wife.
They must be exceedingly rare and exceptional traits, poorly understood by
anyone around us, and its pointless to even attempt to explain them.
I am quite gratified that Conrad himself had some knowledge of what I am
talking about. So let me just share some choice quotes from this
little book (which I enjoyed immensely!)

I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long eight-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent -- and nothing happened.

I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men -- men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.

I let him run on, this papier-mache Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. the most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of unextinguishable regrets.

Oh! The horror, the horror!

Ancient African Proverb

2011-04-12T13:05:00.001-07:00

When two elephants fight, grass wins.

The Universal Panacea

2011-04-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

Was your country just hit with one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history,
followed by a 30-foot tsunami that just kept coming and coming and coming,
and then after that your massive nuclear generating complex started to get a little warm?

There is a solution, just print some more money.

Was your country just hit by a wave of fraudulent banksters selling fraudulent mortgages to people who could not honestly afford them, collapsing the economy and adding 15 million individuals to the roles of the "I'm not unemployed, I want a good job right now!"?

There is a solution, just print some more money.

Did your military machine, already the largest and most expensive and inefficient that the world has ever seen and overextended in several long-term theatres, just attempt to grab yet another expanse of oil fields and find that lo and behold the former owner is choosing to destroy them rather than let you steal them?

There is a solution, just print some more money.

Is your new girlfriend just a little late on her period this month?

There is a solution, just print some more money.

Are the alcoholic members of your legislature, hooked on the glories of giving away free money to the people who put them where they are, suddenly seeing the light of sobriety but arguing and debating that if they cut back from 15 drinks a day to 14 drinks a day, how strong the last drink can be?

There is a solution, just print some more money.

Is your bank commodities desk under orders from above to maintain a short position on silver futures roughly the size of the entire yearly market, and the price of silver has just doubled in the last 9 months?

There is a solution, just print some more money.

Did you find three new grey hairs coming out of your scalp while showering this morning?

There is a solution, just print some more money.

And not only that, but you have the "heartbreak of psoriasis" on your knee?

There is a solution, just print some more money.

Thank God for Mammon!

Lord Jim

2011-03-31T07:42:00.000-07:00

When I was a teen, I saw the movie (1965 Columbia Pictures), and while at the time I did not get the gist of the story, I remembered enough so that when a used copy of the book fell into my lap, I picked it up with interest.

An immediate aspect of the written story is the complexity of the vocabulary. English was actually Conrad’s third language and he shows off a mastery profoundly more articulate than my peers. While there is little doubt that electronic communications have reduced our society’s articulations to the level of tweets and grunts of the forest, this is still an impressive work if for this reason alone. My vocabulary may be more extensive than most yet I found myself reaching for my dictionary every two or three pages. I was furthermore fascinated with the characters’ conversations, for in marked opposition to contemporary constant shouting competition to shock and awe our colleagues, the meat of their utterances is almost always drowned in delicate, savory sauces to the point where only the most intensive attention can perceive it at all.

Other reviewers make a note that Conrad fractures time as well and tells the tale through the eyes and mouths of several characters at differing occasions. By this artifice no simple, straightforward view of Jim emerges but rather a collage or mural.

Conrad weaves an interesting tale set in the colonial backdrop of the maritime West Indies and old Siam. Basically there are only three or four events to make up the plot and around which to build the character descriptions of the major participants. The central theme of the book is the unveiling of the personality of the central figure, Jim, or Lord Jim.

A quick skim of the predominant critical opinions turns up no mention whatever of what I find to be glaring and fascinating about Jim’s adventures and his approach. Perhaps a recent confrontation with Albert Camus’ scalpel in the hand of the protagonist of “The Fall” affected my point of view. Jim’s abandonment of the pilgrims of the Patna, his heroism and rise to Lordship in the struggle with the hilltop raiders of Patusan, and his final act of contrition, reminded me overmuch of the story of Jesus. It strikes me now as pertinent that both stories are told from a variety of voices, times and points of view.

As Camus abjectly points out, Jesus must have known that He was the sole survivor among his peers of Bethlehem, and might reasonably have carried a terrible psychic burden in a sense of responsibility. Conrad goes into exquisite detail in describing Jim’s similar burden after his inexplicable flight from the Patna. Jesus’ sermon on the mount, his subsequent persuading of the crowds to feed each other with their spare provisions and assorted other miracles and wise teachings, parallel Jim’s fabulous success with the ornamental six-pounders and the element of surprise on the mounts over Patusan. And Jim's adamant refusals to defend and rescue himself from narrow, self-serving accusation is exactly similar to Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.

I come to the end of the book admiring, respecting, honoring, almost loving Jim, notwithstanding all the crowd of deviants, miscreants, and mudfaced maggots who circled about him throughout the book.

Warning

2011-01-22T06:45:00.000-08:00

I can't find correct attribution to the bit about the shoeshine boy in 1929.
Street myth, probably.

Anyway, I just went down to the local hardware store to pay off my tab.
The owner (I've been doing business with him for over 20 years, and
he was an old man, then), started to tell me about the Weimar Republic.
He said that Hitler was a smart man and a good orator, until he went
nuts. And he said that soon, we in the good ole USA are going to need
a wheelbarrow full of cash just to buy a loaf of bread.

If there is anyone who actually reads me, and has any respect at all,
lemme tell you now:
Its time to sell. Everything. And go short. Monday morning, first thing,
if you have not done it already.

Craig's List Personals

2011-01-18T06:27:00.000-08:00

"Why do all the men here want asian or latin women?"

After having been reading these personal ads for awhile,
I have decided to stay with my cat.
But I think I can take a swipe at your question.
I am going to make a generalization,
so of course there will be exceptions,
but I think that the principle is basically accurate.

Having read a lot of these ads,
from a variety of women,
I find that most of them have a very definite idea of what they want,
and whatever it is, none of them seem very interested
in learning anything new or having any new experience that they have not done before,
and none of them seem very interested in compromising their values, either.

In other words, they seem to approach looking for a man
the same way that they go grocery shopping,
they have a list of items that they expect to get
and they will not deviate from the list.

And this seems to be the fundamental difficulty that our whole society has got itself into.
We believe that we can control reality.
For one thing, we believe that we can control risks and largely avoid any serious problems.
For another, we seem to think that we can control other countries and governments.
For another, we think that our government can control our economy.

In other countries, the people tend to be a little bit wiser,
and they realize that there is very little that they can really control,
so they are more willing to accept conditions that may not be totally to their liking.
This makes all women from all other societies more appealing than american women.
In a word, american women are all bitches. Sorry to be so blunt, but that's how almost all men feel. Sadly, the american men have the same attitude problem.
What happens is that after a little while, the new latin or asian or african woman leaves the man because he won't compromise either.

Let me give you one example.
fat is ugly.
Not only is it ugly, but being fat limits your ability to negotiate through this world.
The fatter you are, the less you can move about and do things.
You can't even make love with any authority, all you can do is lie there.
However, obesity is getting more and more common among american men and women.
And all the fat americans take the attitude that if others don't like it, they can stuff it.
That we ought to love fat people. that you can't help it.
None are willing to make any sacrifices, even though it would make your own lives much happier and more successful. All it takes is to close the mought for awhile and suffer
the pangs of hunger now and then. Its not difficult.

Another example.
I ride the train to work.
Usually it is on time but occasionally it can be a half hour or more late,
and once in awhile it gets canceled completely.
This morning, there were two inches of snow and slush on the ground.
The man standing next to me on the platform, besides being fat,
was wearing sandals. Bare toes in the snow.
I suppose that he thought that the weather ought to have more respect for his wants and needs.

does this help any?

-chiz

Cathartic Release

2011-01-16T17:49:00.000-08:00

I was at that age where the dreams of a successful career and a warm, loving family were slightly tarnished but still very much alive. Recently I had begun my second professional job. It had taken a few years of labor to recover from the disastrous first. I was still enjoying the taste of such fruits as paid holidays, sick leave and health benefits.
One workday found me crunched in my chair, cramped in my stomach. Though commuting my ten miles by bike could sometimes be a tad inconvenient, this was more than that. I took the liberty of reporting my malaise and then walking the half-block to my HMO.
It was a slow day at the clinic; the waiting room was empty. A secretary took my health card and then explained to me that their system was to initially assign an assistant “health practitioner”, more than a nurse but less than a doctor, to make an initial assessment. I guess I waited a few minutes before a woman not much older than myself, dressed in a lab coat, came for me and brought me back to a dimly-lit examining room.
After checking vital signs, the woman instructed me to remove my shirt, loosen my belt, and lie down on one of those examining table thingies with the crinkly paper. My cramps were coming and going, here and there in my belly. She began to massage my abdomen expertly with her strong hands. Lying there under someone else’s control, I began to have a little sense come into me about my situation. More than likely, there were some serious bubbles of gas tying up my intestines. As she deftly moved things about, they made a few gurgling sounds.
Gradually, I became even more aware, somewhat the way someone wakes up in the morning on a Saturday, when there are no pressing responsibilities for getting up and the cheerful sunlight is streaming through the curtains. The woman’s firm, friendly hands were ever-so-slightly suggestive. The fact that I had hardly seen anyone else, either staff or patient, in the facility, added to the sense of protection and opportunity.
Most unfortunately, another though intruded upon our secluded solitude. I realized that she cared about me and she wanted very much to help me to feel better, physically. She wanted to bring me a release and relaxation. And this was more than a little bit tempting. However, if she kept on kneading me the way she was, there was a strong and growing possibility that we would both be confronted with a noisy, fragrant, and utterly natural bodily event, quite different than the one she appeared to me to be aiming for. It started to trouble me a great deal that the direction she was taking us in would more than likely end in a culmination which, unfortunately, I would find totally embarrassing and utterly without conjugal merit. I began in fact, sweating, shaking, and praying to God that I not make a total fool of myself.
At my tender age, I forced myself to lie in order to extract myself from impending delight, and disappoint her with my coldness and lack of receptivity. All in all, an utterly unhappy outcome of the situation. I told her I was feeling better and I needed to get back to work. Kinda ruined everything. For a long, long, long, long, long, long time ….

more jobs

2011-01-12T17:17:00.000-08:00

from ZeroHedge:

"How The Fed Spent $2 Trillion And In Exchange We Got 650,000 Temp, Leisure And Retail "Jobs""

"When we looked at the changing composition in the US work force one month ago, we discovered, to our dismay, that since the start of the Depression, the US labor pool has transformed substantially from a full-time time to an increasingly more part-time dominated one. Specifically we found that "America has lost 10.5 million full time jobs, offset by a 2.8 million increase in part time jobs" and that "the US not only lost 478k seasonally adjusted full time workers in November but has lost full time jobs for 6 months in a row, for a total of 1.6 million job losses!" In an attempt to further refine this number, we present some TrimTabs data which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Fed's QE (1, Lite, and 2) efforts, when expressed in labor force "pick up" has been an abysmal failure. To wit: "In 2010, the BLS reports that the economy added 1.12 million jobs. Almost 60% of these jobs are in one of three relatively low-paying areas—temporary employment (308,000), leisure & hospitality (240,000), and retail trade (116,000)."

I realize that the preponderance of american denizons find decimal points, zeroes, and the differences between a million, a billion, and a trillion, abit confusing.

So I will help out.

Two trillion in new debt, divided by 1.1 million jobs, equals $200,000 per job.

Which the taxpayers are expected to pay back. With interest.

Word of the Year

2010-12-29T05:32:00.001-08:00

Nominations now being accepted.

So far, "unexpectedly" is the overwhelming favorite ...

Merry Christmas

2010-12-19T06:40:00.000-08:00

I have always hated this holiday. The crass commercialism and greed, the extreme hypocrisy. So many people find so many memories of disappointments, separation, family abuse. Usually I just choose to work on the day.

I have a T-shirt which reads, “When going into the woods, be sure and remember a compass. It is uncomfortable when you have to eat your friends.”

I got to thinking about how that works. It is not too hard for me to imagine a group of intelligent people, stranded somewhere with a food shortage and only faint hope of rescue. I have been hungry, and desperate, I know how it is. I can imagine them coming to the conclusion that some must live and some must be eaten, and drawing straws or some such. But it’s the afterwards that we don’t think about. Suppose one lives. Then, suppose, MIRACLE! He is rescued. Well, what then? The news reports of his rescue. Sooner or later the grisly details will come out, how it was that he was able to survive. And no matter how rational and reasonable we all feel about the choices, it were better, ultimately for the one who survived, if he had died as well. The stigma, the way everyone else, for the rest of his life, will look at him, and cringe just a little bit. It were better for him if he had died as well.

In his novel, “The Fall”, Albert Camus’ protagonist raises a very similar postulation about Jesus. How was it that this incredible kind, loving man, who did so many wonderful things for so many people, found himself to be condemned by all to death by that horrible torture mechanism? But also, how was it, that he neither did nor said the slightest motion towards his defense? Well, if you remember back to the stories in Matthew of his birth, you recall how his parents high-tailed it to Egypt soon afterwards, and Lo and Behold Herod, in his paranoia, decreed that every young child in the city of Bethlehem be put to death. Only Jesus was spared. And no doubt, though the Bible doesn’t go into it, the adults who taught him reading, and writing, and joinery, and how to tie his shoelaces, undoubtedly told him about how lucky he was and about the gruesome act perpetrated on every other family of the town. It would not have been pleasant for him to hear about it, over and over and over again, as it must have come to pass.

In other words, the atheist and nihilist suggests that it was not supreme love at all which drove Him to the ultimate sacrifice for me and you and all mankind. It was guilt, the kind of guilt that only a man who has eaten his friends could understand.

I’m not saying that I agree. But it’s a potent opinion …tough to ignore … at the very least, Satan tells a good story when he wants to …

Airport Insecurity

2010-11-23T06:40:00.000-08:00

vagrant thought ....

It's kind of too bad that I am not flying anywhere for these holidays ...

because I would just LOVE to get all dressed up
in full drag,
and then put a condom in my pocket (or one of the cups of my bra)
and then just see what they do(you DO know that the metallic package
will set off the magnetometer ...)

A prayer

2010-10-28T17:16:00.001-07:00

Our banker, who art in Manhatten,
forged be thy name.
Thy sheriff come,
Thy affadavit be done
In Florida as it is in New York City.
Show us this day our original note,
Or else forgive us our debts
As we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into bankruptcy
But deliver us from penury

For in thy pockets are the president, the congressmen, and
The federal reserve chairman,
Forever and ever.

ah, men!

where is the beef?

2010-10-28T12:13:00.000-07:00

Wondering where the revolution is?
Where is the anger? The riots, strikes, political rallies, demonstrations, sit-downs?

It is here, all around us.
Every day, another ten thousand people decide not to make their payments,
not to meet their contractual obligations.

Most of them, because they can't.

Some of them, because they realize
that the bankers and investment houses and politicians (of both parties)
have rigged the country and the system
to commit rape, pillage and fraud upon everyone else,
negating anyone's moral obligation to play along.

