"They really need to rewrite the bill(s).
If you are dumb enough to believe in Death Panels, you go before a Death Panel. Which doesn’t think highly of stupid people.
If you have a modicum of smarts, well then, as you were, carry on, keep up the good work.
Is that so hard?"
Sunday, August 16, 2009
On pending healthcare reformlegislation...
Some wise guy at the Poor Man summed it up well:
Monday, July 13, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
lunar canine
Music by Mr. Moondog, a man whose biography is as enriching and delightful as his music.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
CONCERNING THE BEARD OF MACROPROSOPUS IN GENERAL.
via
The Kabbalah has a lot to say about beards. There is much, much more where this came from but the following should be enough to convince you that the terrorists are hopelessly out-classed in the beard department. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.
Ahem [Clears throat]:
CONCERNING THE BEARD OF MACROPROSOPUS IN GENERAL.
209. RABBI SCHIMEON began, and said: Woe unto him who extendeth his hand unto that most glorious supernal beard of the Holy Ancient One, the concealed of all.
210. This is the praise of that beard; the beard which is concealed and most precious in all its dispositions; the beard which neither the superiors nor the inferiors have known; the beard which is the praise of all praise; the beard to which neither man, nor prophet, nor saint hath approached so as to behold it.
211. The beard, whose hairs hang down even unto the breast, white as snow; the adornment of adornments, the concealment of concealments, the truth of all truths.
212. It is said in the “Book of Concealed Mystery”: That beard, the truth of all (truths), proceedeth from the place of the ears, and descendeth around the mouth of the Holy One; arid descendeth and ascendeth, covering (the cheeks which it calleth) the places of copious fragrance; (it is) white with ornament: and it descendeth in the equilibrium (of balanced power), and furnisheth a covering even unto the midst of the breast.
213. That is the beard of adornment, true and perfect, from the which flow down thirteen fountains, scattering the most precious balm of splendour.
214. This is disposed in thirteen forms.
215. In the first disposition are classed the hairs from above, and it commenceth from that portion of the hair of His head which is above His ears; and descendeth in one tress before the apertures of the ears in the most perfect equilibrium, even unto the corner of the mouth.
216. In the second disposition are classed the hairs from the comer of the mouth, and they ascend even unto the other corner of the mouth in perfectly equated order.
217. The third disposition is from midway between the nostrils; beneath those two apertures there goeth forth a certain path, and the hair is wanting in that path; but on either side of and bordering that path it is fuller and in perfect order.
218. The hairs which are classed under the fourth disposition descend below the mouth from the one corner even unto the other comer, in perfect order.
219. The fifth disposition. Beneath the mouth proceedeth another path, from the region of the superior path, and those two paths are impressed on His mouth on this side and on that.
220. The hairs which are classed in the sixth disposition ascend and come from beneath upwards unto the corner of the mouth, and cover the places of copious fragrance, even unto the upper corner of the mouth, and the hair descendeth at the corner of the opening, and across below the mouth.
221. In the seventh disposition the hair terminateth, and there are seen two apples in the places of copious fragrance, beautiful and joyful in aspect, because (in that aspect) is the universe maintained. And this is that which is said, Prov. xvi. 16: “In the light of the king’s countenance is life.”
222. In the eighth disposition a certain tress of hair proceedeth round about the beard, and (the hairs) hang down equilibrated even unto the chest.
223. In the ninth disposition the hairs of the beard are interwoven and mingled with those hairs which hang in equilibrium; which hang even thus, so that none is preeminent over another.
224. In the tenth disposition the hairs descend beneath the beard, and cover the throat beneath the beard.
225. The eleventh disposition is, that no hairs are preeminent over other hairs, and they are restored into perfect proportion.
226. The twelfth disposition is that the hairs do not hang over the mouth, and that the mouth is uncovered in every part, and that the hair surrounding it is beautiful.
227. The thirteenth disposition is that the hairs hang down on this side and on that beneath the beard, furnishing a covering in beautiful adornment, even unto the chest.
228. Nothing is seen of the whole countenance and of the places of fragrance, except those beautiful white apples which produce the life of the universe; and they radiate gladness upon Microprosopus.
