unraveling
New Year's Eve
Incomplete
Headline just in, "Obama to Target Congress in 2012 Re-election
Campaign." You think? It'll be like shooting ducks in a barrel.
For example, in today's newspaper, we read that yet another ceremonial
debt-ceiling vote (following yet another ceremonial standoff, I'm sure)
has been
put off until Congress returns.
"Under the request the administration had planned to submit Friday,
Congress would have had 15 days to say no or the nation's debt ceiling
would automatically have been raised from $15.2 trillion to $16.4
trillion.
"But the House is out of session until Jan. 17 and the Senate is gone
until Jan. 23. Leaders of both chambers asked the White House to delay
its request a few days to allow Congress to take up the measure after
returning from winter break."
Nice break if you can get it, but this "out of session" term is
something new, to cover for the fact that neither body is actually
in recess, but instead holding pro forma sessions to keep the
president from making any recess appointments.
They keep records, such as
for yesterday when the House "met" for 2 minutes, and the Senate for
32 seconds, after which they both "adjourned" until "Tuesday."
Seems like 15 days is ample time to give a ceremonial Congressional
"aye" or "nay" so that the president can give a ceremonial
raspberry.
30.Dec.2011
Speaking of the statute of limitations
Does it take longer to run if you're refusing to pay a bill owed to your
employer? I mean, they won't let you graduate from college if you
don't pay your library fines, don't you suppose your paycheck would be
docked? But maybe if the employer is a city, and the "employee" is the
mayor, no one in the payroll department will be willing to step
up and do the right thing?
That's the latest whacky news from Idaho's civil disservice,
a
story about nearby Kuna's incoming mayor sounding like a bit of a
deadbeat. He campaigned on his desire to get rid of the the city
Planning Director, who was trying to hold his feet to the fire, if you
like that.
Nelson said the city is wrong. "It will be a cold day in hell before I
pay the city $36,000," he told the Statesman Thursday.
That'd be what he owes for the sewer hookup of his restaurant and bar,
has no record of paying, but wants the city to "prove" he still owes.
Which they might not be able to do because everybody seems to have died,
been fired, or otherwise replaced over the last 5 or 6 years.
My forecast is that Kuna's going to be spending more on legal fees than
what they've been losing from a misconnected sewer line to the Peregrine
Steaks and Spirits Restaurant and the Creekside Lounge.
ID-01 Superman
Since it looks like the Idaho Statesman is taking a pass on the
most recent letter I sent them (I know, I'm shocked too), and the
statute of limitations on its topicality is fast running out, might as
well run it here. (They did run Robert Allred's
Ay yi yi response yesterday, that was good.)
Editor:
The only things lacking from
Raul
Labrador's latest Reader's View were the audio track from the
Carpenters for his closing ("We've only just begun") and him taking
credit for the sun coming up today. Oh, and perhaps someone editing for
length: his laundry list of self-congratulation bloviated 25% past your
600 word "limit."
His report on the State of the House assures us that Symbolism is still
Strong. A vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment was held! [And um, Allred
noted that Labrador voted AGAINST it, go figure.] Meetings were had! We
tried to repeal landmark legislation to reform health care insurance
without the vaguest clue of a better solution!
Glorioski, he has single-handedly "changed the way Washington works."
Or, doesn't work, if you've actually been paying attention, which
he must be hoping you haven't.
No Child Left Behind has nothing on our Representatives. They're all
above average, at least in their imagination.
More good news for the 1%
Happy story about wealth creation (not so much about job
creation), and what a surprise, those that have shall have more. The
IRS, not so much. The company has to print a few pages of legal
boilerplate, do some accounting, and voilà! Millions
and billions for executives who watched the tide rise again, and the
corporations enjoy a handsomely inflated write-off. As
David
Kocieniewski drily reports,
"For some companies, awarding stock options can seem like a tempting
bargain, since there is no cash outlay and the tax benefits can exceed
the original cost."
Of course, to be fair and balanced, tax lawyers and accountants
can imagine a justification, "because the options represent a real cost
to the company." (Remember all that printing and bookkeeping.) And since
the executives who cash in the options have to pay taxes on the income,
the IRS gets its share, right?
It's like money from nothing. The stockholders who have their
investments diluted hardly notice ('cause hey, their shares went up in
price too), and taxpayers are too busy worrying about their own taxes.
Goldman Sachs granted 10 times as many options in December 2008 as they
did the year before. General Electric went from 18 and 25 million in
2007 & 2008, to 159 million options granted in 2009, the year their
stock opened at $17-something, closed at $16-something and visited $7.06
at its darkest hour. (It's now back to $18... which it passed on the way
up to its 2000 bubble peak of $60 in 1997.)
The
accompanying graphic has a cute gold palette, although numbers of
options and weekly closing stock prices on a variable scale leaves some
mental integration to do. Sirius XM, for example, dominates the chart
with their bazillion options in '09, but their stock was scraping $0.
Whereas Goldman Sachs' tax savings (never mind the largesse to
the execs) is in the $billions, $1.8B saved from 2005 to
2008.
29.Dec.2011
The cost of higher education swoops
After all that soaring, don't you know, here it is
down
to zero at one of the most prestigious brands in the world: the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sure, an actual credential will
cost you something (if you're a "freak" about that kind of thing)
but if you "just want to improve your chops in a marketable subject
area," knock yourself out.