The system is now bleeding from every orifice and
the situation is rapidly deteriorating.
Jobs and income-producing assets, are all rapidly declining.

It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

The Book of Enoch

2010-10-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

From wikipedia:

“The Book of Enoch (also 1 Enoch[1]) is an ancient Jewish religious work, ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. It is not currently regarded as part of the Canon of Scripture as used by Jews, apart from the Beta Israel canon; nor by any Christian group, apart from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church canon.”

“Eleven Aramaic-language fragments of the Book of Enoch were found in cave 4 of Qumran in 1948,[33] and are in the care of the Israel Antiquities Authority.”

“The famous Scottish traveller James Bruce in 1773 returned to Europe from six years in Abyssinia with three copies of a Ge'ez version”

“The first English translation of the Bodleian/Ethiopic manuscript was published in 1821 by Richard Laurence”

“The publication, in the early 1950s, of the first Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls profoundly changed the study of the document, as it provided evidence of its antiquity and original text. The official edition of all Enoch fragments appeared in 1976, by Jozef Milik.”

Scholars have established that this collection of books was written and assembled between about 300 B.C and about 50 B.C. There are parallel passages with books of the Old Testament. There are also quotes from Jesus indicating that He may well have been familiar with this work. And yet, it lost to any of the western versions of The Bible from the earliest compilations of the “Old” and New” “Testaments”, surviving intact only through continuous use in Ethiopia.

So: I had to read it.

Although Joseph Lumpkin’s translation does not make any natural divisions, the “Book of Enoch” easily falls into five distinct texts. These cover:
1. The book of Watchers
2. The parables of Enoch
3. A treatise on Astronomy
4. The Book of Dream Visions
5. The epistle of Enoch

My thoughts, in order of easiest to hardest:

The book of astronomy shows a greater respect for number systems and for mankind taking the measure of his world, than any other spiritual work. It shows clearly the Babylonian influence and their 60/360 counting system. It shows the correction of the calendar year from 360 to 364 days and has an even more accurate description of the orbit and phases of the moon. Not a bad job, for those days, and quite a surprise to find within a “spiritual” work.
The epistle is a simple prophetic send-off from Enoch to his descendants, including vague references to Noah and the flood, but also of the coming of the Son of Man and the end of evil. But its tame stuff with no specifics.

What others dubbed “the parables” I found to be a description of heaven suitable for a cartographer, rendered in the form of relating a special tour Enoch was given by one of God’s angels. I wondered if anyone has set out to actually map the place, given the description. There are mountains, valleys, rivers, streams, fields, and deserts, all in their place. It actually does not sound too different from this planet.

The Book of Dream Visions is written in the same style as the Book of Revelations. In metaphoric terms and with symbols of sheep and shepherds, bulls, dogs, eagles, and kits, it suggests a synopsis of the history of mankind, most especially the Hebrews, from Noah down through Jesus and culminating in a cataclysm resembling the Armageddon or second coming which many Christians believe is foretold through sections of the New Testament.

I refrained from starting any mental exercise of assignment; this sheep is this person, that death is that event, down and down and down. Clearly the book is vague enough that it could be applied with benefit by anybody wishing to make a political argument. However, I was strongly attentive to the description of shepherds assigned by angels or The Lord. The “shepherd” is a heavily-used metaphor throughout the Bible. However, nowhere in our Bible does anyone mention the ultimate outcome for many of the sheep. We probably overlook this simple aspect of that occupation. All shepherds are assigned from time to time to cull the herd and provide suitable animals for slaughter for food. That’s a pretty amusing aspect of my own culture which tends to want to glorify and sustain all life and all living things and pretend that we don’t ever deliberately kill animals and other people. In the Book of Enoch, however, there is a group of shepherds who were selected to carry out this task but who became overzealous in their duties. Later they received dire punishment for their excesses. I can’t ever remember reading or hearing anywhere else of anybody being chastised or punished for “killing too many”. Perhaps its an idea that could be brought back (especially know that its becoming more and more evident to more and more individuals that this planet can no longer support all the people who are here.)

Others have referred to the first section, the “Book of Watchers” as an account of the origins of evil. We may already be familiar with stories about Lucifer and his fall from grace, his revolt, perhaps we have also heard of Lilith, and though we consider these figures to be part of the Judeau-Christian religion, they are not really included in our Bible.

The Book of Watchers goes into great detail about a group of angels who came down from heaven and corrupted both themselves and the men and women on earth. I found myself recollecting the stories from Greek Mythology of Chronos, of Prometheus, of the Titans, even of Cyclops and other giants. There is an uncanny similarity here worthy of Joseph Campbell’s attention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell
Since it is known that Greek dominance came to Israel with Alexander and stayed, this is probably not purely coincidental. In the Watchers account, the angels bring not only fire but the knowledge of metallurgy, including knowledge of gold, from which so much human suffering has disseminated. (Interesting that brimstone, that other traditional scourge threatened from so many pulpits also known as sulphur, is the other necessary ingredient for the refinement of copper and gold.) Historically, the Philistines had been masters of iron ore and probably taught the Hebrews when conquered. Not long after that the copper mines of Timna came to play a prominent roll in their commerce and led to Solomon’s wealth, and untold generations of sorrow afterwards. In sum, the ancients seemed to have a pretty good understanding of the tribulations and suffering which our discovery of metallurgy has brought down upon us all. Neither they nor we have yet devised any solution.

I have covered the bits and pieces which stuck out for me, the book is now readily available in an English translation, perhaps I have tweaked your curiosity enough to go look and see for yourself what you may find.

Parrots and Monkeys

2010-10-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.elfwood.com/~stay1or/Parrot-Monkey-.3252926.html

This is reprinted from a post of mine on Yahoo Finance, made tuesday morning before the market opened ... by the end of the day, the DOW was up 200 pts, with gold, silver and oil all hitting new yearly highs

From time to time my "plebian" friends ask me about
getting in to the market.
If they are really interested, I start them out
by explaining that there is just tons and tons of material to read,
that they need to read read read all the time.
But I explain further that there are basically two types of authors,
parrots, and monkeys.

The parrots are just repeating stuff they have heard somewhere else, some other time.
They have no idea of the sense of what they are talking about, they just like to make noise.

However, interspersed among them are a handful of monkeys,
who know very well what they are saying,
and who are determined to makes fools out of you and me.

If you can identify who the monkeys are,
and bet the other way from the way they try to lead you,
you can't go wrong ...

Goldman Sachs has again revised downward
their estimates for the quarterly GDP.
Its looking pretty ugly.

CNBC is saying that we could be having a little dip here.

I'm putting the accelerator to the floor ....

bi-polar

2010-09-26T06:04:00.000-07:00

As far as the scam goes, I am happy for the scam artists to continue to take advantage of the naïve, for just as long as they are able. I decided quite a long time ago that I was not going to get involved, not make a crusade out of it, not attempt to right the wrongs.

I have a “condition.” It is as much a part of me as my skin color. Furthermore, it is not any more likely to change than my skin color, no matter what I or anyone else do (thirty years ago I remember how my dear friend Lonnie used to pee in the bath to make her skin lighter. Um, it did not work …). This condition is just one of the enormous gifts which my Lord has given to me; no human being has the power to take it away and it is arrogance to pretend that they can.

The condition consists of an intense emotionality which may, at times, not be connected with anything in the present environment, anything in my personal life, or anything in the past, any traumatic experience or bad thing that my parents or teachers or priests did to me, and while there are occasions when empathy with events beyond my traditional senses may be the root, there are times when there is, simply, no cause.
Like the throw of the dice, sometimes you get snake-eyes. Or, in currently-popular jargon, its just “drama”, or theatre, or make-believe entertainment.

At any given time, I may be subject to intense grief and sadness. Sobs, tears pour out of my eyes. At any given time, I may be subject to intense anger. In almost every circumstance, this means taking myself out of action and not trying to do anything or relate with any person, because most other people don’t care to be on the receiving end of it. At any given time, I may be subject to intense feelings of elation, fun and spontaneity. I am known as someone who can do anything, at any time, a master of the unexpected.

There are certain other gifts from God which seem to be more or less connected with this one. I was blessed with extreme intelligence; in other words, I am very, very good at taking intelligence tests. I am smarter than you are, and no amount of jealousy, envy, or power plays on your part will change that. I fully understand that this is not something that I did, it is something that God gave me. I would be happy to share and give it away in any way that I can. Sadly, most people around me view it as a call to compete, to show me up. This results in a lot of other people experiencing a lot of bad accidents.

The situation is exacerbated by my “creativity” and willingness to experiment. I like to believe that I have made more different mistakes than anyone on earth. Of course, I remember every one and all of the more egregious ones I avoid repeating. However, I have found that it is just fruitless to attempt to warn anyone else, this only seems to encourage this “competitive spirit” that I mention above and egg them on towards their destruction. Have you ever read the Odyssey from the point of view of the Sirens? What a sad, lonely existence they must have had!

Just a few words about the scam, from my point of view. Other individuals have gifts similar to mine. In this culture we have built up complex structures and procedures for labeling this condition as an illness, a medical condition. We have special doctors, counselors, hospitals, clinics, medicines, and so forth. The pretense here is that this “condition” can be “cured”. I go back to skin color.

No doubt some of the doctors understand the lie very well. My first shrink moved away to Palm Beach, evidently understanding that rich people make better shills. My last shrink was having fun (and getting paid!) with a patient who was so brain-dead that he could lift his arm into the air and the “patient” would hold it there for hours on end. There is of course necessary collusion from the parents, whose primary interest is to make the individuals less irritating, at any cost. I remember a particular president of NAMI … she was the most hateful, obnoxious human being that I have ever run across in my life. If I had been her son I would have had to kill myself too. That was simply the most egregious example I know of people vilifying their own offspring in order to clear their own names and deny their responsibility.

I saw recently where Seraquel is being given to soldiers returning from Afghanistan. Evidently, the government lying to them about freedom and democracy, sacrifice and honor, while asking them to invade a foreign country and kill innocent women and children, has a permanent impact on their point-of-view of the world. It tends to make them less amenable to cooperation and friendship when they return home. I cannot understand why.

After I had washed out all the other drugs, mostly, from my system, I still had a few 25 mg pills left, and a few times I took them to help me get to sleep. One 25mg pill would guarantee that I was asleep in 20 minutes, regardless of where I was or what I was doing (driving? Waiting for the train? Arguing with my wife?). Moreover, I would stay asleep, dreamless and unsatisfied, for 12 hours or more. Finally, when I awoke I would be groggy and thick-heade for another several hours.

The doctors had had me on 300 mg/day. They wanted me to go up to 400. I would take 200 at night, 100 in the morning. There actually were several times when I awoke, got ready for work, took my pills, went to the train platform, and fell asleep standing on the platform just as the train pulled in (God loves me very, very much. He sent someone to catch me each time.)

At sixty, with a whole lot of assistance from God and despite the strong, steady mistral from my culture, I fully understand these waves of emotion. I have enough sense, when the situation allows it, to take myself out of communion with other people, since some of them they try to damage me for. I can’t always do that. I do find that there is no other human being who will remain as partner to me and share intimate space with me. As a relationship develops, everyone sooner or later decides that they can fix me, so they end up shipwrecked on those rocks.

So it goes. That’s just how it is.

Unemployment Benefits

2010-09-24T06:02:00.000-07:00

Unemployment benefits were a bad idea.
Another way that the government has tried to protect its citizens from small misfortunes.
I return, over and over again, to Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) poem
"The wonderful one-hoss shay".
If you pile all the small risks onto a single entity,
then, by-and-by, it is sure to happen, sooner or later,
that the entity itself will collapse.
By smoothing out the little bumps, you ensure that the big bumps will be total calamities.
No one can eliminate risk in this world and only fools try.

I hired my ex-girlfriend's boyfriend (and now common-law husband)
to install the wood furnace for me
(I took care of procuring it myself,
I had to,
because there is only one factory in the country that makes them
and I was able to find out that they have a huge backlog.
I found one, gathering dust in a tractor shop in the styx,
and I immediately went and got it).

He called all the HVAC places in the yellow pages.
They all wanted to sell me heat pumps.
Other than that, they would not take the job,
either because it was too small or because it wasn't heat pumps.
He finally found a duct man who knew what he was doing, who wanted to moonlight.
The man is good and he is almost finished. He does nice, careful work
and good planning.
but yesterday,
his assistant quit.

Why?
Because the assistant was angry that he was not getting $500 for 24 hours of labor.

excuse me?
That's as much as I am paid for what I do!!!!

When people start to collect unemployment,
they tend not to look very hard for work.
They aren't serious about it.
They are not hungry.
Even, some of them won't moonlight for cash.
Extending their benefits leads them to believe
that they can go on watching tv all day forever.

Besides, it does not take too long before they begin to lose their skills,
forget how to do the jobs they knew how to do before.
They get fat and lazy.

things are going downhill fast. very fast.

MERS cannot foreclose

2010-09-16T03:14:00.001-07:00

This is a quote from an email I have just received --
I presume the guy who sent it will be happy for me to spread it around.

http://mandelman.ml-implode.com/2010/07/...'t-foreclose-citibank-can't-collect/

"Any attempt to transfer the beneficial interest of a trust deed without ownership of the underlying note is VOID under California Law."

If you read that sentence and thought… "MERS," then you're already in the club. If you've never heard of MERS, and have no idea what is meant by being "in the club," don't worry, this is a club that just about every homeowner is invited to join. In fact, you may already be a member and not even know it.

MERS is the acronym used to describe Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. Best I can tell, our friends in the mortgage banking industry created MERS to make it easier for banks and servicers to sell and transfer our mortgages at the speed of light during the real estate bubble. According to the company's Website:

MERS was created by the mortgage banking industry to streamline the mortgage process by using electronic commerce to eliminate paper. Our mission is to register every mortgage loan in the United States on the MERS® System.

MERS acts as nominee in the county land records for the lender and servicer. Any loan registered on the MERS® System is inoculated against future assignments because MERS remains the nominal mortgagee no matter how many times servicing is traded.

I have to tell you… I hate these guys already. Their attitude alone bothers me. I looked at pictures of their three top executives on their Website and thought to myself… "No way I'd be friends with these guys." Probably not very fair of me, but as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to anything that talks like that and was created by the mortgage banking industry… "fair," is where you go on Sunday to have popcorn and cotton candy. Just so we're clear.

MERS, which is a company that I hear doesn't even have employees, has been about as controversial as you get ever since houses started dropping like flies into foreclosure back in 2007-08. God forbid you find yourself losing your home to foreclosure, you'll very likely find a representative from MERS looking smug and acting like the owner of your mortgage. But, MERS is not the owner of your mortgage, of course, and now a bankruptcy court judge in the Eastern District of California has officially said that he agrees.

MERS is a relatively new development in the mortgage world, and as the foreclosure crisis began the courts pretty much let them do whatever they wanted to do, as the party in interest in a foreclosure action.