This stuff is complicated.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
1st prize? honorable mention? Nobel peace prize?
A memorable performance:
Dixie Chicken
The piano break (piano solo starts at 2:10) hearkens one to ol' Jess Stacy in Benny Goodman's infamous 1938 Carnegie Hall version of Sing Sing Sing:
Jess Stacy, piano solo, Sing Sing Sing, Carnegie Hall
Dixie Chicken
The piano break (piano solo starts at 2:10) hearkens one to ol' Jess Stacy in Benny Goodman's infamous 1938 Carnegie Hall version of Sing Sing Sing:
Jess Stacy, piano solo, Sing Sing Sing, Carnegie Hall
Friday, January 9, 2009
alternate history
Mickey Rooney horses around with Brooke Shields in the Mickey Mouse Club rec room at Disney Studios, 1955? I submit this as evidence that time travel is real.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Monday, December 8, 2008
What I Believe
I believe in exploiting such questions as opportunities to belabor us with old treatments on metaphysical themes written ten years ago, whose profundity is matched only by their pretentiousness and occasionally excellent prose:
In Search of the One
Theocrasy (mystical union of the soul with God) and theophany (visible manifestation of God) seem sublimely marvelous when viewed from an aesthetic remove, as in Renaissance religious art. A touch of gold leaf halo, eyes rolled heavenwards, a slackness of jaw evoking the dignified shitface of divine enlightenment - verily, these are divine illuminations. Likewise, the ten thousand Buddhas reclining across Asia in various trances of beatitude portray union with the Mind of All as no more than a passing dream - which it may well be.
I do not think I truly seek to know the mind of God. I feel certain that such knowledge would be devastating to my mental health; in fact, I’m not sure my physical self could survive the encounter. Thoughts of spontaneous combustion or inexplicable vanishings come to mind or, at best, a stunned body carrying a gibbering tortoise shell of a mind that has learned too much to contain itself, and so become gnostically incontinent.
What I seek, and what I believe so many others have sought, is that part of myself which is directly of God. Whether all of me and what I do are directly of God, or there is but a core of Godness within me, or a conduit between God and I, or an original genesis of self from God whose ripples can be traced... or if God is only these questions I ask myself...
It could be that God is just that: an answer to a rhetorical question, the Big Answer that appears just when or only because it was never truly expected.
I believe it is impossible to know this oneness through the normal siftings of thought. In view of the swarming multiplicities of life, it seems impossible to positively identify a Unifier, Grand Theme, Holy Spirit or Creator amid the myriad patterns of meaning and awareness, even though it is life’s harmonious integrity of swirling diversity that begs for a unifying intelligence to both sustain and explain it all. Not to explain it as a textbook offers detailed explanation of, say, the workings of internal combustion engines (replete with cutaway diagrams and illustrations that have been, as the drafting community so quaintly terms it, "exploded", in order to help us visualize crankshafts, cams and pistons cycling in a ludicrous choreography reminiscent of cinema’s old Silent Era Keystone Cops movies, wherein 15 or 20 helmeted constables bob up & down and in & out of a weaving flivver as if they were the engine itself)... but to explain it as light informs sight and sound imparts hearing. To explain it directly, without artifice, without mediation, the way sunrise and birdcalls reveal a summer morning... or a poetic evasion nevertheless constrains the essence of what is sought.
However scientific is one’s reasoning in approaching the One, and however rigorous is one’s method of approach, the quest inevitably refines itself to something more akin to faith, intuition and desire. To wonder upon the pure invokes pure wonder. I believe that many, even most, of us have reached or touched or talked with the One, with or without recognition or understanding on the part of our consciousness. I believe that I just don’t know, much as I know that I just believe. It is not something that one ‘knows’ except in the way one knows that one’s heart beats or one’s mind thinks. (One can’t verify the heart’s palpitation nor the brain’s cognition without severe consequences. One doesn’t perform open-heart surgery upon oneself; likewise, one doesn’t think about thinking without disrupting the very thoughts one wishes to think about.)