This newer effort is planned to be "more interactive" than
MIT's "OpenCourseWare,"
which has been available for a decade and reached many millions of
students with more than 2,000 classes worth of course
material.
If you don't like MIT, try
Carnegie Mellon
or Yale or
Stanford Engineering Everywhere,
or what the heck, the whole planet's worth at
Academic Earth.
Speaking of burst bubbles
"...he says he would force Obama to debate him seven times, for three
hours each and without a moderator, by following him
everywhere he travels until he relents...."
The Newtballon seems to be drifting back to earth. Are the
Republicans ready to accept the inevitable, or do we have to have a
Santorum surge, too? At any rate,
Matt
Bai's NYT Magazine for New Year's Day seems as fitting an obituary
for Gingrich's second act as any.
So many questions... who looks good in a generic hotel meeting room
setting? Who could sound smart while eating? ("Soon he was scooping
yogurt and blueberries into his mouth...") Does he really believe people
want him to lose so they won't look silly? How close to the Greek
financial crisis were Newt and Callista able to get during their June
cruise?
Maybe it was the gas
I have no idea what it would be like to support a fringe candidate like
Michelle Bachmann, so I'm equally clueless as to why someone would
jump
ship to a different fringe. She says it was about "a large sum of
money" but the new ship's spokesman says he won't be getting a salary.
(And oh, her own Iowa political director
refuted
what she said, too.) It's a tenuous business. The most explanatory of
the
facts
in evidence may be this, about why the guy didn't have much to say
at a Bachmann campaign event on Tuesday (before dropping the bomb
yesterday):
"Sorenson had just returned from the dentist, and Sorenson himself said
he was saying little because he was still numb and afraid he would drool
on himself."
28.Dec.2011
Boating on Titan
Could do, if the
Titan Mare
Explorer wins the contest and gets to fly to Saturn.
(Its
competition for NASA's low-cost
Discovery program
is a comet-hopping satellite and a Martian seismometer.
Thanks to Wired online for a collection of images and interesting
captions from the work of Cassini, Caltech, JPL, NASA, as
Titan: A Wet World Not Far from Earth.
27.Dec.2011
Newt now nixes Notes
He says it wasn't so... or, even better, a spokesman says it
wasn't so. Marc Johnson's had some experience writing for others,
making his take on
politicians running
from their words interesting.
"In every political office and campaign I've ever worked in, been close
to or observed from afar, the candidate—or on a rare occasion an
extremely trusted staffer—signs off on everything that is written down
and committed to a speech draft. There is no margin of error on such
statements, particularly since they now find an instant home on the
Internet and can easily come back to haunt. That's how it works."
Of course, Gingrich has already
told us "on the
record, any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood,"
so send that down your little rabbit hole of crazy. They were a
falsehood because those words—which he said—were "inaccurate
and unfortunate."
I forget which unfortunate words those were, but back in 2006,
Gingrich's
praise for Mitt Romney's health care plan was lucid, and made
perfect sense:
"[O]ur goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans.
Individuals without coverage often do not receive quality medical
attention on par with those who do have insurance. We also believe
strongly that personal responsibility is vital to creating a 21st
Century Intelligent Health System. Individuals who can afford to
purchase health insurance and simply choose not to place an unnecessary
burden on a system that is on the verge of collapse; these free-riders
undermine the entire health system by placing the onus of responsibility
on taxpayers."
Thinking outside the box
Specifically, to the outside corners of the box: one of the
NYT Magazine's celebrated Lives, that of
Keith
W Tantlinger, who invented an
apparatus for handling
freight in transit (and a
shipboard freight
container transferring apparatus, and 75 more), in "freight boxes or
containers" with "means for securing the trailer body in position on the
[truck trailer] chassis is readily releasable whereby the body is free
to be hoisted and stowed aboard ship."
The assignee of U.S. Patent #3,027,025 was the aptly named Sea-Land
Service, Inc., a name familiar to me from my earliest days of model
railroading which pretty much coincided with said patent's issuance, in
March, 1962.
Sea-Land's
history starts about the same time mine does, transforming both the
waterfronts and the highways of my memory with globalized trade. In
sturdy boxes.
And when it's time to settle down... you can
turn
those containers into homes and offices.
It's the Fox News Party. Duh.
Interesting read from yesterday's NYT,
Whose Tea Party is it? Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson have a
new book (and a website
for the book of course), based on 16 months of attending meetings,
interviewing members and reading their websites and message boards.
Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions from their generous summary, but it
sounds to me like the unifying factors are their support for Social
Security and Medicare (because most of getting it now or will be soon),
Obama Derangement Syndrome (Mitch McConnell would be their guy), and
"Tea "[receiving] their information primarily, or in some cases
exclusively, from Fox News and talk radio."
Their research will be easily attacked by the thousand-poundgorilla
media juggernaut featured, because it's that crazy
liberal, fact-based, empirical stuff, about social movement
orchestration.
Boxing Day
Out of this world
Our planet has a great big moon, you've probably noticed. At 2,159 miles
across, its diameter is well more than a quarter of earth's. Saturn has
a great big moon too,
Titan, that's
half again the diameter of ours. (Saturn has a huge collection of
moons, of course,
62 for sure,
of which only 53 have been named).