But, that was before the foreclosures became a full fledged tsunami, and homeowners watched the bankers first get bailed out, and then pay out billions in bonuses before treating every single American homeowner/taxpayer who applied for a loan modification like insignificant garbage.

In response, homeowners, having been trained for over 200 years in the fine art of pushing back when shoved, went to their lawyers, and those lawyers started asking questions, as they are prone to do. Many started with questions like: "Who the heck is this MERS guy and why does he think he has any right to be foreclosing on my client's home?"

For almost two full years, it seemed to me that judges, who frankly weren't used to foreclosures being challenged, basically yawned and gave the house back to the bank. Then, starting about a year ago, give or take, things started to change. Judges started to listen to the points being raised as related to MERS showing up as the party in interest ready to foreclose, and the more the judges learned, the more they saw problems with what MERS was doing. As time went on the tide seemed to shift a bit and several decisions weren't falling as MERS would have liked for one reason or another.

According to the company's Website, MERS "is a proper party that can lawfully foreclose as the mortgagee and note-holder of a mortgage loan." Here's what it says on the MERS Website:

FORECLOSURES

("MERS") is In mortgage foreclosure cases, the plaintiff has standing as the holder of the note and the mortgage. When MERS forecloses, MERS is the mortgagee and it is the holder of the note because a MERS officer will be in possession of the original note endorsed in blank, which makes MERS a holder of the bearer paper.

But, in this latest decision, the bankruptcy judge in California didn't agree, writing in his opinion:

"Since no evidence of MERS' ownership of the underlying note has been offered, and other courts have concluded that MERS does not own the underlying notes, this court is convinced that MERS had no interest it could transfer to Citibank. Since MERS did not own the underlying note, it could not transfer the beneficial interest of the Deed of Trust to another. Any attempt to transfer the beneficial interest of a trust deed without ownership of the underlying note is void under California law."

Did you get that? Since MERS didn't own the underlying note, it couldn't transfer the beneficial interest of the Deed of Trust to Citibank.

Healthcare

2010-08-04T06:26:00.000-07:00

the only way to fix the situation ... is not going to happen ....

Doctors, clinics, hospitals and homes must be made to be accountable for their procedures,
patients and parties responsible for paying must have motivation to control costs.
The only way to do that is to totally ban health insurance
and require all procedures to be paid for with cash in advance.
If you aint got the bucks, you dont get the help.

its cold I know, but its necessary.
The "profit motive has so overwhelmed the "standard operating procedures"
that the customary ways that doctors and nurses and hospitals do things
are wasteful and unnecessary and unhelpful in the extreme, motivated solely
for their self-interest.
It has been so much easier to manipulate and take advantage of a large group of people (the insured) than it is to take advantage of an individual.

Example:
I recently went to a cosmetologist with a skin problem,
its simply eczema, dry skin aggravated by stress.
But he still took a small sample to test for cancer,
even though it does not present as cancer at all.
Moreover, he put a fucking stitch in the skin where he too the 1mm square patch,
so that I had to go back to his office to get the stitch taken out two weeks later!

cost of his "surgery" --$250
cost of the biopsy -- $350
cost of the stitch removal -- $90

Now, he did not even tell me in advance what he was doing,
or else I would have blocked it.
My insurance company will go ahead and approve this "preventive medicine".

But this is the kind of thing that makes our medical system the most expensive in the world
without being anywhere close to the most beneficial system in the world.

-chiz

Advice

2010-07-18T04:38:00.000-07:00

People have asked me why my blogs have been tapering off.
Despite a disastrous winter (it took me quite awhile to
assimilate the enormity of what the government is doing,
behind the veil.) I am still one of the top amateur investors
in the country.
About two months ago I was driving around, maybe looking for
free firewood, maybe just looking. I ran across a car with a
bumper sticker that said, "Bark less. Wag more."
Made sense to me. Still does. More and more ...

fracking

2010-06-11T06:11:00.000-07:00

There is a new story on the NPR website
from an amateur investigator
declaiming the process of "fracking"
for extracting natural gas from shale substrate.

basically the article claims that the chemicals used,
pollute the groundwater.

I really don't know, firsthand, if there is any truth to this
or if its just muckraking and fearmongering.
I tend to doubt its veracity because the average natural gas well into shale
is 7,000 feet or more deep.

Americans are going to find that
the only energy source remaining to them
will be the predominant one now employed in Ethiopia,
where there are as many asses on the streets as cars ...

From a Distance

2010-06-01T02:37:00.000-07:00

I am tired of talking about it. Really, I have only been talking to myself, anyway.

From the time when I was a very little boy I have been ostracized. I still
don't "get" why, but it is what it is. My own family, my work comrades, my wives, everybody; they all label me as "crazy", "different", simply damaged or wrong.

I test out as very much more intelligent than most people. I test consistently as triple sigma. Teachers, parents, mentors all my life have told me what a gift that is and that I should do something with it for mankind. But you know what? You
do not want me to. All of you are simply jealous and envious, you all put me down, spend serious time just trying to prove me wrong. The only ones who look at me eye-to-eye are cats. All of you who can read are too busy putting poison ivy leaves on my butt when I'm asleep and then accusing me of having herpes when I wake up.

And the effect of that is to give me distance. I have no vested interest in this society, in this culture. It is neither better nor worse than any other culture that has ever come along. You all are every bit as crazy as the nazi's cremating all those jews or the late romans going to the coliseum every week to watch the latest christian do battle with the most recent lion.

Every one of you knows the story of the emperor's clothes, you were taught as little children. The sad thing is that every one of you is wearing clothing that was made from little bits of the same cloth. You all are just too embarrassed to admit it. Its not just the emperor who is naked, its every single one of you.

Show is over folks.

I'm not sorry.

Prices

2010-05-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

I went in to the local Roy Rogers fast food outlet yesterday
(never mind why, it certainly was not for myself!). On one
section of their price board, above and behind the cashiers, was
the following list:

bottled water $1.45
coffee or tea $1.25
milk $1.10
orange juice $1.35

Now, I lead a lonely life here. I insist that nearly everybody in
my culture is insane, and as a result, must people want nothing to do
with me. But am I really wrong? What am I missing?

Solution

2010-05-21T02:27:00.000-07:00

There is one, and only one, way out of this crisis.

The crisis was brought about, slowly, over a very long period of time, by allowing for too many debts; for loaning too much money to too many people who will never be able to pay it off. (It was bad judgment on the part of the bankers,
to begin with. They created it by taking too high risks.)

It cannot be fixed the way that they are trying to fix it now;
everything that is being done is the equivalent of throwing gasoline
on the fire. It cannot be fixed any other way. Either you do it or else
it will be done to you by forces that are bigger than you are.

The only way out is for all debts, public and private, to be forgiven.
Wiped off the books. Start over.

You cannot postpone it much longer ... we are about to see civil
unrest and general social collapse ... your money is all worthless anyway,
it has no value at all ... the emperor has been quite naked for such
a very long time ...

Endgame

2010-05-14T06:11:00.000-07:00

I interpreted last thursday's 1000-point drop, and subsequent recovery,
to be the warning-signal to anyone still in the water, that the sharks are coming.
My own portfolio was heavily short. I happened to close out most of the shorts
when I saw the jaw-dropping changes; then reopened them just before the closing
bell, so I had a profitable day. Even after the next monday's gap up I was
still looking good. After that, of course, I took on even more shorts.
That leaves only one gold position as a naked long, everything else is hedged or
short.
From what I'm reading about the deterioration in European markets, I
believe that not even the PPT can keep stocks from falling now. For what its
worth, I stand to clean up better than John Paulson did last time. I
seriously doubt that I'll ever be able to actually spend the cash.
The only thing saving us all from instantaneous breakdown is us shorts;
I'm quite aware that there's a whole lot of savvy folk like me, who
have gone short with a whole lot more wealth than I have.
I traded my physical gold for a piece of real estate last month.
I expect gold to continue up for awhile. However, in a situation of
anarchy and general social collapse, owning gold is not going to be
good for one's health. Not with americans armed to the teeth and
drugged to a frenetic torpor with CNBC.
The internet itself will not last too much longer. Satellites have
a way of drifting out of orbit when they are not closely monitored.
Infrastructure requires constant vigilant maintenance. However,
more and more of the intellectual giants find that the only stimulating,
fascinating endeavors lie in the arena of finding new holes and
more devious exploits.
I pay for old sins. My parents had imminent trust in "the establishment"
and they turned me over to the psychiatrists, I expect as much in order
to protect me from the drafty winds blowing towards southeast asia as
because of genuine concern fore my behavior. Still, I believed in
personal change as much as social change, so I gave them enough rope
to do real damage to my body. With my smattering of chemistry, I surmise that
Lithium, the drug of first choice for bipolar, mainly acts by binding
with any free iodine in order to short-circuit the thyroid gland and
just radically dampen-down all bodily function. Yes, it definitely
reduces the intensity of emotional expression, and the parents and doctors
and nurses have no idea of what that feels like from the inside, where
the turmoils and dilemmas are just as intense, they just don't show themselves.
Of course it does, as the metabolism slows, the cholesteral and weight rise, the
kidneys, liver, and gastric system all begin to deteriorate. In enough time,
the thyroid typically sustains permanent damage so that stopping the lithium
cannot save you. Thyroid replacement hormone is a safe, simple, well-understood mechanism. If there is enough of a social system exisitng in the world in
order for drug factories to produce it and pharmacies to dispense it. If not,
a young man will slowly become very, very sick. An older man like myself
will whither. I hope it does not take too very long.

God will be with all of you. After a generation or two, the detritus of our
failed culture will whither and become overgrown. Nature will be able to heal
itself and overgrow all our pathetic and ugly social structures. Life itself
will survive and prosper. People will learn to trust and to rely on each other
again, they will learn that giving is a better means of survival than taking.
I just won't be there to see it. But still, its okay, I know that its coming.

chistletoe,(formerly "Pan" of "Pan and Dora")

From a Distance

2010-05-09T07:31:00.000-07:00

My mother asked me recently where she can invest
her assets to keep them safe, from the volatile market
and the rapacious government.
This is how I answered:

It has been said that the safest place to hide your store of food
is in your neighbor's belly.

My only caveat is that I was born into a race full of "takers"
near the peak of their power ... the people in control
take everything they can get their hands on, from everybody,
and give back nothing in return.
their time is over --
its been over ever since they ran out of new people to take from
(the chinese are finally wisening up)

still, among the poorer folk of the world
I have found that most still operate as givers,
where the measure of a man is the amount that he is able to give away.
Like, I have to be the only white man you know
who has a black man come around and mow his lawn out of friendship,
from time to time ... never mind what I do to get that kind of respect ...
Almaz and I agree that Ethiopia is the country of love
while the USA is the country of money ...
but it took her years and years to begin to really understand how everyone here,
especially the rich,
are trying to take money away from her all the time and give nothing back in return.

I could relate some stories about love and sex in Ethiopia
which would be totally misunderstood here
because people here treat sex the same way,
as something to be "taken" from the other person
rather than as a chance to give pleasure ...

The other issue which our society and culture have totally botched
is the issue of security.
Never in history has a society gone to such extremes
to give people the illusion of total protection.
Not only insurance for nearly everything,
but cars are like cocoons, and cubicles and baby carriages and flu shots
and everything.
derivatives, basically, were designed to be financial insurance,
before people on the other side of the transaction began to treat them as leverage.

As Elizabeth Warren (one of our more favorite people these days) puts it,
"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell."
There must be risk for the system to work.
There must be the potential for failure and calamity of all kinds.

What has happened is that we have made the US government into
the risk-defender of last resort,
the insurance companies' insurance,
the one who protects all of the other organizations that protect.

And what is happening now
(I've said this to a lot of people but not to you yet)
is very much like what Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was describing
in "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay"
where everything is going wrong all at the same time
and the protector of last resort is failing, spectacularly.

From a distance, it makes for quite a show.

Employment Charts

2010-04-09T03:47:00.001-07:00

Natural Gas Issues

2010-03-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

Some honest information for you and your liberal friends:

AES corporation has been applying for all the permits and permissions
for a couple of years now
to build an LNG terminal on the site of
the old Bethlehem Steel plant at Sparrows Point, Baltimore Harbor.

Governor O'Malley, numerous Maryland politicians and pressure groups
have been trying to block this terminal construction for years.

5 years ago, after Katrina devastated wells in the GOM,
US gas supplies were dangerously low. Gas went over $15/therm.
Since then, however, new "unconventional" sources have been exploited
at a feverish rate. The current spot price of natural gas,
about $4.20 per million btu, is about 50 cents per gallon of gasoline equivalence,
the cheapest that it has been for almost ten years.
Future development in the Marcellus shale, in hydrofracking, and in coalbed methane pockets suggest that the east coast will have a plentiful supply for decades to come.

Me and my friends are thoroughly convinced that this terminal is meant to be
an EXPORT terminal, not import.
I'm sure you can understand the benefits
that the USA would receive for selling gas to western Europe.
This also includes their dependence on us and their future stability
and their independence from Russian gas, Gazprom, and the Ukraine pipeline issues.

There is a prevailing street myth that LNG terminals are dangerous.
Certainly all forms of energy involve some risk.
Do you believe that the people who tell you these stories really care about you?
Even if you only rely on a mule to plow your field,
there is always the chance that he will kick you in the keister.
However, there are numerous LNG terminals in operation all over the world,
including another in the State of Maryland,
and none have ever incurred any serious accidents.
In fact, natural gas is not prone to creating large explosions in the open air
because it will only burn when the percentage mixture of gas and oxygen is within
a very tight range.

On the other hand much of the "spring water" bottled water which we enjoy in the region,
which tastes so much better than city water,
originates from coalbed methane gas wells.
Who knows what other unintended benefits might come our way?

One of the strongest causes for the current economic crisis in the USA
is that we have virtually no products for the rest of the world.
The only things that we currently export
are suspicious Wall Street paper,
and Hollywood movies,
and all our miscellaneous and endless wars.
These do not win us friends, nor do they win us hard currency.

Building the terminal would make jobs.
Operating the terminal would make jobs.
Drilling for gas, building pipelines to the harbor, and selling it
would make jobs.
Heck, all of this activity would even generate new tax revenues!

That seems like a good thing, to me, right now.
Worth a little risk, don't you think?

Do You Think What You Think You Think?

2010-03-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom immediately seduced me with their second chapter (Who begins anything at the beginning, anymore?). “So you think you’re logical?” has four little puzzles or exercises, each one about two pages long but really pretty simple, logically. By the third one, I was getting a little antsy because the underlying logic was identical in each puzzle. The fourth repeated the pattern.

But the authors then astounded me by saying that only maybe one out of 4 or 5 people get the first and second puzzle right but the majority get the third and fourth one right. The differences are that the first and second present basically abstract situations involving cards, colors and shapes. However, the third and fourth puzzles involve situations more nearly parallel with real-word problems, such as beer drinking and surfing the Internet at work.