So it is being one among the One. Union is a form of knowledge that defines itself through conscious ignorance: the ability to know what it is that one doesn’t know, to fulfill the vacuum within one’s sphere of knowledge, to perceive those regions that won’t sustain nor endure the scaffolding of rational ideation, to identify the void that can only be filled by one’s awareness. This conscious inability to apprehend the riddle of existence is commonly referred to as surrender or ‘letting go’ or ‘giving up’: “Let go yore sorrows and reach yore haynds up to Gawd, brothers & sisters!”
As easy as it sounds, full surrender is impossible. We can’t stop can-ing any more than we can start can’t-ing. My mind, at least the one on my shoulders, pursues itself with the relentlessness of a ventriloquist’s dummy determined to convince its interlocutor that they are, after all, one and the same, but this act of dialogue defies the One even as it encourages the Same. (Perhaps one head is better than two, but in trying to prove it to one of you that very singularity is lost upon the two of you.)
It is not something one knows except insofar as it is something one does. Its seeming shadow may be inferred from semantic riddles in which it is easy to see that, for example, a single hand cannot clap itself. The Mind of God cannot know the Mind of God any more than one can keep tabs on oneself by following oneself around. “Someday”, said the late and notoriously foulmouthed Miles Davis, “I’m gonna call myself up on the phone and tell myself to shut up!” It would be interesting to see who won that confrontation: RING!
”Hello?”
“Listen, motherfucker, why don’t you just shut up!”
“Oh, do be quiet...”
So it is with the One. We presuppose a divine source of light, posit our self-reflecting awareness as a pair of talented hands, and admire the clever silhouettes of God we project upon the phenomenal canvas in beautiful reflections of a Divine Self. Should we try and touch it, however, the act of approach and attempt of apprehension forces a loss of focus which dissolves One’s shadow. As we approach the screen with hands together, still folded in a projectionist’s prayer, we find the silhouette vanished, obscured by the same hands which cast it: absorbed by the One.
In search of the One, one does well to remember that seeking and finding are not the Same, even if the two endeavors are one, too.
In Search of the One
Theocrasy (mystical union of the soul with God) and theophany (visible manifestation of God) seem sublimely marvelous when viewed from an aesthetic remove, as in Renaissance religious art. A touch of gold leaf halo, eyes rolled heavenwards, a slackness of jaw evoking the dignified shitface of divine enlightenment - verily, these are divine illuminations. Likewise, the ten thousand Buddhas reclining across Asia in various trances of beatitude portray union with the Mind of All as no more than a passing dream - which it may well be.
I do not think I truly seek to know the mind of God. I feel certain that such knowledge would be devastating to my mental health; in fact, I’m not sure my physical self could survive the encounter. Thoughts of spontaneous combustion or inexplicable vanishings come to mind or, at best, a stunned body carrying a gibbering tortoise shell of a mind that has learned too much to contain itself, and so become gnostically incontinent.
What I seek, and what I believe so many others have sought, is that part of myself which is directly of God. Whether all of me and what I do are directly of God, or there is but a core of Godness within me, or a conduit between God and I, or an original genesis of self from God whose ripples can be traced... or if God is only these questions I ask myself...
It could be that God is just that: an answer to a rhetorical question, the Big Answer that appears just when or only because it was never truly expected.
I believe it is impossible to know this oneness through the normal siftings of thought. In view of the swarming multiplicities of life, it seems impossible to positively identify a Unifier, Grand Theme, Holy Spirit or Creator amid the myriad patterns of meaning and awareness, even though it is life’s harmonious integrity of swirling diversity that begs for a unifying intelligence to both sustain and explain it all. Not to explain it as a textbook offers detailed explanation of, say, the workings of internal combustion engines (replete with cutaway diagrams and illustrations that have been, as the drafting community so quaintly terms it, "exploded", in order to help us visualize crankshafts, cams and pistons cycling in a ludicrous choreography reminiscent of cinema’s old Silent Era Keystone Cops movies, wherein 15 or 20 helmeted constables bob up & down and in & out of a weaving flivver as if they were the engine itself)... but to explain it as light informs sight and sound imparts hearing. To explain it directly, without artifice, without mediation, the way sunrise and birdcalls reveal a summer morning... or a poetic evasion nevertheless constrains the essence of what is sought.
