
SHEETZ
Musings aimed to please, inspire, take you away from this mad world and deliver you to even crazier realms.
Now readable on multiple media layers! No extra charge for nuance or meta-tropes!
Coppula eam, se non posit jocularum
Alfred E. Newman
The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man‑produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing‑like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing‑world. Reification is a ‘special’ case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.
"You know what really worried me about Second Life? Is that after I'd spent maybe like four or five hours checking it out last December, I was walking around in the Christmas shopping crowds here, and every so often I would see somebody from Second Life walking down the street. There are people, always well under 30, who look like they've escaped from Second Life."
"In the appointment of Hillary Clinton, he has proved as well that he is a supple thinker, capable of changing his views according to experience. To elevate the junior senator from New York into his Cabinet, Obama had to set aside the criticisms of her that he and his surrogates had voiced during the campaign.
"If her experience in national security and foreign policy were as shallow as advertised back then, after all, on what basis could he offer her the position of top diplomat? If her judgment were as poor as charged by him and others over the past two years, then why would he place such heavy responsibilities on her shoulders? If her honesty were as questionable as his campaign sometimes claimed, then how can he trust her now?
"The answer is not necessarily that his campaign rhetoric was false or insincere, but that he developed respect for her over the difficult months of that harsh contest -- and came to believe that she would be as formidable at his side as she was in his face.
"The same contrast between then and now applies to Clinton as well, of course. To be willing to sacrifice her Senate seat -- and an apparent offer to join the Democratic leadership -- she must have come to a very different view of Obama's potential than the skepticism expressed by her and her supporters in the heat of the primary. In accepting this appointment, she will fully endorse his fitness to lead and the soundness of his worldview, without reservation. That acknowledgment goes far beyond the speeches of the general election campaign, which she delivered over and over on his behalf."
"Whistleblower has learned that a classified internal report at the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has concluded that the pirates are funded by expatriate Somalis and Emiratis based in Dubai. This determination is based, in part, on an independent Interpol probe that managed to identify several moneymen behind the high sea piracy. All live in Dubai."
"Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future. The last time this happened was 400 years ago -- and it signaled a solar event known as a "Maunder Minimum," along with the start of what we now call the "Little Ice Age."
"Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry—at least a little bit. Recently 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered to discuss the issue at an international solar conference at Montana State University. Today's sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why."
"Gates is a great choice because of the respect he has gained from all quarters after the fiasco that went before," says Anthony Zinni, a retired four-star Marine who once headed the U.S. Central Command. "He would also provide continuity at a critical time." The key to Gates' sticking around, Zinni suggests, is how many Pentagon political appointees Obama would let Gates keep if he stays, denying Democrats those key national security positions. "I think he won't stay without his team," Zinni says of Gates, "and the [Obama] Administration can't let him keep them." Then, uncharacteristically for this particular parlor game, Zinni adds: "But what do I know?"
"In 1956, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert discovered a grand illusion in the American oil industry. For tax purposes, he noted, American oil companies regularly delayed the declaration of new oil reserves by years and even decades. The result was a false impression that new oil was being found all the time. In fact, discoveries had peaked in 1936."
"Simmons had become suspicious of the Saudis' claims about the vastness of their oil supply. In his four decades of working in the oil and gas industry, everyone he had ever talked to had taken it as gospel that the Saudis had enough oil to bail the world out when other supplies ran short. If that wasn't true, Simmons believed, the era of cheap oil was over. Demand for crude was on the rise worldwide, and supplies were getting tighter all the time. If the Saudis were pushing up against the limits of their oil production, the world needed to know.
"In his typically analytical fashion, Simmons went hunting for data. He found it in the form of hundreds of technical papers submitted by Saudi oil geologists to the Society of Petroleum Engineers over the past 50 years. Simmons spent the month of August 2003 sitting on his porch in Maine and grinding his way through the minutiae of technical accounts of, for instance, reservoir pressure and water-cut percentages, trying to piece together the challenges that the Saudi geologists had encountered in managing their precious oilfields. In the end, his conclusion was clear. "I finished reading the last paper on a Sunday afternoon," says Simmons, "and I sat back and I thought, Holy crap, this is unbelievable. I've just discovered the biggest energy illusion ever in the world. We're in big trouble. I'm going to write a book."
“She thinks Obama has been great to ask, and she has been well-treated during the process,” the adviser to Mrs. Clinton said. “But she’s unsure.”
"One complication that Mrs. Clinton will face if she becomes secretary of state is the mountain of campaign debt leftover from her presidential run.