So the first thing that I got out of the chapter was a poignant reminder that, as someone who thinks logically and intelligently, I am in a small minority in the population. Its no wonder that so many people treat me as if I am different. I am.

I went back to the first chapter. It involved an exercise of agreeing or disagreeing with thirty “opinions” which most individuals in my culture in my day would be likely to have a clear prior judgment of agreement or disagreement. As it turns out, they are in pairs but shuffled, where one pair is a specific instance and the other a more general statement. Here’s an example:
14. “Judgments about works of art are purely a matter of individual taste."
25. "Michelangelo is one of history’s foremost artists."

Can you see how agreeing with both of those statements would be a near-contradiction? Out of fifteen so-called “tensions” I only selected one such contradiction and even there I was quibbling with the authors about how much leeway “more or less” gives to a truth sentence.

Once again, the authors found my consistency to be remarkable. Through extensive administering of the same little exercise to many different people in different circumstances, they have found that most peoples' opinions are terribly inconsistent, instead most people disagree with themselves most of the time!
Given the current state of affairs of my society, that's not hard to see.

From there, however, the book slogs into some pretty dense jungle. There is a chapter which attempts to help the reader pinpoint his definitions of God, what attributes and qualities God is supposed to have. But here the authors take a dramatic suspension of their quasi-logical approach to everything by the use of the pronoun “She” in reference to God. I fail to see a logical reason for using that pronoun and they never explain their use. Its only purpose seems to be for artistic or emotional effect and it seems completely contrary to everything I had read in the book up to that point.

I put the book down and reviewed again my remarkable recent discovery of the contributions and life of Kurt Godel (he was a 20th century mathematician who had as much impact on logic as his contemporary Einstein had on physics.) Ultimately what Godel contributed was a proof that any logical system had to be, by definition, incomplete and also capable of supporting statements which are internally inconsistent,
such as paradoxes. I got all the way through this book on logic and found the names of many famous logicians and philosophers cited as sources, but not Godels’ nor was there any hint that such “flaws” in the perfect world of logic as conceived by Hilbert and others, lay in wait for the unwary.

The next chapter was entitled “taboos”” Here again, I differ from a lot of people but I know that already. I practice “judge not lest ye be judged” far more than most people and I am less apt than most to hold universal moral judgments on particular behaviors taken out of context. Here, however, the authors went so far in their efforts to try to trip people up that they made a logic error of their own. In exercise three, part one mentions doing an “unnatural act” in complete secrecy and then part two, you learn about a society where members may perform such an act in equanimity. However, these two are not comparable in the way the authors try to represent, because doing something in complete secrecy is totally different from doing something for which you may be judged by your peers. The two cannot be compared or contrasted. I am quite, quite certain that there are all kinds of very strange goings on behind closed doors in my own culture among my own peers, that we don’t make moral statements about or judge each other about, because we simply do not know that they are happening. In fact, I have long supported the logical supposition that all of the people that I deal with on a frequent basis, as soon as they are out of my sight, earshot, and nose, turn into putrid green monsters traversing an environment totally askew to anything I have ever seen or imagined, only to return to their false front the next time they cross my path. And, that it makes no difference, either to me or to them, that this happens.

The most pronounced logical inconsistency of the authors' came up several times,
consisting of a cultural bias presumed by them to be a natural truth -- that
love will always act to eliminate or reduce suffering. In the universe where I find myself, suffering is a significant experience and it is a very necessary prelude
to changing behavior patterns and learning new ones. In my culture, in contemporary times, I see a mass insanity and one big contribution to it is this mistaken presumption, that eliminating or masking or hiding pain and suffering is always desirable, loving and morally correct. I see that nothing could be further from the truth. I see that the overwhelming reliance on addicting prescription pain medications is not beneficial to anyone. I find the insistence on "always being positive" by the management culture in my employment situation brings about incredibly absurd contortions on the part of nearly everyone which ultimately result in virtually no constructive work being accomplished by anyone. I further believe that the reduction or elimination or hiding of small pains and inconveniences throughout the culture will eventually result in the unleashing of massive suffering, perhaps on a scale as has never been seen before in history. And maybe that has already begun.

After getting that far I began to suspend my engagement with the book and devote some of my focus to critical reexamination. There are several more exercises. I came to stronger conclusions that the authors themselves are more trapped by their own cultures and idiosyncrasies than they have any idea about. One of my strongest objections came up in a section discussing belief in God. The authors' prose suggest that all beliefs in God are based either on evidence, on proof, or on “faith”. It never occurs to them that there are other possibilities. The generalization that “religion is the opium of the masses” should be well-known and understood. A lesser-known but powerful other alternative is that belief in God is functional; that is to say, it enables escape from arrogance without endangering dependence on other people or peoples. Such a purpose for belief in God is totally “outside the box” that the authors are in.

So, ultimately, I finished the book unsatisfied, thinking that the smug authors think more nearly like the illogical people that they seem to chide frequently, than they think like me.

God’s Way is the Safeway

2010-03-21T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Holy Bible is rather like the supermarket, isn’t it.

Inside the covers, you will find whole chickens, chicken legs, chicken breasts, chicken tenders, chicken livers, canned chicken, chicken noodle soup, and chicken bouillon. You will find fresh vegetables, frozen vegetables, canned vegetables, and vegetable juice. The one store serves literally thousands of different people, with thousands of different tastes. Some come in with a month’s list, some come in with a few ideas and a hunger, some come in just to grab something quick for lunch, and some may come in just to find someone else to flirt with.
There may be one or two things in that store that you have never tried, or only tried once. There might be anchovies, chitlins, beef liver and spam. There might be juice with artificial lemon flavoring or furniture polish with real lemon.
There might be other things in the store that you buy over and over again. When there is snow in the forecast, you can just about be certain that there will be no bread, milk or toilet paper left on the shelves.
There may be some people coming into the store who only buy the same three or four different products every time that they come in there, never venturing to sample anything else. They rub shoulders with other people who keep a great variety of edibles and ingredients in their sumptuous kitchens, and then eat out every night. It’s a safe guess
that the person who has tried every item in the whole store is a rare one indeed!
Most of us simply do not know how we could ever manage our lives without the supermarket. On the other hand, we might never, never, never buy brussel sprouts or prune juice. God help the people who do. Thanks Safeway that they are there for them.

God Knows

2010-03-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

God Knows, many people would be offended by this book. God knows, any work of art worthy of any consideration, is greeted with outrage and effrontery as it upends everyone’s “comfortable values” and challenges the senses on multiple levels. I have not laughed so hard for many a day. God knows, people on the commuter train, in my office, even in the bathroom, were wondering what the heck was giving me so much fun.

Joseph Heller has taken a serious knowledge of the Old Testament, combined it with artifacts of history, art, music, and the lot of the modern Jewish boy, and produced a firsthand account of the life of David. He brings the characters alive, put flesh on their bones, color in their cheeks, and adds here and there a few blemishes, pot bellies, whines and cheese. The descriptions of Michal as the original Jewish American Princess and Abishag as so beauteous, patient kind, and insecure, really bring them to life. The descriptions of Saul’s melancholia and paranoia, and how David followed him down that same road in his later years, give an exquisite picture of what it really must mean to make it to the top of the heap in this world.

If you are the sort of person who revels in the discovery of a new word such as “assherd” to add to your regular usage, then I thoroughly recommend you check this out. Or, if you would like to review the stories that you learned in vacation bible school, told in such a way that the boys might escape to the john to read it amongst themselves, well, you know what to do. If you want to learn the extent of the hebrew empire under its greatest poet and military strategist, and then consider what has happened to every single nation which rises to become a world power, then this might be a very good review for you.

Snow

2010-02-10T12:54:00.000-08:00

In the DC area in the wintertime, very occasionally two jet streams will converge, cold dry air will pour down from the Great Lakes and Canada while moist air will come up from the Gulf of Mexico. The two will spin together in a vortex, pulling down even more cold air from the north and moisture off the North Atlantic, sitting tight overhead for 24 hours or more and dump and dump and dump.

When I was younger, the storms from this convergence would always catch the weather forecasters by complete surprise, though they have begun to watch for it in more recent times. Some years we go without any snow all winter, other years we get
3 or 6 inches here and there. But when this happens, comes the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

About fifteen years ago I remember catching the train to work even though they were calling for a couple of inches and it had already started to come down. Once there, I went through my morning rituals, and talked with friends about office mates living nearby too chicken to make it in. I also stopped by the credit union to withdraw a large amount of cash. If I remember right, I needed it to close the deal on a second-hand tool purchase.

But the snow kept coming down, harder and harder, and the wind began to blow. The forecasters changed their story from a few inches to several inches to a major storm. One by one my co-workers abandoned their posts. .Finally our whole office was dismissed, as were most others. The streets quickly became impassable.

The train of course only runs at rush hour. I knew that the first train back, after 3, would be packed. So although the office was getting very, very quiet, I did not venture out until time for the next train.

But by this time in the late afternoon, the wind was howling, blowing snow, the temperature had dropped, snow had piled up in drifts, the streets had become deserted, even the plows had quit. I had boots. I had gloves. I had long underwear. I had a hat on under my hood. But it was cold.

I got to the station about 10 minutes before the train was due – I did not want to miss it. The station was locked and there was not a single other person around. I waited in a corner, trying to protect myself as much as possible from the biting wind. I stomped and shuffled my feet, closed my eyes, breathed lightly, and tried to remember as much as I could about Jack London.

When the time came for the train to come … it did not come. It did not come and it did not come and it did not come.

And I was just a little bit scared. I started to consider my alternatives. I knew no one was left at the office to let me in. I did not know anyone who lived nearby. There was one hotel I knew of but it was over a mile away and tromping through knee-deep snow and fighting that wind did not make that option appealing. There was one more train due in another 50 minutes.

I could burn the money in my wallet.

I prayed that the train, which had always been there for me, for years and years and years, even if sometimes a couple of hours late, would still come.

Jamboree

2010-02-06T04:08:00.000-08:00

One spring our boy scout troop participated in a "jamboree", a
camping trip and contest to show off our skills for all the troops in
the area. We all gathered on a piece of land adjacent to the CIA.
Two boys did get over the fence and into spyland, but that's another
story.
The big shots organized inspections of our campgrounds, our
entrance ways, the monkey bridges or other rope constructions,
our cooking and our latrines. They also held contests on the
common area, such as a pancake-flipping contest. I was chosen to
represent us in the fire-starting contest.
Each contestant was given a small area to build a fire.
We were completely restricted to natural materials that we gathered
on site and we were given two matches. Our areas had been prepared
with two cotton strings at twelve inches and twenty four inches.
Our materials could not exceed the first string. We were each to
have, I think, 5 minutes to in which to burn away the second string.
Everybody went to work while the judge circulated. I was way
at one end, there were twenty or thirty contestants. I had carefully
prepared some green cedar branches and, underneath and inside,
some tinder from the shreddings of the cedar bark.
We all were instructed to light our matches at the same time.
After a couple of minutes the judge made his way down to my site.
By then, it already looked as though a few boys were going to be
successful but a large majority had already failed, probably for
lack of sufficiently small, fine tinder.
There was nothing but prodigious smoke coming out of my
green effort. The judge pompously proceeded to pronounce my
effort a failure in advance of the time limit. He patrimoniously
explained to me that green material would not burn, that I needed
to use dry material.
Just then, in the middle of his speech, four things happened
v.bery quickly.
First, the second string completely disappeared.
Second, the smoke disappeared.
Third, in its place suddenly burst forth the largest, biggest
licks of orange fire in the whole area.
Fourth, the judge stopped talking.

I was the first to burn through the second string. I was not,
however, awarded the first prize, because, the judge explained,
I had not done it according to the way he believed that it should
have been done. My frends and troopleader protested that I had
been ripped off but their protests were ignored.

The rest of my life is pretty much going along the same lines.

Structural Deflation

2010-02-04T16:18:00.000-08:00

...must be Lloyd (God's Work) Blankfein's worst nightmare.

think about it ... suppose society gradually builds in an expectation that prices are gong to fall, like, say, 2% or 5% per year, forever.
Then what happens?
For one thing, people postpone important purchases - most especially real estate - for as long as possible, knowning that the prices are sure to come down.
Then, by the same token, they become very reluctant to borrow money to make a purchase because the loan balance could be expected to end up larger than the value of the purchase.
And, by the same token, banks and bankers become even more reluctant to make loans, because there would never be adequate collateral to make sure they were repaid.

It'll never happen here. We love you too much, Lloyd.

giggle ...

Evelyn Fields

2010-02-03T04:44:00.000-08:00

I flatter myself to believe that, just a little bit, Evelyn Fields was my friend.

http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=evelyn+fields&gwp=13

From time to time, she would come in to work out of uniform, wearing jeans or some old throw-on dress. I must admit, the first time that I caught her doing this, there was just the merest fleck of gold from her hat, peeking out of her purse, to clue me off. I quickly understood that this was a game … maybe the only pleasure she had in a very, very difficult position.

Because, of course, you know what happens. During the day, in uniform, she received stern, dignified respect from the white pot-bellied associate directors. But let her show up out of uniform and not even the guards recognized who she was. Instead, they would treat her the way they saw her, as some old black lady trying to take advantage of the system. And so she would be openly dissed.

And I? Well, I guess that I was the only little white boy to ever look her in the eyes, and see what she looked like, and recognize that little twinkle of an impish. boyish miscreant that she got when she knew she was making fools of them. I knew exactly who she was and what she was doing. She earned huge respect from me for the incredible rigidity that she had to display, without the faintest hint of a crack, whenever she was around other folk. Once in a while, we got to do silly stuff alone together in the elevator.

At the end of her career, when she announced that she wished to retire, she was asked to serve for six months more while they found a replacement. Reluctantly she obliged. And during that time, the application for promotion of my boss’s boss, among others, came to her desk. Perfunctorily she passed on it.

And at the end of six months, it came to pass that someone noted that those applications for promotion had not been passed on through Congress as was the protocol.
Don’t you know that after her brilliant career, after attaining a rank never before held by either a woman or a black person, and executing it with aplomb and grace, they had to find this petty, petty excuse to denigrate her and even demote her, after her retirement.

As for my boss’ boss, she was soon forced to leave the corps because she had difficulty keeping her mouth shut, at the dinner table. She stayed on in her position for many years afterward, in a most undistinguished role, bringing many a man to his knees begging, yelling, pleading, her to allow them to do some useful work.

So it goes.

And now for something really different ...

2010-01-19T12:04:00.000-08:00

The Green Prophet

660,000

2010-01-13T04:35:00.000-08:00

Last month, according to the US Department of Labor, approximately 660,000 individuals stopped looking for employment. They did not find jobs, each one must have reached some other arrangement. The whole situation enabled the DOL to report an unemployment rate of 10.0%, whereas if those 660,000 people had still been counted, the rate would have climbed to 10.4%. Of course, this gradual process of exclusion has been going on for quite some time.