However scientific is one’s reasoning in approaching the One, and however rigorous is one’s method of approach, the quest inevitably refines itself to something more akin to faith, intuition and desire. To wonder upon the pure invokes pure wonder. I believe that many, even most, of us have reached or touched or talked with the One, with or without recognition or understanding on the part of our consciousness. I believe that I just don’t know, much as I know that I just believe. It is not something that one ‘knows’ except in the way one knows that one’s heart beats or one’s mind thinks. (One can’t verify the heart’s palpitation nor the brain’s cognition without severe consequences. One doesn’t perform open-heart surgery upon oneself; likewise, one doesn’t think about thinking without disrupting the very thoughts one wishes to think about.)
So it is being one among the One. Union is a form of knowledge that defines itself through conscious ignorance: the ability to know what it is that one doesn’t know, to fulfill the vacuum within one’s sphere of knowledge, to perceive those regions that won’t sustain nor endure the scaffolding of rational ideation, to identify the void that can only be filled by one’s awareness. This conscious inability to apprehend the riddle of existence is commonly referred to as surrender or ‘letting go’ or ‘giving up’: “Let go yore sorrows and reach yore haynds up to Gawd, brothers & sisters!”
As easy as it sounds, full surrender is impossible. We can’t stop can-ing any more than we can start can’t-ing. My mind, at least the one on my shoulders, pursues itself with the relentlessness of a ventriloquist’s dummy determined to convince its interlocutor that they are, after all, one and the same, but this act of dialogue defies the One even as it encourages the Same. (Perhaps one head is better than two, but in trying to prove it to one of you that very singularity is lost upon the two of you.)
It is not something one knows except insofar as it is something one does. Its seeming shadow may be inferred from semantic riddles in which it is easy to see that, for example, a single hand cannot clap itself. The Mind of God cannot know the Mind of God any more than one can keep tabs on oneself by following oneself around. “Someday”, said the late and notoriously foulmouthed Miles Davis, “I’m gonna call myself up on the phone and tell myself to shut up!” It would be interesting to see who won that confrontation: RING!
”Hello?”
“Listen, motherfucker, why don’t you just shut up!”
“Oh, do be quiet...”
So it is with the One. We presuppose a divine source of light, posit our self-reflecting awareness as a pair of talented hands, and admire the clever silhouettes of God we project upon the phenomenal canvas in beautiful reflections of a Divine Self. Should we try and touch it, however, the act of approach and attempt of apprehension forces a loss of focus which dissolves One’s shadow. As we approach the screen with hands together, still folded in a projectionist’s prayer, we find the silhouette vanished, obscured by the same hands which cast it: absorbed by the One.
In search of the One, one does well to remember that seeking and finding are not the Same, even if the two endeavors are one, too.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Still Got My Two Front Teeth...
...so, somewhere between ridiculously intangible hopes like peace on earth and such, and ridiculously accessible but unnecessary tangibles like this which will find their way down my chimney somehow by next summer, I'm sure, so I can spend a week in the woods (something very good for me to do once a year) AND polish a novel for submission while I'm up there, what I'll ask for Xmas is something both reasonable, absurd, and not totally impossible but highly unlikely: to be able to do young dude things like this again.
The Season Commences...
O Tannenbaum
Well, since the season is about death and rebirth, hopes for immortality or restoration or at least a sense of redemption:
All Over the World
The Flame Still Burns
Some background context for those who haven't seen the movie
I highly recommend it, and I don't much like movies nor am I a diehard rock'n'roll fan. I'm more what a dear old pair of wooden dancing shoes, who played guitar and sang in the original 60s Liverpool/Hamburg/Amsterdam European/British invasion rock scene, called a "more of a Stan Getz-y/Igor Stravinsky kinda zotz".
No one wants to live forever, I think, for all the talk of Heavenly Hereafter and Eternal Life, but we all wish we didn't lose old friends and wish we didn't have to go and leave others in our time, and we all would like to have a bit of a reunion now and then, aye?
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
Well, since the season is about death and rebirth, hopes for immortality or restoration or at least a sense of redemption:
All Over the World
The Flame Still Burns
Some background context for those who haven't seen the movie
I highly recommend it, and I don't much like movies nor am I a diehard rock'n'roll fan. I'm more what a dear old pair of wooden dancing shoes, who played guitar and sang in the original 60s Liverpool/Hamburg/Amsterdam European/British invasion rock scene, called a "more of a Stan Getz-y/Igor Stravinsky kinda zotz".