"Mrs. Clinton has $7.6 million in outstanding bills from the campaign, Mr. Reines said, not including personal loans she made to her campaign."
"Questions about a time before the big bang were once thought to be meaningless, because according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, the universe began at a singularity - a mathematical point with infinite density at which all calculations break down.
"However, physicists now believe that the theory of relativity is limited and the effects of quantum mechanics would have blurred out the singularity just a little, so at a crucial moment the density of matter and radiation was not infinite. If this was the case, it becomes possible to try to work out what led up to that moment."
According to Levitte, Sarkozy's diplomatic advisor, the French president misheard the balls remark. Sarkozy replied: "Hang him?" Putin then replied: "Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein." Sarkozy tried to dissuade Putin from this course of action, reasoning: "Yes, but do you want to end up like (US president George W.) Bush?"
Putin was briefly silenced before responding: "Ah, you have scored a point there!"
It is a sad state of affairs that Bush's America now appears in a Bond film in rather the same light as Brezhnev's Soviet Union used to. One can only hope that President Barack Obama can adopt the sort of policies that can get Bond back on our side.
Elizabeth Warren, expert on personal bankruptcy, crusader against credit card industry lobbyists, and founder of the extremely useful blog Credit Slips, to be a member of the bailout oversight board.
"WASHINGTON – Former President Bill Clinton's globe-trotting business deals and fundraising for his foundation sometimes put his activities abroad at odds with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and could cause complications if President-elect Barack Obama picks her to be secretary of state.
"During her own White House campaign, the New York senator criticized China for its crackdown on protesters in Tibet and urged President George W. Bush to skip the Olympics in Beijing. Her campaign was embarrassed by reports that her husband's foundation had raised money from a Chinese Internet company that posted an online government "Most Wanted" notice seeking information on Tibetan human-rights activists that may have been involved in the demonstrations.
"Hillary Clinton has campaigned as a champion of workers' rights. This year, Brazilian labor inspectors found what they called "degrading" living conditions for sugar cane workers employed by an ethanol company in which Bill Clinton invested."
"Losing - when the President determines that being in Iraq is not in our interest and successfully executes a plan to that effect.
Winning - when the President is forced by the enemy to sue for peace through bribery and acquiesces to an unwanted time table to withdraw."
"The College Republican National Committee has raised $6.3 million this year through an aggressive and misleading fund-raising campaign that collected money from senior citizens who thought they were giving to the election efforts of President Bush and other top Republicans.
"Many of the top donors were in their 80s and 90s. The donors wrote checks — sometimes hundreds and, in at least one case, totaling more than $100,000 — to groups with official sounding-names such as "Republican Headquarters 2004," "Republican Elections Committee" and the "National Republican Campaign Fund."
"But all of those groups, according to the small print on the letters, were simply projects of the College Republicans, who collected all of the checks.
"And little of the money went to election efforts.
***
"College Republicans serve as the party's outreach organization on college campuses. The group has been a starting place for many prominent conservatives, including Bush adviser Karl Rove, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed.
"Once a part of the Republican National Committee, the group is now independent. It is set to help get out the vote for Tuesday's election.
"Officers of the College Republican National Committee did not respond to questions about their fund raising."
"When the bailout bill was first debated, Congress was applauded for promising oversights on its implementation. But The Washington Post reports that "no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste." And Congress has missed the deadline for its first monitoring report. The Congressional Budget Office, which also has oversight responsibilities, is worried it won't be able to find people with the expertise to carry them out. "It's a mess," said the Treasury Department's inspector general. "I don't think anyone understands right now how we're going to do proper oversight of this thing."
"The supporting role the former Clinton official played in its collapse raises some hard questions about whether he should be the next treasury secretary.
"As the incoming Obama administration prepares to find a way out of our latest economic mess, it is worth recalling the forgotten relationship between the man who seems to be a leading candidate for treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, and the collapse of Enron, which in many ways presaged our current economic crisis.
"The supporting role that Summers played in Enron, including his reassuring correspondence with Ken Lay and his laissez-faire approach to the California energy crisis of 2000 and 2001, indicates why he may not be suited to steer the nation through the troubled economic waters that lie ahead.
"In his book about Enron, Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald describes Summers’ role in the early stages of the California energy crisis when the state was suddenly faced with power shortages and energy costs that were soaring up to 20 times normal levels. Then-Governor Gray Davis, convinced that Enron and others were manipulating the market, begged the federal government to intervene.
"Before Summers is nominated to head the treasury, he should be asked some basic questions.