I liken the current economic situation of the country to a passenger train going down the tracks. In the cars, there are a lot of people seated with tickets. Some of them read the paper, some of them sip their drinks, a few are engaged in quiet conversation. Occasionally they may look out the windows and enjoy the scenery going by – the backs of warehouses, the chain link fences with barbed and razor wire, the junk yards and bus lots. Because the tickets they bought say that they are going to Pittsburgh, and because that’s where the same train went yesterday, and the day before, they all believe that they are going to Pittsburgh.
In the locomotive, the engineer and the fireman are the only ones who can look forward through the glass. They sit transfixed by the image of a washed-out bridge over the river ahead of them.
The conductor, back in one of the passenger cars, has been alerted to the situation. He, of course, and not the engineer, is the one empowered to make the decisions. He doesn’t see the bridge. He does understand that the train has too much momentum, that even if the emergency brake is thrown and all the wheels locked, that the train would not stop in time to avert disaster. He sees no reason to throw the paying passengers out of their seats and into a panic. No benefit would incur. And so he has made the decision to carry on as if nothing is happening. He has told the engineer to do nothing and he himself has not alerted the passengers over the loudspeaker system.
On top of the train, riding in the wind, there happen to be an odd collection of fellows. They have arrived to where they are via hitchhiking, hoeboeing, or otherwise ostracized from the crowd below. They are the only ones on the whole train who can see the whole situation, all around, and feel the wind in their hair, the rapid speed, and see the black swirling water ahead under the bluff. If the train could be slowed down they could get off but now it is moving too fast for them, they are prisoners. If they could talk to the passengers below them, the passengers would not listen to them anyway because they are outcasts, vagabonds, who did not pay their way. And so the train continues on.

That’s just how it is, and how it’s going to be. Might as well enjoy the ride….

Nigerian airplane bomb

2009-12-30T03:18:00.000-08:00

I seem to be in hot water anyway ... I read the following account
in the comments section of The Washington Post
signed by a pseudonym, and decided that it was worth repeating ... if not
protecting from deletion ...

"We the people are not getting the full story on the underwear bomber.

Detroit attorney Kurt Haskell dropped bombshell revelations concerning his eyewitness experience of the Flight 253 attack and how the FBI detained a second man after dogs detected a bomb in his luggage on The Alex Jones Show today. The FBI has not only ignored Haskell’s story, but they have launched a cover-up by refusing to even acknowledge the existence of another man who filmed the entire flight, including the aborted attack, as well as the well-dressed man who aided the bomber to board the plane even though he had no passport and was on a terror watch list.

After being allowed to disembark from the plane by officials, passengers were detained in customs with their carry-on luggage for six hours while they waited to be interrogated by the FBI, according to Haskell.

At this point a bomb-sniffing dog pointed at carry-on luggage in the possession of a man Haskell described as Indian around 30 years old. Officials led the man away to an interrogation room. Haskell said he was concerned because the bomb-sniffing dog had flagged the man, indicating he may have had explosives in his carry-on luggage. The Indian man was subsequently led away in handcuffs.

Following this incident the FBI moved the passengers to another location. “You’re being moved,” the FBI told them, “it is not safe here. I’m sure you all saw what happened and can read between the lines and why you’re being moved.”

Haskell said the corporate media refuses to cover this aspect of his story. He has repeated it to “countless” news agencies and they uniformly have not included it to his knowledge.

Mr. Haskell questioned why officials have not released the Amsterdam airport security video that will undoubtedly reveal crucial information about the “sharp-dressed man” who escorted a disheveled Mutallab to the boarding area. Haskell described the suspected terrorist as appearing to be a “poor black teenager.”

The well-dressed Indian man did all the talking. He insisted Mutallab be boarded on the plane without a passport and when an airport employee refused to do so Mutallab and the Indian man went to talk with a supervisor. The Indian man tried to pass off Mutallab as a Sudanese refugee and have him boarded despite the fact doing so would be in violation of regulations concerning refugees. In general, documentation must be provided by an embassy in order for refugees to board international flights.

Mr. Haskell did not see Mutallab again until the botched terror bombing inside the plane on the approach to Detroit. He did not know how Mutallab finally boarded the aircraft.

The FBI conducted a follow-up interview earlier today in Michigan. Haskell asked them why he was not shown a full body shot of the suspect. Haskell was eight rows back from the suspect. The FBI agents did not answer and were displeased with the question. He also asked the FBI agents if it would be more appropriate to bring the surveillance video from the Amsterdam airport instead of still photos. “I don’t think they liked that comment from me,” Haskell added. The FBI said they did not have the videotape. They also made a point to tell Haskell they were asking the questions and not him.

See the interview here:
http://www.infowars.com/bombshell-eyewitness-revelations-confirmed-fbi-cover-up-of-flight-253-attack/

Healthcare

2009-12-17T09:04:00.000-08:00

Healthcare: A Right or a Privilege? the headline read.

That's easy.
Back in the day, we all used to say "God heals the sick and the physician sends the bill."
God's healing is a right.
Paying the doctor's bill, however, is a privilege.

"Fear" as an Institution

2009-12-12T06:20:00.000-08:00

Now I am the kind of guy who, when he sees a fence,
understands that it was put there precisely
for him to find a way over, under, around or through.

I think that the "black swan" event in the USA was the assasination of JFK ...
followed by his brother, and MLK,
and then finally, just in case anyone did not get the message,
John Lennon.

All hope was killed in this society.
The only thing left for anyone to do was to take care of himself as best he could
and screw everybody else.
Well, we did.

Many people have said that the current "crisis" is a credit crisis,
caused by too much borrowing and too loose money.
I disagree.
Although those conditions certainly contributed, loans, sometimes very large,
have been a social tradition since ancient times.
However, what I have seen rise from nothing to the point of dominance
is a practice that had no historical precedent
but has now permeated everybody's thinking.

Insurance.
"Managing risk".

Just think about how much time and money everybody, and I mean everybody,
spends playing with futures contracts.
The first ones were automobile insurance, health insurance, and life insurance,
and the hoi polloi are still struggling with those.
But over top of them grew commodities futures and options contracts.
what we call derivatives. And the structures just continue to get more and more complex and large.

Now just look at one life insurance contract.
Basically it is a bet between you and your insurance company.
You are putting your money down to say that you are going to die before they expect you to -- if you are right, you win the bet and your family gets paid off. The insurance company is betting that you will live longer than you expect to, and keep on paying them premiums. They plan on raising and raising the premiums while lowering and lowering the final payoff. There's different rules and versions of the bet, but for the most part, the insurance company has stacked the odds considerably in their favor.
Out of this concept grew a whole new class of mathematicians,
actuarial calculators, statistics.
Soon afterward, we got a whole class of managers learning how to fudge the numbers by lying about the basic assumptions. (from which cometh the global warming debate, among other ills). The critics all go back over the mathematical equations and
they find that the arithmetic has been done correctly, so they conclude that the results are correct but they are not because the basic problem was stated wrong.

Back in the day, we used to say that the market boils down to two emotions, fear and greed. We understood that greed makes the market to go up while fear makes it go down.
But it seems to me that in the last fifty years or so,
bit by bit,
people have forgotten that simple fact.
Fear makes the market to go down.
Our society has become more and more obsessed with fears of all kinds, we keep collecting new ones.
Meanwhile, every old one becomes institutionalized,
made permanent in our minds and actions,
through the use of insurance contracts, derivatives, or what have you. As a culture we have collected more and more fears
without ever "solving" any of the old ones. They get built into our social customs
and our laws.
So the burden, and the expense,
just keeps on getting heavier and heavier.

One little example.
As I have said before,
I got rid of my computer virus protection two years ago,
because it was costing me considerable amount of money
and moreover the software was using up to 60% of my machine resources,
which I considered to be obscene and outright theft.
Since everyone else was protected, viruses can no longer work.
In two years my machine has not caught one virus
(but it has picked up an awful lot of new junk,
as the large corporations and advertising mavens relentlessly keep finding new routes
to invade and infect me and steal my time and resources ...
its an ongoing battle as, sooner or later, I find ways to get rid of the new junk
and then they invent still more nefarious methods of stealing from me.)

Anyway, what I am getting at is,
I have known that our culture, our society, is doomed
by this institutionalizing of our fears,
and by the smaller and smaller spaces that we have left
within which to create and grow.
I've known it for decades.
This place is decaying, its headed relentlessly downhill.
There is no escape.
Its not Bernanke's fault, or Greenspans, or Bush's or anybody's,
anymore than Nero was to blame for the fall of Rome.
Its just the way things happen in this world.
cycles.
up and down, up and down,
too hot, then too cold, too bright, then too dark.

just like sex.
(now excuse me. I think I remembered something I have to do this morning ...)
-chiz

Feeding Africa

2009-12-11T16:34:00.000-08:00

(credentials: I have traveled to Ethiopia 4 times, eaten, slept, danced and prayed with the people, married one and brought her back to the USA, I also
mingle and socialize freely with Africans here.)

The predominant approach to the societies of sub-saharan Africa by the USA and western European nations has consisted mainly of sending food relief, to a lesser extent sending medicine, and sending a few missionaries who hole out in the local Hilton and force-feed the gospel. The justification for sending food rather than cash is that corrupt governments would steal the cash. Sending food has the dual effect of propping up first world agribusinesses by buying their surpluses, while crushing native farmers by flooding their markets.
For the past decade China has been exerting a greater and greater presence. I hear the same story over and over from my friends and acquaintances. The Chinese build roads, build schools, build hydroelectric dams and steel mills and mines.
They also immigrate in much greater numbers, enough to begin to sway the cultures.

I understand compassion. Children are cute, suffering children are heartbreaking. However, before you lift a finger to act, I strongly recommend the following exercise:

Plan to do this for a whole season. Set aside a time of day when you can buy a loaf of bread and take it to the park, every day. Once there, start to feed the few pigeons (or ducks, or sparrows, or whatever ...). give them bread until they stop begging for it. Then come back the next day.
After just a very few days, you should notice that the birds start to anticipate your arrival, recognize you, and eagerly look forward to their meal. You should also be noticing that they increase in number.
After a couple of weeks, you should be finding that you are now attracting large numbers of birds, quite a few more than you had ever seen in that park before.
You will begin to notice that a few of the other humans using the park may become a bit annoyed. You may notice that the bird droppings are increasing in the area and the odor is definitely deteriorating. In fact, if you continue in your daily routine for very much longer, your activities are very likely to come to the attention of the local constabulary. Depending on your demeanor, they will either politely or less politely find the means to persuade you to cease.
Through all of this, it may be an issue here as to if you have any intelligence and free thought. If that is the case, then it is likely to dawn on you that your efforts to fix a problem, i.e. hunger, have actually been encouraging the birds to be fruitful and multiply, as well as to invite all of their friends and relations. Thus your actions actually have the opposite effect of your original intention.
FEEDING PIGEONS ONLY MAKES MORE PIGEONS!
At least, I would certainly hope so.

black swan

2009-12-07T05:35:00.000-08:00

Let me just share this with you ...

"Scientists must stop ignoring the black swan in the room"

The ongoing "climategate" email scandal brings to mind an old axiom of science about a lovely hypothesis being slain by an ugly fact. It refers to the principle that a hypothesis cannot be proven correct; it can only be falsified or proven incorrect. This principle is best illustrated by philosopher Karl Popper's white swan thought experiment. It goes like this:

If you see a large group of white swans, you may be tempted to hypothesize that all swans are white. But you cannot prove this hypothesis. No matter how many white swans you count, there always remains the possibility of a black swan lurking out there. And looking for black swans is a fundamental principle of the scientific method.

In the case of climate science, the emails and other documents make it absolutely clear that the cabal headed by Phil Jones and Michael Mann abrogated their responsibility to science by making no effort to disprove their own hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, they actively sought to prevent others from examining their raw data out of fear that they would find the black swan. They also took extreme steps to marginalize and silence scientists who disagreed with their work and who had the temerity to say, "But here is a black swan."

It is now clear that Messrs. Jones and Mann and their colleagues pressed on counting white swans all the while stumbling over the black ones. Their actions not only discredit the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, but do incalculable damage to the public perception of science and scientists.

William G. Hopkins, professor emeritus, Biology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ont.

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2292759

Happy birthday to You

2009-12-06T13:11:00.000-08:00

This is just a friendly reminder that the above-titled song
is copyright, the copyright belongs to Warner Chappell,
and technically the song may not legally be performed at any
public gathering without paying royalties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_To_You

If you think that this warning can be safely ignored,
please read this account about the recent arrest and prosecution of
this no-doubt bloodthirsty succubus:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/1916606,twilight-taping-arrest-movie-120209.article

The Mayan Empire

2009-11-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

some semi-connected impressions:

Recently I had occasion to visit the Mayan ruins at Lamanai, Belize,
and listen to the enlightened guide of Carlos from "Lamanai Tours", Orange Walk.
(I highly recommend them, if you are down that way...)

Lamanai was one of the longest continually-habitated cities of the Mayans,
located some 8 kilometers from a major stone quarry on the New River lagoon.

Carlos said that when the spanish first arrived in the new world
and found these civilized inhabitants they asked them, in spanish, who they were.
The residents answered, in their own language, that they did not understand.
The sentence sounded like "mayan" to the spanish, and the name stuck.

Carlos explained about 2012 that Armageddon is just a Hollywood fabrication ...
that the Mayans did, indeed, have a circular calendar
and that one of the calendar's units was (is) a 52-year period
that just happens to end again in 2012.
The last one ended about the time of Kennedy's inauguration ....
The next one will end in 2064.
Circles have this quality about them, they just keep going around and around,
they never end ...

Carlos also talked about the devastation
that the spanish brought to the Mayans,
how Pisarro captured their king, held him for ransom,
and when the gold was paid, killed him anyway.
He also told how it was really the diseases of europe,
(among them syphilis, small pox, and tuberculosis)
which devastated their population and civilization even more than the spanish guns.

But what was even more interesting to me was
when he explained that the Mayan civilization actually went into a decline
spontaneously, around 900 AD, long before the spanish arrived.
Their calendar and indeed a whole system of hieroglyphics
had been developed prior to that time but reading and writing fell into disuse
and the whole population and economic development declined.
He voiced the question of modern scholars, "What happened?"

I know what happened.

Same thing's happening here, now.

At a certain point (it doesn't matter where!)
the general population of a civilization will reach a point where,
in their collective imagination,
there is precious little room for the civilization to grow.
There are no new frontiers.
At that point, the civilization will gradually turn from
productive, growth-oriented strategies to strategies
which are meant to defend or secure or hold on to what people have.
And because growth stops, those strategies of just trying to hold onto what we have
are doomed, by the law of entropy, to fail.

Everything in God's world works on cycles,
up and down, around and around.
Nothing stays the same, nothing goes up forever.

From a distance, its not that hard to see.