Titan has an atmosphere, unlike every other moon we know, and it's
50% denser than our planet's.
The Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations—a.k.a.
CICLOPS—has
some holiday eye
candy treats from around Saturn: natural color images of Titan,
Dione, Tehtys, and of course Grampa Saturn, who just about always sneaks
into the picture.
They are awesome, as usual.
The one shown here was taken from 1.4 million miles away, six times
farther than we are from our own moon. Which got me to wondering what
Cassini's orbital distance is, which led to this page showing
its
present position, with four disparate points of view: views of
Saturn, and of Enceladus from Cassini; view of Saturn, its moons' orbits
and Cassini from "above"; and the view of Earth from Cassini. Turns out
a lot of those moons have some crazy elliptical orbits around the gas
giant (although
Titan's
is pretty round).
Found this, too: a Hubble image of a
Saturn's moons in a quadruple transit.
Simply must clean up some of this crazy bit collection
You all know about opening multiple pages in browser tabs by now?
An interesting feed, or run through Facebook, or newspaper site and I
can end up with six or 10 pages queued up, and then... never quite get
to reading them all. The laptop which just goes to sleep when I'm done
with it can sit there and wait (and dissuade me from loading still
more), but for the machine that gets shut down every day, a decision has
to be made. Ah, "bookmark all tabs," and maybe I'll get back to them
some day.
I've got 50 items in WIP-NoDate-General, 14 in WIP-NoDate-Work, 22
folders in WIP-Dated, 17 bookmarks in WIPx, 14 in WIP-Nov2011, 37
in WIP-Dec2011. All told, about north of 400 pages that piqued
my attention for a moment, to read, to forward to someone, to comment
on, something. Sort of like that Inbox with 1,516 items in it, 1,111
unread (except that a lot of those are coming in without any continuing
expression of interest on my part).
For example: Charles Blow's short blog post in 2008,
Why
is America So Religious? to spark a discussion about a chart from
the Pew Research Center's
Global Attitudes Project, showing
that
"the wealthier a country is, the less important religion is to that
country. The one exception: The United States."
Three years later, comments are no longer being accepted, but 460 are
archived. (I didn't read through them.)
Oh, this is interesting, posted last month:
The
American-Western European Values Gap, "American Exceptionalism
Subsides." A little. A week's worth of blog fodder, at least.
"...Americans are far more inclined than Western Europeans to say it is
necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values;
53% say this is the case in the U.S., compared with just one-third in
Germany, 20% in Britain, 19% in Spain and 15% in France. ..."
One chart worth 1,000 words is toward the end of that
long page, "Views of Religion in the U.S.," sliced by sex, age,
education, and ideology. "It is necessary to believe in God to be moral"
was agreed to by 66% of conservatives, 52% of moderates and
26% of the liberals they polled. Those Godless liberals you hear
so much about, I guess.
Ok, so that's one item I can delete now.
Virtual currency
Same word, different meanings: deFAULT is a bad thing, when the company
you gave some money to in exchange for a bond and some interest payments
tells you they can't pay any more. Or maybe
it's
the whole county going belly up, and prepared to redefine "full
faith and credit" to mean "actually, we don't feel like paying you."
DEEfault, as is in, "the choice somebody else made for you" is good for
somebody, such as Google, making
$300,000,000
a year to be the search engine you get in Mozilla Firefox without
bothering to do anything.
Christmas Eve
Pop quiz
How many Republican voters' signatures do you need to get in Virginia to
obtain a good one? Well more than one, maybe less than two, on average,
as
Newt
Gingrich and his campaign learned to their dismay "in the wee hours
of Saturday" when "the Virginia Republican Party announced via Twitter"
(for real?). The March primary in that state ill apparently not be
including the Newtster. Or Rick Perry. And no trying to write anybody
in, either! You just can't be too careful.
23.Dec.2011
Political Theater II
Jennifer Steinhauer saved me the trouble of digging around C-Span,
describing
the
atmospherics of today's Senate and House deal-sealing of the
two-month payroll tax cut extension.
How many Senators does it take to rub the noses of "those members who
are newer to this body"? Just two. Steinhauer didn't give a count of the
House (beyond "a Republican or two dotted the chamber"), but as I
supposed, Boehner was swinging the gavel, and none of the obstreperous
Tea Partiers stuck around to cause trouble.
"Without objection, uh the bill is engrossed, uh read for a third time
and passed, and the motion to reconsider is laid on the table."
The Speaker of the House of Representatives
Such as... Mr. Speaker, point of order: do we have a quorum? Or, how
about a roll call vote on this bill?
But unanimous consent is nothing if not unanimous, so there we have it:
passed the House 435-0, not a single objection. Merry Christmas to all,
and to all a good night!
I had a vague sense of these "pro forma" sessions being used to prevent
recess appointments, but I was confused by the facts that (a) the House
doesn't approve presidential appointments, and (b) the Senate has a
majority of Democrats, so shouldn't they be happy to let the president
appoint away? The same NYT reporter explained it this summer:
Sometimes a Day in Congress Takes Seconds, Gavel to Gavel.
"According to the Constitution, neither chamber of Congress may adjourn
for more than three days without permission of the other."