"Even as blackouts shut down dialysis machines and traffic lights from Sacramento to San Diego, Summers and the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, decided to take a few moments to teach the California governor a lesson or two about free markets. In an emergency meeting the day after Christmas 2000, Summers and Greenspan, responding to the governor’s complaints about corporate tampering, lectured the governor that price manipulation was only possible because California had improperly regulated its markets. They urged the governor to take it easy on Enron and the other power companies because, in effect, being too critical of them might make them reluctant to do business in California. Summers and Greenspan pressured the governor to remove state caps on consumer rates."
Pentagon insiders and defense budget specialists say the Pentagon has been on a largely unchecked spending spree since 2001 that will prove politically difficult to curtail but nevertheless must be reined in.
"The forces arrayed against terminating defense programs are today so powerful that if you try to do that it will be like the British Army at the Somme in World War I," said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the liberal Center for Defense Information in Washington. "You will just get mowed down by the defense industry and military services' machine guns."
"Since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, funding has grown for both the annual defense budget and emergency spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latest Pentagon budget, for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, is an estimated $512 billion, not including more than $800 billion in additional war spending that has been allotted since 2001.
"But a series of forces are now at play that make such large expenditures untenable, according to the Defense Business Board, the Pentagon oversight group, which includes about 20 private sector executives appointed by the secretary of defense."
"AIG's size and market significance meant it had the government over a barrel. The insurer's finance operations had grown far too big to fail, while operating in large part in the cracks between different regulators' territories.
"If the Fed and the Treasury have now done enough to stabilize the situation, that offsets some of the embarrassment of having to bail out their own initial bailout. Longer-term U.S. financial regulations need to capture any company that becomes so significant to the financial system.
"Rewriting the currently inadequate rule book is an important task for President-elect Barack Obama."
Barack Obama seeks a new era of bipartisanship, but he should take heed of what happened to the last Democrat in the White House – Bill Clinton – in 1993 when he sought to appease Republicans by shelving pending investigations into Reagan-Bush-I-era wrongdoing and hoped for some reciprocity.
Anyone expecting full recovery in 2 years is heartily invited to get a head start on the next real estate boom by purchasing this lovely bridge at a special depression price.
War may well be forced on Obama, but I will adopt the standard of no "pre-emptive" wars and also no solo wars. If it's important, we have to be able to persuade at least 2 of the big 3 in Europe, plus a few other heavies, to join.
Economy stabilized by 2012 (not fully recovered, just stabilized with decent bull periods for people to cash out what they had the balls to buy when the market was down).
Some new technology boosted seriously by federal investment (with a few strings so the taxpayer can make his money back here) close towards actually making money (I's thinking nano here, but people who know tell me that's about 10 years away. I can hope, though).
75% of our troops out of Iraq by end of 2010 (as in, by the midterms...). The rest mostly in friendly Kurdistan. Iraq, of course, has to remain stable after our leaving for this to be reckoned a success.
Rollback of many provisions in the PATRIOT act.
Rectifying the FISA mess.
Roll back Bush's war on environmental regulations.
A markedly more transparent white house than Bush's. At least a press conference a month. Regular "fireside chats" would be nice too.
Find a way to harness either Russia or China to pressure Iran.
Decrease the amount of free pass Israel gets for its actions re: the Palestinians.
I'm sure I'm missing something. Oh yeah, close the brig at Gitmo. Or at east specify that only US servicemen can be held there. Don't mind that use so much. Just make it clear the SCOTUS holds sway there.
Senate legend Robert Byrd, approaching 91 this month and hailing a “new day in Washington,” said he would voluntarily give up the chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee with the new Congress.
“To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven,” said Byrd, who had fended off earlier challenges this past spring and summer. “Those Biblical words from Ecclesiastes 3:1 express my feelings about this particular time in my life.
“I have been privileged to be a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee for 50 years and to have chaired the committee for ten years, during a time of enormous change in our great country, both culturally and politically,” Byrd continued in a statement released by his office. “I have learned that nothing is quite so permanent as change. It is simply a part of living and should not be feared.”
Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who is 84, will take over for Byrd on the powerful panel, which oversees hundreds of billions of dollars annually in federal spending. Byrd will officially hand off the gavel on Jan. 6, 2009.
Robin Morrison has pursued life like a senile butterfly enthusiast, rushing off without so much as a net, always feeling he's left something behind; for example, the memory of where he came from before he emerged to mate and some day die.
He is old and unwise. His sword arm is shot, and he agrees with the authorities that there's nothing like a good blaster at your side and stomping on anything that still writhes. He calls this 'writing'.
"Writing protects me from reality," he said. "Readers protect me from my creditors.