Coal

2009-11-21T07:00:00.000-08:00

I have been saying this, over and over, for years,
and even though it just seems to generate jealousy, resentment and anger,
instead of anyone simply following my advice,
I will say it again:

Over the next twenty or so years,
the USA is going to become the "West Virginia" of China,
meaning that we will become impoverished
and our major economic activity will become the mining and exporting of coal.
Those who do not own it will have to work in the mines.

Here is a wonderfully-written synopsis of
economic events in the USA and the world over the last 30 or 40 years,
written by a Canadian banker ... it is long, very colorful, and worth finishing, imho:

The Power of Zero
http://www.scribd.com/doc/22536643/BMO-CM-Basic-Points-Nov-2009

"Anything which cannot go on forever, will stop."

Addendum, Nov. 23

This from Reuters today:
"the latest official Chinese customs data showed coal imports rose 219.5 percent from a year earlier to 11.14 million tonnes in October."

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idAFN2326566820091123?rpc=44

Wind Electricity Generation

2009-11-13T08:03:00.000-08:00

A compendium of facts collected from a wide variety of sources, and my inferences therupon.

The top two commerical wind turbines, by market share:
1 Vestas 22.8 V90 Geared 3,000 kW
2 GE Energy 16.6 2.5XL Geared 2,500 kW
(source):http://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/en/part-i-technology/chapter-3-wind-turbine-technology/evolution-of-commercial-wind-turbine-technology/large-commercial-wind-turbines.html
[note that the figures of 3,000 and 2,500 are the nameplate capacities of those turbines.]

"Capacity Factor: Wind power typically has a capacity factor of 20-40%"
(source):http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_energy_source
What this means is, that the nameplate capacity on a wind turbine is the maximum amount it can generate in ideal wind conditions.
The capacity factor is the percentage of its nameplate capacity to expect over a long period of changing conditions.

the installation cost:
"I asked the company Vestas this question. They are number two in the world in producing wind turbines. They told me the answer is based on a thousand factors but that the general rule of thumb is that wind turbines cost 1.3 to 1.5 million per megawatt. "
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_3MW_wind_turbine_cost

USA electrical generation, by source, for 2008:
coal: 1,994,000,000 mWh
NG: 877,000,000 mWh
nuclear 806,000,000 mWh
(source):http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html

"The American Wind Energy Association has reported that wind projects installed through the end of 2008 were expected to generate 52 million megawatt-hours/year (MWh/yr),"
(source):http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States.

Okay, now its time for one inference from me.
This is a mere calculation:
If anyone has a stated goal of replacing all of the existing coal-fired electricity generation in the USA
(and assuming, for the moment, that electricity demand does not increase),
2,000,000,000 mWh divided by 8500 hours/yr is about 250,000 mWyr.
250,000 of the largest commercial wind turbines.

If they cost $3 million each, as above, thats a total of $750 billion, or roughly the budget of DOD.
And, after building them, you have to find someplace to put them. Not in my backyard, please.

tomorrow lets look a little closer at coal.

addendum, Nov. 21

I just have to wonder ...
how much coal has to be burned (in blast furnaces) in order to fabricate one large wind turbine.
I imagine that its not insubstantial. There is still no other way to make steel....

Teza

2009-10-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

I went to go see "Teza" with my good friend Miss Anne on Sunday.

Anne was raised in a one-room home not too far from here about the
same time that my mother was teething on her silver spoon. She is
doubtless the most gracious and gentle person that I have had the
priviledge to know. I love to share new, special pieces of music or art
with her and here her perceptions.

"Teza" is a low-budget, award-winning movie written and directed by
Haile Gerima. The movie has won awards from Vancouver to Venice.
an arduous project, it took the team 14 years to complete.

"Teza" means "dew" in amarinnia, the official Ethiopian language.
The movie depicts a young man who leaves his village for schooling in Cologne.
He returns to Addis Ababa to work as a medical researcher at the University,
during the regime of Mengistu and the Derg. His best friend is violently
murdered. He is exiled to East Germany. There, a band of white "skin-heads"
beat, lame, and almost kill him. Finally he returns to his village, there to ponder
the meaning of life and to teach reading and arithmetic to young children.

As a young adult Anberber is full of hope, vitality and energy. He
wants to find cures and bring hope against the dreadful diseases which
scourge his people. But he finds frequent dangerous conflicts with
the communist regime in Addis Abeba and its supporters.

The whole story depicts many different incidents of people inflicting
harm and suffering to other people. Anberber's dad had been among
an army wiped out by an invading army's gas attack. A couple of boys from
the village are forcefully captured and conscripted to war; one is returned later,
mortally wounded. A young mother, overwhelmed with the craziness
of her world, suddenly kills her own young baby. Anberber's friend
fathers and then deserts a boy in Germany, who grows up to become
enraged at his treatment as a half-breed. And deeds beget other deeds.
This is a long, long movie and it is not easy to watch. While we are all
busy with the challenges and trials we face as adults, somehow, the morning
dew has all vanished.

As a young man, I was often praised for the intelligence I showed
and exhorted to do what I can for the world and for mankind. I
was trained in aspects of world history and culture and personally
exposed to many, many diverse views. My peers all shared the same
hopes and enthusiasms. Now, as I enter old age, I perceive a culture
that is rotten and mistaken almost to its very heart. I and many of my
companions heartily doubt its ability to survive the onslaught of several
inevitable cataclysms, among them the reduction of cheap, readily-available
energy, the overpopulation on the planet, the reduction of food supplies, and the failure of people to foresee and address the problems.

I married a young Ethiopian girl, awed with her charm, intelligence,
perseverance and wit, thinking that I could perhaps do a little good.
She stubbornly clings to her philosophy that blind hope is far better
than the pessimism of wisdom and experience. And more and more,
she is teaching me to abandon plans and preparation. Perhaps
this very moment is the only one that I have ....

Concerning Al Gore and Me

2009-10-11T14:45:00.000-07:00

I am one of Al Gore's important supporters. Please allow me to explain.

Al Gore, of course, is the man who invented the Internet.
Wonderful invention. The most democratic technology to come along since
the invention of the printing press. The whole idea behind it, from the git-go,
was to be able to survive and prosper without the aid of central authority.
My kind of world. But I digress ...
So, we suspect that the Internet requires some power. Its a little difficult
to determine how much, the subject seems to be a sore point among liberals.
But here are a couple of quotes, estimates:

"U.S. business servers and data centers suck up the energy equivalent of all the electricity consumed by color televisions. The industry uses about the same amount of electricity as 5.8 million average American households."
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/ecogeek/527/compression-could-reduce-data-center-energy-use-by-95.html

"according to Dr. Jon Koomey, scientist at Lawrence-Berkeley labs. The actual number is closer to 1.5 percent [of all Us-generated electricity]"
http://www.podtech.net/home/4183/and-how-much-power-do-all-these-computer-servers-require

"Worldwide data center power demand in 2005 was equivalent (in capacity terms) to about seventeen 1000 MW power plants."
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1748-9326/3/3/034008/

Well, after Al Gore finished inventing the Internet, it seems that he had nothing to do. I heard he had some disappointments hanging around Chad. Then he got over it, and helped to make an inconvenient movie. I hear it was a big hit, though I've never seen it myself. I did hear that one of the authors misplaced a decimal point in one of the calculations, accidentally stating that 23 inches might be 23 feet.

Movies, of course, also require electricity to display, but maybe not so very much. In 2007, a careful sleuth determined that Al Gore's electric bill for his personal residence in Nashville, Tennessee averaged over $1300 per month
http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/v1185475433.pdf
(and he forgot to turn off his lights for "Earth Day" ) http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/YeasandNays/Earth-lover-Gore-doesnt-love-Earth-Hour-42081362.html

So now, you ask, since evidently Al Gore has never even heard of me, how is it that I can claim to be one of his important supporters? Its quite simple. As you surmise from my blog, I am a private investor, independent, feisty, extremely successful. I do not know how far my reputation goes but there are signs that at least a few people know about me and a few of my ideas. I've been successful ever since George Bush announced that he wanted to invade Iraq, and I made the simple observation that since Osama Bin Laden had never lived there and all Bush's friend were oil men, probably he wanted the oil. So I bought oil stocks.
However, being an equal opportunist, I also bought coal. I've learned while I've earned. I've learned about US coal reserves, uses, extraction, and shipment. Not the least important is that about half of all electricity generated in the US comes from coal, while the electricity that comes from wind and solar panels is, well, not even enough to power the Internet. I've also received immense returns on my investments. I've also freely posted a whole lot about what I know, in different places on the Internet, so that others can share in the profit.
So you see, all this electricity that Al Gore is inciting other people to use (like, to tell everybody about "global warming"), and all this electricity that he is using himself, has to come from somewhere. Mainly, from coal. I'm doing whatever I can to help out. I hope he appreciates what I do, because I sure appreciate what he does.

Same Story, Different Day

2009-09-29T07:01:00.000-07:00

from another buddy,
trying in vain to send out the news
through Yahoo to Beijing:

Excerpt:
<Several countries, such as India and China, give financial incentives either in the form of tax breaks or cash payments to companies producing fossil fuels including coal that are major contributors to climate change.
Dumping subsidies could cut global warming by 10% by 2050, according to figures form the International Energy Agency and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the draft. The G20 will discuss possible ways of phasing out subsidies at their next meeting.
"Inefficient fossil fuel subsidies encourage wasteful consumption, reduce our energy security, impede investment in clean energy sources and undermine efforts to deal with the threat of climate change," the draft reads.
G20 leaders will agree to investigate ways of providing financial help to countries threatened by climate change, according to the draft, and "intensify our efforts" to reach a UN climate change agreement at the upcoming talks in Copenhagen.>>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/25/g20-communique-pittsburgh

I'm a little suspicious as to what exactly is included when they say they want to eliminate fossil fuel "subsidies" in terms of the G20.

Countries like Iran, Saudi, and Ven certainly subsidize consumption but my concern would be that they also eliminate certain legitimate tax deductible expenses for the fossil fuel industry....expenses that are necessarily incurred to carry on in business.

Witness what was done recently in the US with regard to some previously deductible expenses. Are we to see more of the same?

If that's the plan, the effect on new energy supplies will be much more immediate and trump normal geological depletion (which is already a tough hurdle to beat) and put us back to the stone age in no time. Surely, these knuckleheads aren't thinking along those lines while at the same time thinking alternatives can make up the difference on an even more accelerated timeline????

I shudder to think that if such plans are in place how the industry will ever be able to come up with the necessary capital to even come close to meeting our energy needs but is this all part of the master plan?

Are the elites wanting to create energy shortages so they can justify rationing and gain more power over us?

This elite-sponsored govt interference is actually more dangerous than peak oil is because it accelerates the timeline and the speed at which the alternatives need to be ramped up to offset declining fossil fuel supplies.

And there will be no turning back once the industry's capacity in terms of both capital and the necessary skilled human resources is no longer available.

Of course, this would suit the elites who are pulling all the strings in that it would ensure that everybody would have to tow the line and obey govt in order to get their allotment of rationed energy wouldn't it?

I never thought about this before but it makes sense to me now.

In an energy constrained world, we are much more likely to be faced with a more dominant government and that's not a good thing.

Censorship

2009-09-24T04:44:00.000-07:00

From time to time, the national news media bring up issues relating to
Chinese censorship on the Internet, often in relation to american companies
such as Yahoo aiding and abetting. As usual, we may have here yet another case
of the shill master trying to divert your attention from what is really going on.

I did not blog about the time I tried to post something on Yahoo about
the seventh planet in our solar system, and the name was replaced with "U)(*&&&%%$".
That was just too funny, but also too trivial to write about.

A friend of mine has been trying all week to post the following post
on one of the (USA) yahoo finance message bases. Every time he tries to
post it, the post is blocked, with no explanation. He emailed it to me
and I tried to post it there under my handle. Yahoo still blocks it.

"I'm not sure I believe the judicial system is all that independent anymore."

Oh yes it is. Don't buy the jive about that.

Yes, the mortgage bag holders know they've got to get the law changed now. They are toast. I suspect most of the states will rule the same way. What the wall street idiots did with the MBSs, or CDOs, or whatever, simply ignored the law. They wanted to turn mortgage lending into a casino.

To do that, you've got to grease the palms of the best gubment money can buy, like they did for years. They were so confident they could buy every Fed. regulator and politician in town they thought they didn't have to worry about the small time state judges. Big mistake.

Obviously, something has to be done. But at this point, I'm not sure what can be done. Obama says no more bailouts. I suspect Ben feels the same way. The recovery of the market takes the CDO crowd's leverage away. And Phil Graham no longer rules the Senate.

And the state court judges don't give a shiess about any of the above.

Bob

Well, lets see if Google will allow me to post it here ...

The markets?

2009-09-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

Okay. I don't get these markets.

Okay, we all know that the US Federal Reserve is printing money like mad and putting it into circulation, one way or another. Also, we understand that money
"velocity" is way down because everyone else besides the government is hoarding it.

My understanding is that money is not wealth. It is an arbitrary symbol for wealth,
predicated on the myth that it is scarce (in reality, the government can make absolutely as much of it as sawdust or sand, as much as it wants, right?) Printing
more money does not make more gasoline, or sunlight, does not make more roads,
houses, tires, computers, or anything else. Printing more money to make wealth
is like wearing a flag lapel pin to promote patriotism and heroism. Or,
like pushing string.

So the government is busy printing money and passing it out to the least deserving individuals, the least productive, i.e. certain corporations which have colossally failed to produce wealth but instead have destroyed it. Somehow I don't see how
that helps anybody. Did I miss something?

The media keeps saying over and over that "70% of the economy is the consumer"
and keeps nursing the fond hope that the children, once weaned, can be induced to return to their mother's breast. The citizens are at least peripherally aware of the massive debts. It seems to me, that the way to pay off the debts and to create wealth, is to do work, to engage in productive activity, to engage in activity which is useful and desired by other individuals and entities, to produce goods and service which the rest of the world desires to have ... (somehow, I do not believe that war, coercion, or hypocrisy are commodities that too many people are envious enough to have that they will offer things like oil, cell phones, or tropical hardwood lumber in order to obtain).

Meantime, how can we hope to receive more when we continue to do less and less ourselves?

I don't get it....

My computer makes a joke.

2009-08-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

Please regard the following backgammon position:

(If you don't play this game, I'm sorry, this will take too long to explain.)

As you see, I am playing against the computer.
As you know, backgammon is a sufficiently-limited game such that the computer can,
from any position, work out all of the possible eventual outcomes and
compute the exact probability of winning or losing.
The dice enter an element of randomness into the game.

Now, never mind how we got into this position in the first place.
It had to be an interesting game, such that
the computer and I doubled and redoubled all the way up to 64.
What I want you to look at is the current situation.
It is the computer's turn to play.
Now if you know the game, the computer has a 100.0% chance of losing at this point
but it has a clear majority of a chance to get one man off
before I get all mine off, thus saving itself from the gammon.
I still win the match, probably a very important issue,
because the match is only to 50.