"The use of pro forma sessions to block recess appointments is a very
recent development," said Katherine Scott, an assistant historian for
the United States Senate Historical Office. "Republicans threatened it
with President Clinton in the 1990s, but didn’t use it. Senator Reid was
the first to declare, in 2007, that the Senate would hold pro forma
sessions to block recess appointments."
Turns out it's a lot easier to throw a wrench in the works than it is to
get the machinery rolling again.
Update:
Gail
Collins' version describes the "old-fashioned Congressional
compromise that resembled the offspring of a wart hog and vampire
bat."
22.Dec.2011
Political theater
In the power struggle between the Senate Minority leader and the
anonymous GOP rabble of the House, it appears
Mitch
McConnell succeeded in throwing the rabble off the bus so that the
Senate could have its way, the fairly inexplicable super-short-term
extension of the tax cut everyone gets (as opposed to to the nicely
tailored tax cuts, signed, sealed and delivered in last year's
game of holiday chicken). There's still the possibility of some drama
and Christmas Eve unmiracle, however:
"Mr. Boehner said in a Capitol Hill news conference Thursday that if the
compromise was not approved in the House by unanimous consent on Friday,
as planned, he would 'absolutely' call the House back into session for
a vote next week. The House is in pro forma session and can make such a
move if no one objects. The Senate is expected to do the same."
We imagine that most House members have cleared out of town, haven't
they? Wednesday's "pro forma session" went slightly off script when,
after the appointment of fill-in Speaker was read, a prayer given,
the journal of the last day's proceedings approved, the Pledge of
Allegiance recited, and the fill-in Speaker swung the gavel to declare
the House adjourned, an "unidentified speaker" (as
C-Span
reported)
piped up, asking for unanimous consent to actually do some business.
The fill-in Speaker had been well-coached, ignored the commotion and
walked out the door as
a.k.a.
Minority Whip Steny Hoyer called for unanimous consent to
bring up the bill to extend the tax cut for 160,000 Americans.
On Friday, round two, with John Boehner swinging the gavel, I'd think,
but this time asking for unanimous consent to pretty much what Hoyer was
after on Wednesday. If there is just one House member with the (a)
stamina to be there at the right moment, (b) temerity to stand and say
"I object!" (and (c), Mr. Speaker actually recognizes him or her), the
House could be in town between Christmas and New Year's Eve. You think?
I bet there's still a copy of Dale Carnegie's book in
the Library of Congress....
Solstice
Searching for a sympathetic bazillionaire
Max Abelson's opinion roundup on Bloomberg.com might have felt more
neutral if it hadn't been under the headline
Bankers
Join Billionaires to Debunk 'Imbecile' Attack on Top 1%. But then
that snipe was part of the "defense." You guys can afford a marketing
department, can't you? Find somebody to write you a speech with
something more clever than attacking your critics as "imbeciles." Or
whining about them not paying income taxes when they pay 15% of their
income in payroll taxes (and you don't pay anywhere near that much, now
do you?).
The "chorus" of unapologetic wealthy people is growing, how charming.
Thus providing someone to share your disdain with over lunch, say
for
"...Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires public companies
to disclose the ratio between the compensation of their CEOs and
employee medians, according to Allison. The rule, still being fine-tuned
by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is 'incredibly wasteful'
because it takes up time and resources, he said. Stemberg called the
rule 'insane' in an e-mail to Bloomberg News. "
Annoying, I can see that, but "insane"? And incredibly wasteful to, um,
divide one number by another? You've got an accounting department too,
don't you? It brings to mind Scrooge McDuck swimming in his vault and
bristling at the idea that he should have to take inventory.
At least hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman is getting some
love for standing up for his kind:
"Cooperman said in an interview that he can't walk through the dining
room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being
thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude
on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said."
When is a holiday not a holiday?
You know the old saw about the difference between a recession and a
depression, don't you? (Something about losing your job.) The
Wall Street Journal's got it going on in their "Review & Outlook"
about
the GOP's Payrol Tax Fiasco:
"Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama
position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent
most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the
economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013."
Said "largest tax increase ever" would be the end of the ill-advised and
economy-busting Bush-era tax cuts initiated in 2001, passed with a
10-year ("we'll have packed the suitcases with money and moved offshore
by then") sunset, then extended for a post-Bush two-year bonus.
Opinions differ about past, present and future economic costs and
benefits, but you can't deny that Republicans successfully turned a
temporary tax cut into permanent thinking, so that Rupert Murdoch
outlets can unabashedly label any notion of accepting the deal
legislated from the beginning as a "tax increase."
But the most precious part is less than two paragraphs down:
"Their first mistake was adopting the President's language that he is
proposing a tax cut rather than calling it a temporary tax
holiday. People will understand the difference—and discount
the benefit."
That's "people" as in our people, I guess. You cut my
taxes, good, settled, done, forever. You cut the taxes of 160 million or
so of the semi-washed workers in the country, even temporarily, that's
some kind of crazy "holiday," and don't get any ideas about it
continuing, and of course it's only temporary.
The WSJ conclusion is that "Messrs. Boehner and McConnell were gulled
into going behind closed doors with the President, who dragged out
negotiations and later emerged to sandbag them." That's the same
President who's at turns incompetent and lacking leadership, when the Messrs.
tell the story, but what do you know, he picked their pockets while they
did a Keystone Kops head-butt routine! Oh, he's conniving, isn't
he?