No one wants to live forever, I think, for all the talk of Heavenly Hereafter and Eternal Life, but we all wish we didn't lose old friends and wish we didn't have to go and leave others in our time, and we all would like to have a bit of a reunion now and then, aye?
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
Just Enough White Men Agreed
He's One of the Good Ones
My only problem with Obama is I'm afeared I'm gonna masturbate to Michelle once I see her on Oprah. Oprah gets wimmin talkin' about they... uh-huh. (lemme 'splain: it's a joke based on this funny political vid)
OK?
These fellahs are upset. Hard to blame 'em. First Toby Keith, now the Detroit Big Three.
Whiskey!
Next we'll hear Dolly Parton's boobs ain't real.
Lester Save Us!
Tired, Tired, and Tired... but insurpassably beautiful
Miles cut his career with Dizzy and Parker, but everyone knew Lester was the torch they all went back to time and again to relight their flame. (And omigodzilla: it's a 50s Kinescopic American Jazz Idol. Amazing.)
My only problem with Obama is I'm afeared I'm gonna masturbate to Michelle once I see her on Oprah. Oprah gets wimmin talkin' about they... uh-huh. (lemme 'splain: it's a joke based on this funny political vid)
OK?
These fellahs are upset. Hard to blame 'em. First Toby Keith, now the Detroit Big Three.
Whiskey!
Next we'll hear Dolly Parton's boobs ain't real.
Lester Save Us!
Tired, Tired, and Tired... but insurpassably beautiful
Miles cut his career with Dizzy and Parker, but everyone knew Lester was the torch they all went back to time and again to relight their flame. (And omigodzilla: it's a 50s Kinescopic American Jazz Idol. Amazing.)
Thursday, December 4, 2008
'potant plums
via
Sec of Energy
Sec of Labor
Director of CIA
Director of National Intelligence
Chief Technology Officer
Ask me, these positions have far more import on our prospects than Sec of State, Sec of Treasury, even Sec of Def.
Sec of Energy
Sec of Labor
Director of CIA
Director of National Intelligence
Chief Technology Officer
Ask me, these positions have far more import on our prospects than Sec of State, Sec of Treasury, even Sec of Def.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Once Upon A Time, Products Couldn't Read Their Own Labels...
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.
via
There are those who prefer to buy only 'brand names'. This is understandable: symbol-standard-quality. But when Mattel contracts for cut-rate production overseas, the brand reputation is devalued. This too is easy to understand.
It is harder, it seems, for us to understand that the same thing applies to the stock market.
Excuse me; I never went to college, so it isn't incumbent on me to pretend I understand Marx or find him old hat. But it seems to me that much of ye olde post-modernism was just slightly dressed-up Marxist thought.
Or something. Whatever the brand name 'Marxist' still means.
Or, to quote the increasingly irresistibly quotable William Gibson:
"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."
Saturday, November 22, 2008
The Bastard Makes Sense
via
Considering that one valuable skill a good Sec of State should possess is the ability to tell bald-faced lies, or at least exaggerate the truth, Hillary is formidable indeed. Ducking low on the airport tarmac of Sarajevo to avoid sniper fire...
"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."
Considering that one valuable skill a good Sec of State should possess is the ability to tell bald-faced lies, or at least exaggerate the truth, Hillary is formidable indeed. Ducking low on the airport tarmac of Sarajevo to avoid sniper fire...
Friday, November 21, 2008
And we were going to let them run our ports
via
"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."
global climate change
via
"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."
Same Pattern, Again
via
My point? Like Hillary, Obama gives the top dog a sjot at it, but requires sacrifice.
Hillary has to rein in her former president of a husband; Gates has to give up his advisers.
Throw a bone in the ring and let the dogs have at it in the media circus ring.
Would Gates make a decent Sec of Def? More so than not. The stain on his reputation from the Iran-Contra affair is modest, and I think his post-Reagan foreign policy stances show chastened learning from the mistakes in which he participated as a former CIA director.