But the computer, instead of either playing it out
or offering a resignation of a single,
has offered a resignation of a double, or gammon!

Pure fatalism.
and you thought only people get depressed ....

The Markets

2009-08-05T06:04:00.000-07:00

The markets can not and will not ever be stabilized.
It is not their nature to be stable.
The crowd, the majority, is always wrong.
The markets will always go in the direction which prove the most people to be wrong.
No system, no "risk management", no regulations, no "manipulation" will ever be able to stop this from happening.
The markets are made up of the billions of individual decisions of all the participants.

Mother Nature herself works in cycles, tiny and small and medium and large cycles, day and night, winter and summer, warm eons and ice ages, birth, growth, decline and death.
Man always dreams about stability and constancy
but life itself is not like that and can not be made to be like that.

The readers of this message base have had the privilege of living through the richest, most complex heights that civilization will ever attain. We are all now facing decline and crumbling. This process is larger than any individual, no matter how heroic, or any institution. It is inevitable, though poorly understood by most. The direction will not be constant, there will be "indian summers". The ultimate outcome will be far fewer people on earth, far less connectivity
(The Internet is going the same route as the Tower of Babylon),
far more languages, less travel, less knowledge, less trade,
simpler device and tools, more interpersonal contact and people helping their neighbors for no personal gain,

more happiness.

-chiz

Elevator Humor

2009-07-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

I work in an office building which houses roughly 1000 cubicles.
It was built for the gubmint, which has always rented it.
Three floors below the street level and three floors above it are
dedicated to a parking garage; then the offices occupy the
15 floors above that. The builder/owner has some kind of
sub-rosa contract with the county so that the munincipality
collects parking fees and writes citations for scoflaws.
No one I have asked knows what the builder/ownber gets in return.
So there are two banks of elevators in the building, one
traversing the public floors, the other, the restricted offices;
with a security checkpoint in between. Its suitably convoluted
for the gubmint, confusing everyone who first tries to negotiate
and navigate through.
The public floors are labeled (from bottom to top)
G4, G3, G2, P, M1, M2, 1.
The office floors are labeled 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15.

I often arrive early in the day. After settling in and checking my
mail and appointments, I often have cause to go back down to
the bottom of the building. I get on an office elevator, go down
to 1, cross the security checkpoint, get on a public elevator,
and go down to G4. Sometimes others get on with me.
Always polite, and standing next to the buttons, I ask,
"Are you going to 'P'? Its not funny to the regular
inhabitants anymore but there are always salesmen, job applicants,
and newbies. If they ask what the letters stand for, there's
always "Pis for groud level, G is for parking."

Usually the elevator will stop there anyway. And nearly always,
there are people coming in to work who have not yet had their
second cup of coffee and have not taken the time to look
at the indicator over the opening door. So they will
push their way in, then realize that the elevator is going
down, and then push their way back out. Or, someone
truly somnambulant may stay on the elevator and go
"Oh!" in dismay as the doors close and it resumes its
downward course.

The other morning, I was severely waylaid on the
way down by individuals who simply were not paying attention.
On the way back up, the travel was turning out to be
equally tortuous. I passed by security and finally
found an empty elevator and pressed my floor. But just as the
doors were closing a hand found its way in, followed by
a harried young blonde.

I could not stop myself. I said, "This one is going down!".
She hurriedly got back off. I spent all day giggling to
myself, wondering how long it took her to realize that
that elevator was already at the bottom of its shaft.
Some days you get the elevator, other days people mess with you.
So it goes ...

On Thievery

2009-07-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

On the commuter train this morning, a gentleman recently discovered his need for a spare key to his property. He allowed as how there must be a thousand places in his yard to put one. Maybe he could buy one of those fake rocks to hide it in.
I said nothing. I've long since dispensed with this "situation" in our culture. For my own self and my own property, I simply do not lose either my own keys or wallet. I have not lost either item for over thirty years. Once or twice I have misplaced them, but a bit of reflection will always reveal to me where they are, even if that means coming to the understanding that my cat has seen fit to place them more to her liking.
I also figured out, a long time ago, that virtually every homeowner in the country goes through the same experience and comes to the conclusion that he must hide a spare key somewhere on his property outside of the locked door. Its a given that he must lock his doors ... everyone does, which is why I don't need to.
Its also a given that a common thief is armed with this information: that every homeowner has placed a key somewhere outside for him to employ. All he needs to do is to find it. (The same principle applies to computers and passwords and personal information, of course, but that is meandering from my topic.)

Okay, I am a thief. Always have been, since I was a very little boy. I have never lowered myself to common burglary, however. I am confident that this particular gentleman has nothing inside of his plastic home beyond a few pieces of Walmart furniture made from polyurethane chipboard that he aseembled himself, a very large flat screen tv (ugh! you can't pay me to have one!), some plastic
credit cards, and probably a set of glass (china???) and stainless steel (silver???) from his wedding.

For a long long time my stealing has remained entirely within the laws, rules and customs of our great nation; which laws, rules and customs, of course, were all designed by the thieves at the top of the heap.

Of course I have long contended that this nation was settled by rogues, thieves and bandits who could not get along with their families, friends and countrymen and so had to leave. The revolution was nothing more than a rebellion by some well-to-do landowners, most of them slave holders, who simply did not want to pay their taxes, but ended up with a new government with higher taxes than ever. "Revolution", a turning, as in, the more things change the more they stay the same. But that, too, is straying off topic.

Apparently, GS got "caught" last week with their hand in the cookie jar. According to some "insiders", they had discovered how to access and read every single electronic trade, milliseconds before it was executed, in fact, in just enough time for them to open a position themselves first, then close it right afterward, virtually guaranteeing them a fractional profit with no risk.
A tax, as it were, on everyone else. Everyone. Making them a few millions a day.

No biggie. At the moment, total trading volume is off by almost half and volatility has reached a low not seen in my memory. Must be kind of frustrating for people who live off of price swings and commissions. I'm so sorry. I hear, though, that they are licking their chops over the proposals for "cap and trade". I've mentioned before in this blog that the coming winter is going to be the coldest in everyone's memory across Europe and North America ... GS better keep their propaganda machine "hot" if they hope to continue this "global warming" Oz and keep everyone from noticing the man behind the curtain.

I still own more coal than anyone you ever met. And I'm buying more.

Tsunami (again)

2009-05-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves."

-Alan Greenspan

yeah, there is. Oil.

-chistletoe

An Ever-Flowing Tribute

2009-05-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

Don't it always seem to go,
that you don't know what you've got til its gone.
Pave paradise, put up a parking lot.

-joni mitchell

THE COMMUNITY OF SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND DERIVES
ITS NAME FROM THIS SPRING, DISCOVERED IN 1840 BY
FRANCIS PRESTON BLAIR AND HIS DAUGHTER, ELIZABETH,
WHILE RIDING ON HORSEBACK IN THE WOODS BEYOND
WASHINGTON. RAYS OF SUN ON MICA SAND PARTICLES IN
THE WATER CAUSED MR. BLAIR TO NAME IT “THE SILVER
SPRING.” THIS ALSO IDENTIFIED HIS ESTATE AND SUMMER
HOME BUILT IN 1842.

THIS PARK WAS ACQUIRED IN 1942 BY THE MARYLAND
NATIONAL CAPITAL PARK AND PLANNING COMMISSION. IT
WAS RESTORED AND DEDICATED ON MAY 23, 1955 BY THE
FOLLOWING ORGANIZATIONS AS AN EVER-FLOWING TRIBUTE
TO THE MEN AND WOMEN RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GREATNESS
OF SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND, AND ITS BRIGHT FUTURE
THROUGH CIVIC AND COMMUNITY SERVICE.

When I started work in silver spring in 1990,
this little park became one of my favorite lunch spots
and I delighted in finding a flowing spring so near the city.

In the late 1990's, the ramshackle stores and
parking next door were torn down in favor of building
a large, modern department store. The store went
bankrupt almost immediately and was resold for office space.
The process of digging the foundation disrupted the
delicate subterranean capillaries feeding the spring
and it stopped flowing, forever.

Several years later, the little park was restored again,
with new slate walkways, some nice perennial flowers and
bushes, and a few benches. Someone I guess realized the faux pas
and so an electric pump was installed near the spring and
hidden under a steel cover made to look like a big rock.
To date it has not been turned on.

I really don't need to say anything, do I?

Preaching

2009-05-14T05:32:00.000-07:00

I was on the phone with JT the other day talking about woodworking, when God piped up with the answer to a prayer that I hadn't exactly articulated. He doesn't usually say much to me when I am with other people, and I never, ever, ever find Him in church. But, He can do anything, can't He.

My mother's father was a preacher, and his Daddy before him. He died young but my grandmother always hoped that I would take to the cloth. My Dad's Dad was a newspaper columnist (am I following in his footsteps with this blog?). His Dad was a character … he fled New Hampshire to avoid the draft for the Civil War, got land in the Illinois Territory, and did all kinds of things. He married a young woman that none of our family genealogists have been able to trace and my grandfather was born to them in 1898 (now do some arithmetic!). But his dad, and his dad, and his dad, and his dad are all buried next to the little white clapboard church in New Hampshire where they preached all their lives. The first one of those, of course, left Boston for New Hampshire to steer clear of the French and Indian war. But enough of that.

I guess that I have been asking God this question, in different ways, on and off, for a very long time. There are all these fabulous gifts that He has given me. I have wonderful health, have never broken a bone, had surgery, or any major illness. Though small, I bicycled everywhere I wanted to go during my late teen years and developed incredible stamina, once covering 220 miles with 50 pounds of luggage in 24 hours. IQ tests administered to me in those years consistently came back with the score of 153, or above 99.95% of the population. My memory is still sharp; short term I remember 12 passwords, my and my wife's SS#'s, driver's license #'s, bank account #'s, car license #'s, and I keep my appointment calendar in my head. Long term, I still retain several memories from my pre-kindergarten days.

Besides all those generous gifts there are two more. One is actually many; the verifiable incidents of prescience that occur to me, somewhat at random, at a rate of about 1 or 2 a week. From time to time I “know” something is going to happen when I have no way of knowing. The other, is God's rather verbose communications with me. Sometimes, I chalk that one up to the fact that He is just lonely. Sure, a whole lot of people are sending up requests and demands of what they want and how they think His world should be, all the time. But very, very few people ever seem to pay attention to Him, very few ever seem to listen, or respect and enjoy the wonderful crazy diverse world that He has made. Besides some of His jokes can be a little crude, though still uproariously funny!

I was “reborn”, while lying drunk and half-dead in the cellar of an old church. I was lying in a pool of stale water and old spilled heating oil, in the dark. From the low wooden ceiling were hanging dozens of old spider's lines, with something dessicated wrapped up in gauze hanging from the end of each one like a scene from “The Hobbit”. I seldom speak about it with any person because the term “reborn” is so cruelly misused by so many people these days. For me, rebirth in God was only the first step (actually I had to crawl for awhile before I could walk!). It was like clearing out my ear canal. I realized that He had been talking to me all along, but I had just not been listening. I began a process of throwing out everything that my parents and society had taught me, starting over, and learning about life, and people, directly from God. He showed me that the world is entirely inside-out from the way most people see it, in so many ways. For example, it really is true that every dollar I give away, comes back to me and makes me richer. It also is true that the more money I accumulate, the more burden and work it becomes for me, mainly because of all the other people who try to get it from me by one means or another. He presented miracle after miracle, for my eyes only, to help me in my growth. He taught me that most people are wrong about most things, most of the time. Then, gradually, as I grew older I became more absorbed and involved in the world of other people, more mature and able to stand and act without His direct participation, an adult as it were, and I hear a lot less from Him these days.

Among other things, God taught me a great deal about hypocrisy and preaching. I hope that I do much less of that than I used to. What He showed me, over and over, is that whenever anyone preaches or moralizes or counsels on any subject, he does it because its he himself who needs to learn the lesson that he is spouting. Almost all the time, as we well know, the people preaching or moralizing fail to listen to themselves. That is why preachers go on preaching, politicians go on politicizing, and psychiatrists go on psycho-anal-izing. Because they seldom listen to themselves. I learned, now and then, to listen to my own preaching, and to take heed. Its not easy for me to change my own behavior. But its so much easier than changing anyone else's!

For the last several years, as you may know, I have been reaping extraordinary returns on the stock market. My numbers make Bernie Madoff look like a piker … and mine are real. Yet, I am not rich, or even wealthy in many peoples' eyes. I have given away a formidable share of my winnings. Most of the money has gone to people who were not born into privilege, some people who, due to circumstances out of their control, cannot even buy a break for themselves. A good chunk of what I have made, in fact, has found its way back to Africa. Looking at the Bernie Madoff exposure and the AIG bonuses, I realize that God has protected me from becoming rich and especially from being ostentatious about my lifestyle, because the rich are getting into more and more hot water these days (deservedly so, I might add …). Basically, I am in love with the market. She's my main squeeze, I never tire or get bored with her. The game is everything, the money is just a side effect.

So I have this very general question before Him: what am I supposed to do with all these gifts? What is Your purpose for me? Its very typical for someone of my background to act as benefactor for people less fortunate. Its also very typical to think that, having prescience means that God wants me to prophesy and preach. People, of course, take to my preaching and prophesying about as well as they did to Jeremiah. I have just about the same kind of news to tell as he did and its no more popular today than it was then. Or, am I supposed to just keep quiet and keep stealing money from the market and giving it to people who don't have my opportunities? Perhaps one or more of them is the one that I, like an earlier John, was sent to herald and baptize?

What He said was, “You do not have to do anything. This is not a trade. I don't ask for anything from you. I just give them to you because I love you. Go out and do what you want, and take care of yourself. Have a good time.”

Eyes in the back of their heads

2009-04-29T03:56:00.000-07:00

The following photo can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pjchmiel/1428914515/sizes/l/
where it is marked "all rights reserved" but also marked "anyone can view".

Oftentimes, it seems to me that every other human being I deal with, acts this way some, most, or all of the time.
I am again reminded of the play by Ionesco named "Rhinoceros" in which, one by one, every character but the protagonist, voluntarily turns himself into a rhinoceros, and proceeds to wrought the destruction of civilized institutions that such an animal can bring about. He was writing about the normal citizens, the everyday people, of German society in the 1930's and 40's. But it seems equally
appropriate to describe how contemporary American society can condone torture and gross human rights violations and the most outright thievery by all the people in high places.