The alternate explanation—that McConnell's prime directive (make Obama
a one-term president, whatever it costs the country) is not only morally
bankrupt, it's politically stupid, and that John Boehner has lost
control of the Tea Party lunatics running the Asylum House—is
apparently too embarrassing to acknowledge. Better to "somehow manage
the remarkable feat of being blamed" when their hearts are so pure, and
that darned President gulled them.
Knowledge-based charity
As a regular user of
Wikipedia, I've seen plenty of
those year-end appeal ads, and successfully ignored them for a long
time, clicking or scrolling head to the useful information I'm after.
But thanks to social media, and a friend who said "I donated," it
actually occurred to me to participate.
It's a fabulous resource, one of the truly wonderful things on the web,
and an extension of human knowledge. What's not to like? So today, I
made my first-ever donation to the
Wikimedia
Foundation, to help us all "imagine a world in which every single
human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
And encourage you, gentle reader, to go and do likewise.
19.Dec.2011
Finding our way in the dark
I've never felt the need of a philosopher or religious official to
explain to me that atheism and morality are not in any kind of
opposition. But who knows, maybe the remnant of my theistic upbringing
is still keeping me in line.
Louise Antony's argument in
Good
Minus God, moves us beyond the simple observation that it's POSSIBLE
to live a moral life without belief in God (as many have, and do), to an
argument that a God provides us no help whatsoever in establishing
morality.
If God has intermediaries who can tell us what She wants of us, that
could be just fine, but does it constitute moral behavior?
Obedience is a virtue from the point of view of the person giving
orders. But following arbitrary orders has no moral content,
and following immoral orders can never be virtuous.
"[T]here are things one loses in giving up God, and they are not
insignificant. Most importantly, you lose the guarantee of redemption.
Suppose that you do something morally terrible, something for which you
cannot make amends, something, perhaps, for which no human being could
ever be expected to forgive you. I imagine that the promise made by
many religions, that God will forgive you if you are truly sorry, is a
thought would that bring enormous comfort and relief. You cannot have
that if you are an atheist. In consequence, you must live your life,
and make your choices with the knowledge that every choice you make
contributes, in one way or another, to the only value your life can
have."
18.Dec.2011
Biggest jump ever
Too much news, too many superlatives, you might fail to notice after a
while.
Carbon
emissions up 5.9% in 2010: "Almost certainly the largest
absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the
largest percentage increase since 2003."
That's extracted from the detail and uncertainty ranges of
the Global Carbon Project's report. But this is direct enough:
"The present concentration is the highest during at least the last
800,000 years."
33 billion tons of CO2 are the highest emissions in human
history, half again as much as were emitted in 1990, the reference year
for the Kyoto
protocol. Not only are we not reining in emissions, the pace is
increasing: up 1% per year in the '90s, up 3% per year in the most
recent ten years. The global recession put the brakes on in 2009, but
we're back on the gas.
More charts and detail in
the
full report. One picture worth 1,000 words is slide #23, "Human
perturbation of the global carbon budget," to show the scale of what's
happening.
17.Dec.2011
Honey, we broke the Congress
Not so much "we are broke," that political b.s. talking point,
but we are going to hell in a handbasket, given that the legislative
branch of the most powerful country in the world has been incapacitated
by a collection of narrow-minded idiots incapable of looking out for
anything but their personal parochial interests. The only thing about
approval ratings into a single digit we don't understand
is—seriously, someone still approves of the job Congress is
doing?
I guess at least 10% of any group can be counted on to not be paying
attention. There are so many distractions these days.
A friend just forwarded a link to a two-year old item in Science Daily,
still timely:
Is
Global Warming Unstoppable? A University of Utah scientist figures
that stabilizing CO2 emissions would require "building
the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day" (for, um, how
many days?). We haven't built any in this country in the last two years,
have we? And that study was out long before reports of
the melting of arctic permafrost, tundra fire and methane—a
greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon
dioxide—bubbling
into the atmosphere hit the MSM.
Down in the lower 48, we have a different sort of flaming gasbag, Rush
Limbaugh warning his listeners that the gummint is coming after their
cherished incandescent bulbs,
"gunning
for you." Pity the poor conservative, forced to use
"inferior light," "small and tiny." (You know, like those pathetic
Christmas
decorations you see this time of year. I'm sure the Feds will come
gunning for those, soon.)
No
joke, one of the most "important" things on this week's
Congressional agenda was a 10 month delay in funding to enforce the law
passed by the House, 264-163 and the Senate, 65-27, and
signed by George W. Bush four years ago this month. Why do Republicans
now hate
energy independence and security?
The question of whether the planet is warming, and heading for
increasingly severe climate-driven disruptions for the people living on
it has been answered in myriad ways, even if nay-sayers will dispute the
role of human-generated emissions right up to the apocalypse. It's
conceivable we could change the course of events by changing our
behavior. Do we have the political will? Haven't seen much of that. Even
if it were mustered, do we have sufficient political competence to carry
it out? No evidence whatsoever.
We're on our way to a world of hurt, it would appear, "bipartisan"
acts with as much long-term vision as
Thelma and Louise's finale.