But he's gotta check his weapons at the door of Obama's administration and commit to the new team.
We'll see.
"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?"
My point? Like Hillary, Obama gives the top dog a sjot at it, but requires sacrifice.
Hillary has to rein in her former president of a husband; Gates has to give up his advisers.
Throw a bone in the ring and let the dogs have at it in the media circus ring.
Would Gates make a decent Sec of Def? More so than not. The stain on his reputation from the Iran-Contra affair is modest, and I think his post-Reagan foreign policy stances show chastened learning from the mistakes in which he participated as a former CIA director.
But he's gotta check his weapons at the door of Obama's administration and commit to the new team.
We'll see.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
the facts of the matter
Preludio:
via
So he did:
"Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy"
"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."
via
"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."
So he did:
"Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy"
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Hillary Allegedly Unsure About Accepting Sec of State Position
via
Bill could pay off that debt, I suppose, if he didn't have to curtail his investments abroad which cause the current conflict-of-interest dilemma.
I still think (well, hope) that most of the tentative Cabinet picks Obama is making now are for show, straw samples to appease the old Dem party machinery and confuse the right-wing punditry.
“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."
Bill could pay off that debt, I suppose, if he didn't have to curtail his investments abroad which cause the current conflict-of-interest dilemma.
I still think (well, hope) that most of the tentative Cabinet picks Obama is making now are for show, straw samples to appease the old Dem party machinery and confuse the right-wing punditry.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
In the pre-Beginning
via
"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."
by the balls or by the bush or by the bond?
via
via
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!"
via
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.
Monday, November 17, 2008
I'll Take It!
Encouraging News
Credit Slips blog
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.
Credit Slips blog
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Hopin' he's a playah
Articles like this make me hopeful that my estimation of Obama's handling of his high-stakes/high-hopes presidency will be adroitly finessed. His transition period, for example seems to reveal him letting his colleagues and sycophants all the rope they need to hang themselves so he can make the choices HE wants to:
via
"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."
via
Defining Victory
Gravatar Boronx say:
"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."
Friday, November 14, 2008
Thursday, November 13, 2008
From a Little Republican 'ACORN" Grew The Mighty Oak Oaf
via The Seattle Times
"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."
Crashing the Crash
via The Daily Beast
Meanwhile, back at the ranch...
If you don't like this development, go here:
President Elect Obama's Transition Phase Feedback Site
"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."
Meanwhile, back at the ranch...
"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."
If you don't like this development, go here:
President Elect Obama's Transition Phase Feedback Site
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Put The G.I.Joe Back In The Box
Pentagon's Defense Business Board tells Obama that dramatic cuts in military spending are needed
This series of forces is, essentially, the incredibly long string of bad checks the government has kited on the winds of war and other hot air: we be BROKE.
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."
This series of forces is, essentially, the incredibly long string of bad checks the government has kited on the winds of war and other hot air: we be BROKE.
Honor Fat Rolls
AIG: America's New Open-Pit Money Mine
"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."
Alternative Energy
"As for a stimulus package, there is not much of an industry left to stimulate back into life, Hennecke said."
Welcome to the neo-NASA of a government-subsidized alternative energy industry. Heavy on the nanotech but mostly an orgy of cross-discipline engineering. Gonna be a great time to major in math and science.
Welcome to the neo-NASA of a government-subsidized alternative energy industry. Heavy on the nanotech but mostly an orgy of cross-discipline engineering. Gonna be a great time to major in math and science.
Faith-Based Inevitability
The Lord works in mysterious ways,
Our blunders to reform.
We, the American democratic republic known as the United States of America, are in a mighty mess.