I guess what it is, is that everybody, especially younger people, can be seduced into doing the most heinous, awful things, provided only that there is a slow, gradual introduction, in order to maintain social contact and to "get along with" the people around him.
Or, I guess what it is is that everybody else but me has their eyes firmly fixed on the past. The lesser intelligent people will be focused on yesterday, or maybe the last hour, or maybe the very last thing anyone has said to them. More intelligent people will be able to see back further. But just about everybody believes that they are looking at the future but they try entirely to expect the past, one or another item of their knowledge of the past, to repeat.
What seems to be different about my approach is first of all that I understand that time, "chronos" is synonymous with change. From a knowledge of the past, it
is very possible in many cases to reason how current events are going to impact the
future. If I see a child balancing on a book on a chair trying to reach a cookie jar
on the top of the refrigerator, I can pretty easily deduce what is likely to happen,
and I can pretty much guarantee that the result is not going to match what the child is anticipating.

just, sometimes, I get so lonely ....

Red Rose Petals

2009-03-28T17:14:00.000-07:00

For some reason, this incident from my past keeps welling up from my memory. It happened at a time when my life was made up nearly all of hopes and dreams, having very little substance to maintain and care for.
Working for a delivery company, I was walking down an urban street looking for an address. My eyes were diverted by a vision of spilled blood at my feet. However, looking down, I saw that there were just several fresh red rose petals fallen on the sidewalk.
As I walked on further, I spied two men in coveralls attempting to raise a tall ladder. One was holding the feet to the ground, while the other was walking it up from the other end. Though it was an extension ladder, maybe 24 feet, it lacked a rope through the pulley to raise it properly so they had to do it the hard way.
The man from the top came in closer and closer. The to went up, 10 feet, 15 feet, 20 feet, as he approached his comrade rung by rung. At about 70 degrees, the top of the ladder began to sway from side to side. He struggled to control it. Then suddenly he realized that he could not, for the weight above him had far more leverage than he did. He ducked quickly to get out from under. The top of the ladder swung out and rested for just a second against the wires suspended along the street by telephone poles. Then it came crashing down, down, down to the sidewalk below.
Only then, the man at the feet, let go of the ladder and fell back on his back and started gasping spasmodically. Belatedly we realized what might have happened to him. The workman who had been at the head end, ran to the first townhouse door to knock frantically. His partner lay there, jerking erratically.
Remembering my goodly training from my boy scout days, I began to do what I saw I must do. The man soon stopped breathing or moving. So I put aside my customary persona and proceeded methodically to deliver mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When I delivered two or three good lungfuls, he started hopefully to breath again heavily. His breaths came fast and deep. But each breath was shallower than the last. After five or six, he came to a rest again.
I began again. This time I went a little more slowly, deliberately. Although small on the outside, all my internal cavities have unusual capacity and strength. I could give him good, rich air. This time I delivered three or four breaths to him. Then he gasped and began panting heavily again. Again, his quick breaths faded gradually back to stillness.
Very distantly I could hear his partner panickly pleading for help on a phone.
A third time I began to deliver breath to this person seeming to fight for his life. This time I gave him three, four, five good draughts and then he began, again, on his own. His efforts were a good bit weaker this time and I was prepared when they faded away yet again. This pattern went on, and on, it seemed for a lifetime, at least for 15 minutes. Each time, it took more breaths from me to get him started. Each time, his breathing was weaker when it came. Each time, the period where he was still grew longer.
Finally I heard an ambulance pull up on the street and paramedics jump out. From behind me a man said, in a slightly bored and disgusted tone, “That’s enough.”
I pulled back and rose to my knees. From there I could see that the man had completely wet his pants. I gathered from the paramedic’s tone that he thought the situation hopeless, the man gone. For just a minute I waited to see if anyone wanted anything from me, if there was anything to do. In silence, then, I got up and padded quietly away.
For awhile I reflected on the thought that “In the boy scouts, they don’t tell you that you can do everything right, you can do everything you know how to do, and still the patient will die.” I struggled all afternoon with what I was to feel about this happening, what I was to learn, what was gained, what was lost. Basically there wasn’t any change in my routine. I found the address where my package was supposed to be delivered and dropped it off. Nothing else happened that day.

We had a pretty good rally in the markets for the last two weeks. Some people are already talking about the bottom being in. But I’m older now, and more aware of the unmistakable odor …

Cushing, OK

2009-03-26T07:08:00.000-07:00

I count seven large tanks here with no vegetation around them,
meaning that they could have been built recently.
but that's my inexpert opinion ...

Big Ugly Chart

2009-03-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

I received this chart from a fellow independent investor
a week ago (he asked me to post it for you all.)

My own opinion remains that we are headed for "0".

-chiz

Quandary

2009-03-13T16:58:00.000-07:00

From time to time I have puzzled with this. The right wing in this society,
the business class, the so-called "conservatives", oppose abortion.
Why? Thinking people, intellectuals, "liberals" wonder if its
just part of their sense that they have the priviledge, the right, and the
obligation to impose their will and their point of view on others
who have less money and power than they do. But the inconsistency
has still puzzled me.
After all, its the right wing who are so enamoured of sending
our young men (and women) off to foreign lands for the purposes of
tearing down buildings and factories, maiming and raping and killing
and generally disrupting the citzenry, and obsconding with whatever
loot can be taken. In the process a certain percentage of our own
die prematurely or sustain permanent damage. Its the right wing
who create jobs for policemen, judges, and lawyers by locking
up and ruining the productivity of individuals who happen to be in too-
close proximity to a common weed which happens to have medicinal
properties far superior than the far-more-expensive prescriptions
to be obtained in system establishments at considerable cost.
What is the point?
Certainly some of them must be aware that the planet earth
is undergoing severe strain and incurring alarming damage from
the press of the sheer mass of humanity and the institutions which
maintain us. All of the basic systems which nature operates here
appear to be under siege and threaten to collapse or take major
deviation.
Certainly some of them must be aware that the majority of
women desiring abortions, if forced to bear their young,
will most likely raise their children to vote for liberals.
At least a few of them must supect that there is not
enough available oil gas or food even to sustain the current
world population and the consequences will be dire,
politically and economically.
Its funny, for a minute, to say that for them , "Human rights
begin at conception ... and end at birth." But that's no answer.
Why do they think that we need more people?

While I was writing my piece on Ponzi schemes and
capitalism, it suddenly struck me what the answer to this
quandary is. Its really quite simple, once the basic nature
of our economic system is revealed. You remember I pointed
out that capitalism can only survive when there is a reasonable
prospect for growth, for an increase in the quantity and
velocity of financial transactions.
So, obviously, they need more people. Not, of course,
because they love them or care one whit about them. They need
ever-more people so that their own lifestyle can be sustained.
Its survival.

Its not going to work anymore, folks. The game is over.
We are on to you.
Good-bye.

Electric Cars

2009-03-10T11:14:00.000-07:00

Here's a starter on electric cars:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5104

I have no concrete figures or studies on this, but a strong suspicion
based on the actions of Detroit, as much as anything:

An internal combustion engine encapsulates between 1000 and 6000
small explosions per minute. Over the years, automotive designers
have succeeded in developing designs which control and distribute
the ensuing vibration, heat, and exhaust, minimizing the damage.
Nevertheless, they have built into the consuming public the expectation
that the average automobile will only last for, maybe 6 years,
maybe 150,000 miles.

Contrast this with electric motor systems, which contain no explosions,
create little heat, and create very little vibration:
in virtually all the devices I have owned which employ electric motors,
the electric motors don't fail.
I had a band saw that I cut firewood with until one of the wheels fell off.
I have drills and sanders that last forever
unless an axle breaks or a bearing fails (and I can't find a replacement).
I have scavenged many an old washer or dryer, worn out and left on the curb for dead, for the motor, to put to some new use in my shop.

The key thing about electric cars is that they are likely to last
for decades. I am convinced that this is precisely why
Detroit has successfully suppressed their research, design and manufacture for the last 100 years,
and why they will take hold, now.
The savings to the consumer in depreciation costs will far outway
fuel costs (although the fuel, going forward, will also be cheaper.)

got coal??????

Ponzi Revisited

2009-03-04T12:21:00.000-08:00

After the Bernie Madoff exposure, I was tasked with explaining to my Ethiopian companions what a “Ponzi scheme” is, how it begins, proceeds, and ends. One of the points I made is that Madoff began with high and honorable intentions, and then first discovered how a single number could be slightly adjusted to improve his credentials, improve his stature, improve the trust and faith and capital people gave him, without being observed by anyone, and then his road proceeded down that direction to its final terminus. Then I trotted out the familiar graph of a triangle operation which works just fine until it reaches the point where it is no longer possible to continue to add a larger and larger base at the bottom, at which point everything goes to hell.

The other day I came across this essay and it brought me to review an old discussion from a new vantage point:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5121
Roger K makes the point that “Many people have claimed (I am one of them) that our current economic system requires constant growth for healthy functioning”. This statement, juxtaposed with the exposition above, brought me to realize afresh how much trouble our economic system is in and how deep are the root causes.

People who know me are aware that I have been an extremely successful investor, concentrating on energy for the last decade, and widely read in fundamentals. In brief, I have been telling and writing for anyone who would listen that the concept of “peak oil” is based on production levels, not total worldwide available reserves, and that it is not a theory but a fact, the peak having been achieved in May of 2005, and the current “financial crisis” by damping down demand and restricting access to capital, has accelerated the decline.
The ethanol debacle and the simple information that nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured from natural gas, led me to examine the worldwide food production and supply as well. The numbers suggest that natural gas production has not yet peaked but that a peak is inevitable and probably lies within a small number of years. Less gas definitely means, less food. And less food, quite logically, leads one to the inescapable conclusion of less people.

I considered the economic history of the USA, bastion of capitalism. Recent among civilizations, a few rogues, thieves and misfits, determined either to make profit or to force their world to adapt to their theocratic fantasies, settled in a land which embedded the best farmland and forestry in the world, as well as the most coal and iron ore and oil and mineral resources. They quickly set about the business of exterminating the sparse people who called the land home, and importing slave labor to do their dirty work. Within several generations, these people became rich and powerful in the world, and they attributed their wealth to their religion, their political system, their economic philosophy, and their own general superiority. Certainly one key to their success has been the constant influx of new immigrants, who determined that climbing on to the bottom of this pyramid was to be preferred over staying where they originated.

I considered technology in my lifetime. I went to school during the “race to the moon”.
At first focused on the fiction that mankind could spread to other planets and star systems throughout the galaxy, the unintended side effects were unpredicted advances in calculator machines and methods, among other inventions. My career spanned the advent and growth of the Internet, a technology which first threatened to bring common language and democracy to the entire planet, much as the Tower of Babel had in its day. I have since watched as the corporate world attempts to divide and conquer are relentlessly bringing it to its knees.

One of the fundamental tenets which make capitalism function is the value of providing one’s assets for another person or corporation to use, in the anticipation that both parties will benefit financially. Obviously there are trillions of such transactions, each with its particular circumstances. But the aggregate of all of them, works. Clearly, it can only work when there is long-term growth. Again, over 400 years the population has steadily increased, the infrastructure has steadily increased, the assets and the consumption have steadily increased. The culture has a built-in expectation of economic growth. You have to believe that your own income is going to increase in order to justify most loans.

However, there is a growing awareness, at least among the better educated of the populace, that this growth cannot continue forever, that there are limits, and that some of those limits may be at hand. The limitation of availability of oil is a huge consideration. The use of oil for energy has increased man’s efficiency by a factor of some 34,000 from the days where anything he accomplished was done by his own sweat. If oil production can no longer grow that puts a tremendous governor on the economic machine. Another limit is the amount of food that the planet can produce. There are not a lot more rivers to dam or forests to clear and plow. There are constant increasing threats to modern agriculture as the diversity of crops has diminished, from diseases and parasites adapting genetic resistance to our best methods of controlling them. Maybe the most critical limit to future growth is the availability of potable water. Because of the permanent nature of our residences, transportation systems and workplaces, the threat of any sort of major climate change also could also cause economic contraction.

In short, the society at large is coming to the overall conclusion that general growth has gone just about as far as it can go.

And what does that do to capitalism as an economic system? If a lot of people begin to believe that hoarding food, water, oil, and other basic resources is more likely to be to their advantage than loaning or investing resources in the mechanics of creating more, doesn’t that become a self-fulfilling prophesy? If people stop investing, then what?

For this reason I believe that capitalism as an economic system has come to its final end. Much as Wiley Coyote, chasing Road Runner, would still spin his legs after he ran off the cliff, our day-to-day operations continue. But you know, one of these days, we are destined to look down. And its still an awfully long drop.

Darfur

2009-02-11T11:13:00.000-08:00

The time for action in this concern is ...
long since past.

Estimates vary on the number of dead ... perhaps between 400,000 and a million, perhaps even greater than that. All of the rest have been uprooted, relocated, their homes and their lands and their lives destroyed.

So perhaps its time to say what I think really happened, since no one else has said so. A few of the western media stories mentioned the possibility that there may be oil underneath the ground, that the native Nubians living on it did not care to prospect for it, that the Arabs lusting after the land perhaps did, and that the western world thirsty for the commodity might have a bit of responsibility for it. I do not know. For the most part, the western media reports on the slaughter,
the burning of homes and villages and crops, the departure from the area to other places, tend to implicate the Sudan government either by design or by neglect. They tend to portray the situation as perhaps a racial issue, with the native blacks the hapless victims and the Semitic aggressors as the guilty perpetrators. They endlessly debate whether or not the situation may be labeled "genocide" as if that term will make one whit of difference to any of the people affected.

I do know that there is a tree which thrives in the area and grows nowhere else. This tree has been cultivated by the Arabs for many years and they annually tap the sap in order to harvest a product called "Gum Arabic". This substance, a sticky yellowish crystal, is known to be an excellent emulsifier. What an emulsifier does is to allow substances such as oils, such as aromatic hydrocarbons, to be dissolved in water and to remain in suspension throughout the fluid rather than floating to the top or settling to the bottom. Aromatic hydrocarbons include such things as oil of cinnamon, oil of wintergreen, and in fact a thousand other
fragrant oils, many of them considered pleasing to the taste or smell. Chemical laboratories have attempted to create man-made emulsifiers but no product that could be mass-produced has ever resulted. "Gum Arabic" is the best there is.

If this discussion doesn't have your heart racing with excitement yet, then consider one consumer product, that of the carbonated soft drink.
Consider by how many and how often this product is consumed.
Consider the jobs, the factories, warehouses, retail outlets,
vending machines, sales clerks, and everyone involved in
producing and disseminating this product.

The flavors of soft drinks are provided not by natural juices
but rather by the oils that natural fruits contain and which give
them their distinctive flavors. the oils can be successfully and
cheaply manufactured artificially. However, they will not mix
with water or soda-water. an emulsifier is required to
get them to mix and stay mixed. And that means: gum arabic.

The people who were living peacefully in Darfur, minding their own business, were growing subsistence crops and raising animals on the land. The people who have been taking the land from them have been cultivating gum arabic for generations and selling it for cash.

If anyone had really wanted for the violence to end, they needed for citizens of the "civilized" world to stop drinking any soft drinks. That would have done it. Nothing else would have.

But its always so much easier to point the finger of blame
on someone else than it is to change one's own behavior, isn't it?