Update:
Hours later, I see that my friend did not "just" send me the link
to Science Daily, but rather sent it back in Nov. 2009 when it was
fresh and new. Secrets of my Inbox are thus revealed. The entertaining
video is of the same vintage as the SD piece. But the MSM picking up
the artic methane story now, two years later, that part is real, and
thanks to
Dr.
Igor Semiletov of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And Congress
broken, that's for real, too.
15.Dec.2011
Newt and the giant pot of money
Robert
Reich: "Newt's tax plan, and why his polls rise the more outrageous
he becomes." Jacking up the deficit by $850 billion in a single
year, seriously? It's not just big ideas, the Newtster is spinning
off big, crazy ideas.
"History is full of strong men with dangerous ideas who gain power when
large masses of people are so desperate and disillusioned they'll follow
anyone who offers big, seemingly easy solutions."
It remains to be seen if Mr. Big Idea is going to regain power and be a
strong man, but he's already lasted longer than any of the previous
parade of front-runners.
14.Dec.2011
Threshold
Tipping points as we close in on the solstice, halfway through the
month, barely 10 shopping days left before the shopopause and all the
while...
V-ger
is hurtling to the edge of the unknown 636 miles a
minute, 11 billion miles out, no way home, no prospect of every being
"very close to any other object in our solar system, or even in our
galaxy."
Not much to see close-up to the void, but there are billions of stars
and galaxies in every direction. And one day soon, a hint about one of
our beliefs, that
"we are in a cloud of material that was ejected by the explosion of a
series of supernova, about 5 to 10, 15 million years ago, very near the
sun. And that we will be embedded in the material from those giant
explosions, and the magnetic field which was swept up by the shells of
material ejected by those exploding stars."
Just because we're a curious lot. And friendly, judging by the free gold
record we sent with our ambassador to the galaxy at large.
12.Dec.2011
Two gems from the campaign trail
Take these in either order, but I suppose better to go with Hendrik
Hertzberg's fantasy-meets-reality alt-hist horror show,
Alt-Newt
before reading
John Cassidy's debate cheat sheet rundown of Saturday night's
go. On the down side:
"Imagine a man who, in a country just staggering out of the worst
recession of the past fifty years and facing the threat of worldwide
economic collapse, proposes to hire small children to work as janitors,
mopping floors and cleaning toilets in their schools (or their
orphanages, perhaps)."
And the upside, finding out it is still possible to make the latest
front runner
blush:
"Most of the other candidates had their moments, particularly Ron Paul,
who poked Gingrich in his most tender spot: the hidden pouch where he
stashed the $1.6 million he received from Freddie Mac."
Corporations aren't people, part 2
James Surowiecki's piece in
The New Yorker is nominally
about bankruptcy and default but in describing the "obvious and
offensive" double standard in the response to entities not paying their
debts, he reveals an important difference. The corporate shield
provides immunization from shame, guilt and fear as well as the
protection against personal liability that is the
raison d'être of nonpersonal business organizations.
The Mortgage Bankers Association can dish a little guilt on prospective
defaulters by trying to get them to think of what "their family and
their kids and their friends" will think, and for its own account,
persuade its creditors to accept a short sale of its HQ, "dumping
it for thirty-four million dollars less than the value of the building's
mortgage." Necessity remains the mother of invention, and societal norms
are not carved in stone. That's why we have
"Strategic
Default" in the dictionary now.
"Strategic defaults would help distribute the pain more evenly and, if
they became more common, would force lenders to be more responsible in
the future. It's also possible that a wave of strategic defaults—a
De-Occupy Your House movement—would get banks to take mortgage
modification more seriously, which would be all for the better. The
truth is that banks have been relying on homeowners to do the right
thing. It might be time for homeowners to do the smart thing
instead."
There would be the problem of where to go after the deoccupation,
assuming camping down by the statehouse isn't fully attractive.
The attempt by Occupy Boise to
ask the Sheriff
nicely to stop foreclosing on people is slightly charming, but
he gave no sign of being charmed. Nor does it seem likely he'd sit
on his hands if OB followed through on the idea to
eventually occupy foreclosed homes.
Adverse possession (a.k.a. "squatter's rights"), on the other
hand, does provide legal means to lay claim to ownership of
someone else's property. Not-so-recent (but recently picked up by MSM
outlets)
news from Texas describes someone squatting up a $300k house for
$16 ("He says an online form he printed out and filed at the Denton
County courthouse for $16 gave him rights to the house.")
Occupy real estate with no money down! But yes, it's just
another opportunistic scam.
When you start talking to the
folks with
non-made-up letters behind their names, you find out that actual
laws make the process slightly more difficult than a camp in the
living room. In Texas, if you're not prepared to come up with some sort
of legitimate paperwork to meet the 3 or 5-year statutes, your term of
actual, open, notorious, exclusive, hostile, continuous, and
uninterrupted occupation will have to run 10 years before you win
your dream house. Each one of those highlighted terms has a very
specific legal meaning, so good luck with that. Somehow, your
occupation needs to be both "hostile" and "peaceable" for example.
And don't forget to pay all the taxes! The county Sheriff will be
enforcing that requirement, and taking a dim view of things like
breaking and entering, filing false affidavits, slander of title, and
fraud. Maybe even if you declare yourself a corporation.
Update:
Two more potentially useful finance items, from Jane Bryant Quinn (with
a h/t to the same fellow who sent me the interesting link to The New
Yorker):
What
happens when you walk away from a mortgage loan? and
Thinking about a mortgage default? Beware the taxes due.