The links in the chain of cause and effect can be pursued backward through history as far as oppositely pointing fingers care to point:
back to Bush's (s)election by the Supreme Court in 2000 (a new concept -- letting the Supreme Court choose our president);
or Clinton's embrace of Third Way policies;
or 12 years of Reagan/Bush 1st voodoo economics;
or Carter's disastrous decision of October 22nd, 1979, to grant the Shah of Iran political sanctuary in the USA (an event that almost single-handedly turned the ire of Muslim fanaticism against the USA* instead of Russia, which had thoroughly pissed them off by invading Afghanistan 15 months earlier on August 7th, 1978)
*(on November 4th 1979, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking more than fifty Americans hostage.);
or what we'll just call the Nixon Legacy (1968-1974) as "Graciously" pardoned by Ford, (1974-1976);
or the Johnson Legacy which, despite passage of the Civil Rights Act, Great Society War on Poverty breakthroughs, also turned the Viet Nam conflict into a major war in which several million lost their lives, based on the now known to be fraudulent Tonkin Gulf Resolution and its associated War Powers Act that has since let presidents make war without Congressional;
or JFK's assassination...
...but I think it makes sense that the Long View of the chains of cause and effect leading to our current state of abomination begins with Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" coming to political prominence, beginning the unholy alliance of evangelical political action groups with the Republican party, spawning a movement that would grow increasingly crucial to Republican political success; while the Short View should begin with the entry into the White House of what an overwhelming majority of historians and popular opinion polls agree has been The.Worst.President.Ever.
THE LONG VIEW: (expressed in one quick short term -- deregulation). The loosening or outright abolition of prudent, useful, even wise regulations on economic functions and institutions bore its first disastrously foul fruit with the 1987 S&L Crisis and Black Monday.
THE SHORT VIEW: (expressed in longer terms as befits satisfactory ranting). Simply put, eight years of Bush and the Religiously Right Republican party of Family Values and "compassionate conservatism" have been so disastrous and discouraging to Americans that we have now accomplished one major goal of the Left -- electing an Afro-American president -- and are hip-deep in another process that the Right has accused the Left of conspiring to do for decades: turn America into a full-blown socialist economy.
Between Bush's brutal bumbling in what some dare call foreign policy but reality perceives as a series of exercises in pissing off the world while making the American taxpayer pay the bill and the American professional soldier endure the horror, and his further deregulating of our economy, turning it into a laissez-faire speculative free-for-all that allowed banks to sell shaky mortgages to other banks which then used them as collateral to leverage investments in some cases as much as 4,000% of their original (speculative) value, all it took was for the underlying basis of modern economic life -- fossil fuels -- to have its supply outstripped by demand (last spring's $4/gallon gas), and these bubbles within bubbles surrounding bubbles containing bubbles within bubbles began popping like the brilliant bright foam of kitchen sink dishwater when the first greasy plate is submerged.
Result: economic collapse, which then kicks fossil fuel prices the other direction, a signal of massive raw deflation, that nasty stuff we had in the early years of the Depression.
And there you have it, folks: God-fearing, free-market, militarily hawkish the-best-defense-is-a-strong-and-lunatic-offense, "trust me for I have the mandate of heaven because I've (questionably) won two elections" government has forced the Republican party into relying on a borderline white-supremacist vote (observe this swing-vote graph, the red revealing where support for the Republican candidate actually increased in this election, and tell me I'm 'playing the racist card' -- I dare ye), and also forced a Republican White House into commencing what is already the biggest bailout (welfare, socialism, whatever) by we the people of private industry in the history of our nation, and it has only begun.
It is not inconceivable that in ten years we will be even more socialist than The Netherlands. Which is fine by me, because I have friends in old Holland and I very much like how they do things there.
If a $700 billion bailout of private industry, paid for by taxpayers, isn't "wealth redistribution", then what is it? Robbery?
When next year rolls around, and Obama inherits the Oval Throne (which has, over the past eight years, become the National Shitter), remember this: it was Dubya who first called for us to cough up $700 billion-and-rising to "save the economy", but it was Democrats who put at least *some* form of regulatory restraint on what those bankers and lenders can-or-must do with that money. Not enough by a long shot, but that is what I expect Obama to do (among the myriad other janitorial duties this seemingly magical Negro will be tasked to perform).
If ever there was a time in recent history when writing letters to your Congresspersons was a valuable investment vehicle, it is now.
Our blunders to reform.
We, the American democratic republic known as the United States of America, are in a mighty mess.