11.Dec.11
Running on empty
Time for a weekend roundup of campaign commentary. Paul Krugman wonders
if it's possible to believe "the modern G.O.P. catechism" without being
utterly cynical, or
clueless.
"[W]hoever finally gets the Republican nomination will be a deeply
flawed candidate. And these flaws won’t be an accident, the result of
bad luck regarding who chose to make a run this time around; the fact
that the party is committed to demonstrably false beliefs means that
only fakers or the befuddled can get through the selection process."
Hunting
the
elusive job creator: even with the help of "numerous Republican
congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership," and
business groups lobbying against the so-called "millionaires' surtax,"
none were to be found. The Tax Relief Coalition said they're out there,
just real shy.
From the What You Don't See Can Hurt You department,
Dave Gilson and Asawin Suebsaeng chart
the Exploding Universe of Dark Money, "rapidly expanding super-PACs
and nebulous 501(c) groups exerting their gravitational pull on federal
elections." Karl Rove's binary giants appear to be the Death Star of the
conservative groups, "drawn to scale, though they may be larger than
they appear to the naked eye due to limited or incomplete
disclosure."
Also in the funny-not-necessarily-funny-ha-ha papers, Brian McFadden's
got your
new pet Newt ready to order, 'Think Tank' included.
10.Dec.2011
You would think it would go without saying
But no. So independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont
has
proposed an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to spell out what the
founders certainly intended, that constitutional rights be for natural
persons, not for "for-profit corporations, limited liability
companies, or other private entities established for business purposes
or to promote business interests under the laws of any state, the United
States, or any foreign state."
8.Dec.2011
Juxtaposeurs
Not sure if it was an editorial decision or just the basic attempt to
cover "both sides" of an issue, but Sunday's Idaho Statesman had an
interesting pair of "Reader's View" opinions stacked on page I2. I read
John Gardner's piece,
Let's
carefully use our power supply to invest in new sources first, and
thought he did a good job of explaining the slightly esoteric topic of
energy return on energy invested (EROEI), and why it's an important
consideration. Worth reading (and not long or difficult), and
understanding the implications because "The longer we put off
investments in renewable energy technologies, the more expensive,
energy-wise, it will be to make those investments."
(If you want to go whole hog, there's
a 6-part series on The Oil Drum,
Why EROI Matters, and
lots of intelligent discussion of the issue on that site.)
Gardner's piece was not so much "opinion"; as an engineering professor
and director of Boise State University's Energy Efficiency Research Institute
(announced
a year ago; and still spinning up?), his work is more in the realm
of technical education.
Which I dare say the co-author of the "top" opinion, our junior
Representative to Congress, Raúl Labrador
could use some more of. Labrador's current hobby horse is a bill to
end
all energy subsidies now because... the market will solve all our
problems? Government shouldn't be picking winners and losers? Subsidies
are a rat's nest of corruption and influence peddling?
All that and more, the grab-bag of ideology labeled "common sense" (as
in, "it's just common sense, so there's no need for me to actually
provide a sensible explanation") and a really simple solution to a
really complex set of problems that are at the very foundation of our
modern economy.
Just cut everybody off, fair is fair, smaller government, hoorah!
Labrador and his partner in advocacy,
Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas got their unabridged opinion
in The
Washington Times late last month, and the original is even less
worthy than the short form. You don't even need common sense to decry
"subsidy folly" and the "infamous Department of Energy."
(Infamous, really?) And this, away over the top:
"The good news is that with the support of the American people,
politicians now are speaking the truth."
Politicians such as Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, for example.
And Raúl Labrador and Mike Pompeo. We must be on the threshold of
a golden age.
7.Dec.2011
Be still my ♥
When an emoticon can't say enough:
Emoji.
I love the note about cross-cultural issues:
"But some things may be lost in translation in emoji’s journey. For
example, the emoji of a smiling coil of human waste is a popular way to
express dissatisfaction in Japan, but doesn’t have quite the same
resonance in the United States. And while the iPhone has emoji for
steaming bowls of ramen, balls of rice and cups of sake, there aren’t
any for common Western items like pizza."
I'm sure somebody will arrange for pizza delivery, soon.
In the meantime, if you're having trouble understanding emoji,
Apple can help you,
in at least 17 languages.
6.Dec.2011
Deferred gratification (or not)
Not one of the marketing messages you're seeing among the
thousands
coming at you every day, but one of those old-timey virtues I was
raised to acquire was the one of working toward a goal, saving up
earnings to buy something.
Credit cards were growing up about the same time as I was, but
weren't much seen in our neighborhood. The Savings and Loan was
within walking distance though, and I understood 4% per annum interest
to be what one would get for patience and a passbook, and I eagerly
(and impatiently) watched the pennies add up in mine.
Not everyone in the baby boom sees things the same way, but there are
plenty of similarities in the demographic bulge making its way through the
snake of time. Workers' compensation used to reflect such family values
as I knew, providing for a long-term relationship with an incentive to
stick together, work hard, perservere. The pot at the end of the rainbow
was of course RETIREMENT, those golden years worth striving for.