The links in the chain of cause and effect can be pursued backward through history as far as oppositely pointing fingers care to point:
back to Bush's (s)election by the Supreme Court in 2000 (a new concept -- letting the Supreme Court choose our president);
or Clinton's embrace of Third Way policies;
or 12 years of Reagan/Bush 1st voodoo economics;
or Carter's disastrous decision of October 22nd, 1979, to grant the Shah of Iran political sanctuary in the USA (an event that almost single-handedly turned the ire of Muslim fanaticism against the USA* instead of Russia, which had thoroughly pissed them off by invading Afghanistan 15 months earlier on August 7th, 1978)
*(on November 4th 1979, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking more than fifty Americans hostage.);
or what we'll just call the Nixon Legacy (1968-1974) as "Graciously" pardoned by Ford, (1974-1976);
or the Johnson Legacy which, despite passage of the Civil Rights Act, Great Society War on Poverty breakthroughs, also turned the Viet Nam conflict into a major war in which several million lost their lives, based on the now known to be fraudulent Tonkin Gulf Resolution and its associated War Powers Act that has since let presidents make war without Congressional;
or JFK's assassination...
...but I think it makes sense that the Long View of the chains of cause and effect leading to our current state of abomination begins with Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" coming to political prominence, beginning the unholy alliance of evangelical political action groups with the Republican party, spawning a movement that would grow increasingly crucial to Republican political success; while the Short View should begin with the entry into the White House of what an overwhelming majority of historians and popular opinion polls agree has been The.Worst.President.Ever.
THE LONG VIEW: (expressed in one quick short term -- deregulation). The loosening or outright abolition of prudent, useful, even wise regulations on economic functions and institutions bore its first disastrously foul fruit with the 1987 S&L Crisis and Black Monday.
THE SHORT VIEW: (expressed in longer terms as befits satisfactory ranting). Simply put, eight years of Bush and the Religiously Right Republican party of Family Values and "compassionate conservatism" have been so disastrous and discouraging to Americans that we have now accomplished one major goal of the Left -- electing an Afro-American president -- and are hip-deep in another process that the Right has accused the Left of conspiring to do for decades: turn America into a full-blown socialist economy.
Between Bush's brutal bumbling in what some dare call foreign policy but reality perceives as a series of exercises in pissing off the world while making the American taxpayer pay the bill and the American professional soldier endure the horror, and his further deregulating of our economy, turning it into a laissez-faire speculative free-for-all that allowed banks to sell shaky mortgages to other banks which then used them as collateral to leverage investments in some cases as much as 4,000% of their original (speculative) value, all it took was for the underlying basis of modern economic life -- fossil fuels -- to have its supply outstripped by demand (last spring's $4/gallon gas), and these bubbles within bubbles surrounding bubbles containing bubbles within bubbles began popping like the brilliant bright foam of kitchen sink dishwater when the first greasy plate is submerged.
Result: economic collapse, which then kicks fossil fuel prices the other direction, a signal of massive raw deflation, that nasty stuff we had in the early years of the Depression.
And there you have it, folks: God-fearing, free-market, militarily hawkish the-best-defense-is-a-strong-and-lunatic-offense, "trust me for I have the mandate of heaven because I've (questionably) won two elections" government has forced the Republican party into relying on a borderline white-supremacist vote (observe this swing-vote graph, the red revealing where support for the Republican candidate actually increased in this election, and tell me I'm 'playing the racist card' -- I dare ye), and also forced a Republican White House into commencing what is already the biggest bailout (welfare, socialism, whatever) by we the people of private industry in the history of our nation, and it has only begun.
It is not inconceivable that in ten years we will be even more socialist than The Netherlands. Which is fine by me, because I have friends in old Holland and I very much like how they do things there.
If a $700 billion bailout of private industry, paid for by taxpayers, isn't "wealth redistribution", then what is it? Robbery?
When next year rolls around, and Obama inherits the Oval Throne (which has, over the past eight years, become the National Shitter), remember this: it was Dubya who first called for us to cough up $700 billion-and-rising to "save the economy", but it was Democrats who put at least *some* form of regulatory restraint on what those bankers and lenders can-or-must do with that money. Not enough by a long shot, but that is what I expect Obama to do (among the myriad other janitorial duties this seemingly magical Negro will be tasked to perform).
If ever there was a time in recent history when writing letters to your Congresspersons was a valuable investment vehicle, it is now.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
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