Perhaps you've heard of such good old days, as were sloughed off
some time around morning in America (S&L deregulation) and
the
Me Generation. The idea of a "career" being something you have with
a particular organization is being retired along with boomers who
somehow managed to survive half a dozen rounds of layoffs over the last
decade.
What better dateline than Madison, Wisconsin for
a
story about workers in the public sector retiring sooner rather than
later? The race between the stay-the-course, keep your head down,
work toward That Day tortoises, and the get out while the getting is
good (or before it goes any worse) rabbits is getting hare-ier every
day. "Workers fear a permanent shift away from the traditional security
of government jobs, and they are making plans to get out now, before
salaries and retirement benefits retreat further."
"It's about fear," said Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin
Professional Police Association. "A lot of people are seeing this war on
public employees and saying, let's get out."
Yup, he said war on public employees. Which brings to mind
another item from my upbringing, back when we had adages: a house
divided against itself cannot stand.
Update:
Connected by the concept we shared in our post headlines,
this,
on Good Morning Yesterday from Lam Chun See in Singapore.
3.Dec.2011
Giving capitalism a bad name
Two things:
Frank
Luntz sounds desperate, crazy, or both. (None of which prevent him
from selling what he's selling, necessarily.)
And how 'bout them Republican Governors getting schooled on how to
"blame Washington" for any and every failure they may encounter?
Idaho's own Clement L. "Butch" Otter was on hand, skipping out of
state business for a Florida vacation and some elder hostile education
in big money spin.
5. Don't say 'government spending.' Call it 'waste.'
"It's not about 'government spending.' It's about 'waste.' That's what
makes people angry."
Me, I get more worked up about scumbag political operatives playing
semantic games and shilling to an audience who seems to have lost track
of what public service is all about.
What drives prosperity
It's much easier to come up with a rationalization that works
than an explanation. The former just needs to be vaguely
plausible, while the latter actually has to make sense. That fact
doesn't constrain the newsfotainment industry much, since most of the
time, most of us are content with a self-serving suggestion. If it
matches what we know, we check the mental reinforcement box and
move on. It's not that an valid explanation can't be
self-serving, just that benefit in the eye of the beholder raises
the risk of self-delusion.
Which brings us to public policy and taxation once again. We've been
running downhill on the theory that "if only" we lower taxes and shrink
governments, our economy will boom. Given our most immediate history
of trying that very thing and having it fail in bad-to-spectacular
fashion (other than for the wealthiest sliver of humanity) the
durability of the theory is enough to make one believe in zombies.
If someone tries to tell you that accepting the end of a temporary tax
cut for his wealthy friends amounts to a tax increase, but
letting
a payroll tax cut expire isn't, he fails the laugh test. (What if...
you and your wealthy friends have been enjoying the "temporary" cut for
a decade, and you've only had your payroll tax cut for a year? Ha
ha.)
On the other hand, if your run of the mill bazillionaire explains that
large
luxury yachts are not actually the cause of rising tides while the
rest of the fleet owners celebrate their tidal victory, it might be
worth a listen.
Especially if you're Neil Cavuto: you could learn more if you would
stop
interrupting and listen up. (And what the hell is the problem
with the ADHD tech crew at Fox Business with the whooshing and the
flashing and the interviewer who won't let his subject have his
say?)
Nick Hanauer:
"If it was true that less tax and less regulation and less government
would create prosperity, then someplace on earth there would be
this libertarian utopia where nobody paid any taxes and nobody paid any
rules and everybody lived like a king. ... Prosperity is linked to our
investment in our society."
On liberty (and justice, and stewardship)
One of the standout features of our local newspaper is
Ed Lotterman's syndicated column,
Real World Economics.
Yesterday's edition (the original ran on Nov. 23
in the St.
Paul (MN) Pioneer Press) was the best ever, in my opinion,
with details of his biography to put his thinking and his values in a
deeper context.
He's lived in Brazil, and Peru, consulted in Bulgaria, served 29 years
in the U.S. Army, and grew up on a farm. Can't get much more fertile
ground than that. (His own website's
about page
shows that the personal information he shared in the column was a
modest sample. It's all interesting, and the last item, "At Home,"
pegs the charming meter, as well.)
Running it a week and a half later, the Idaho Statesman edited
out the Thanksgiving message in his opening (and conclusion), but the
point he makes doesn't depend on any particular season: "because
liberty is vital, it should not be trivialized."
"Individual freedom is important but it is not absolute. In a just
society, any single person's freedom to do what he wants is always
limited by how his actions affect other people. And that line between
individual autonomy and the needs of society as a whole is not always
distinct."
2.Dec.2011
Is that all there is?
After months of having what seemed like far too many candidates for the
GOP nomination, and now just weeks away from the Iowa corn poll, we've
got a left-for-dead retread with
no
ground game as the "front runner," matching Herman Cain's folksy
crazy twirlin' with teh professorial crazy:
"This is disorienting. This is such a rapid change that we’re having to
rethink our own internal operations right now and where we are."
Yes indeed, disorientating.
Meanwhile, over on Fox, the anybody-but candidate long assumed to be the
guy GOP voters will eventually hold their noses for, Mitt Romney, gave
the pundosphere
ample
cause to conjugate "petulance" with a demonstration of why his
rarely agreeing to extended, on-camera interviews is probably a good
idea.
Is it Jon Huntsman's moment to shine? Please?
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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