The Day I Lost It

I lost my temper the other day. I am usually a very steady Eddie. I don’t get excited much., don’t yell and scream or wear my emotions on my sleeve. But the other day I completely lost it. A red faced, blood pressure raised, spittle flying, tirade. What made it even more amazing was that I was yelling at a friend. (Though I’m not sure he continues to consider me his friend after my outburst.)

The reason for my anger?

Corporate income taxes.

My friend – I’ll call him Fred – and I were on the return trip from picking up some groceries for a soup kitchen where we both volunteer. I mentioned something about how I thought it shameful that Corporations should be treated as people. He replied: “Corporate taxes are regressive.”
At first I thought, “huh?” This statement was so far out in left field it demanded a comment but I held my tongue saying simply “Don’t go there, Fred.”
He continued. “Corporate taxes are totally regressive. There shouldn’t be any income tax on corporations.”
“Have you any idea how much money corporations in this country make?” I asked.
“America has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. There shouldn’t be any taxes on corporations at all.”
“If they’re not taxed, who’s going to pay for the roads and bridges that they use?” I asked.
He ignored my comment. “When corporations are taxed, they just pass the cost on to consumer.”
“You’re against all taxes?”, I said.
“No. There should only be taxes on sales. Then people wouldn’t buy so much crap they didn’t need.”

In an instant, I was pulled through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole into a surreal land where every statement of mine was not answered except by another pat Quasi-Libertarian talking point. I felt like I was arguing with an Ayn Rand doll with a string in her back that when pulled spouted inanities like “Let the market decide.”

In the end Fred wound up like a broken record, answering every question of mine with the statement “You’re getting too excited. You shouldn’t get so excited.” Which of course infuriated me even more. Before I knew it, I was yelling and screaming at the top of my lungs.

It really upset me. Here was a guy, a friend of mine, who had spent the last several months volunteering his time once a week to help cook a meal for a group of homeless people, many of whom have trouble raising bus fare, and he’s spouting off about how the solution is to allow wealthy corporations like Exxon-Mobile and Walmart, to pay less taxes, and make even more money! How could he witness the plight of people with nothing to eat week after week and advocate giving more money to wealthy shareholders of profitable corporations. It was too much for me, like being forced to ride in a car with Rush Limbaugh – not the radio, the actual guy – with no way to get him to shut up.

In the week since it happened, I have played the conversation over and over in my mind. I have struggled with different ways I could have handled the situation better. But what it boils down to is this: I believe the problems we face in this country today stem from the fact that too few people are willing to engage in true debate, the kind where you come in with an open mind and unbiased opinions that are not set in stone. The kind of discussion where doubt is allowed.

I would have been happy to discuss Fred’s ideas on tax policy calmly, if he had answered even one of the questions I posed. But he never did. He just spouted platitude after platitude and then professed suprise when I got angry. When I watch hungry people shuffle into the soup kitchen week after week, people who have no job, no healthcare, and many who don’t even have homes, I am disgusted. I am disgusted by the fact that the United States, the wealthiest nation on earth, can’t seem to come up with a governmental system that keeps people from living on the streets and starving. I am disgusted that we continue to put blind faith in an economic system (capitalism) that produced these homeless people in the first place. And most importantly I am disgusted that we allow corporations like Exxon-Mobile to make obscene profits while people in our own country go hungry. If I thought for a moment that it would help the population of the soup kitchen where I work, I would be the first to consider the idea of lowering corporate taxes. But the Walmarts of the world don’t give any of their profits to the poor now. Does anyone out there truly think that lowering their taxes will cause them to be more generous in the future?

Maybe they would. but I, for one, doubt it. I doubt it very much.

September 2009 Comment of the Month

Another month down, another round of awards to hand out to the best and brightest patrons of the online pub that is In Mala Fide.

The September 2009 Comment of the Month Award goes to Doug1 for pointing out why quantblogger analyses of sexuality are flat-out wrong:

I read that Agnostic piece contemporaneously in GNXP. I didn’t post anything in comments questioning it because I had no social science basis for doing so. Nonetheless I flat out don’t believe it. Well there IS one thing I do believe. That is that there WAS a diminution of slutty sexual activity beginning it’s commonly said as soon as the 70s were over but really beginning around 1984 or so. When the aids thing hit, and it hit FAST in consciousness as a huge scare when it did. Aging boomer girls were already turning away from casual sex and big into clamping their husbands down from dreams of open marriages and so on, but that was the big thing. It did go down in the second half of the eighties and much of the 90s. Not completely atall and there were pockets, but a lot. Came back in the oughts, or really by the late 90s in NYC.

…

All this GSS and other stuff is based on a house of cards. Those cards are that females don’t lie, or don’t lie much in anonymous as reported surveys about sexual activity including number of partners or incidence of infidelity. I’m here to tell you that girls lie HUGE about such stuff and do so reflexively, as part of their personality almost, and do so so thoroughly that only the most reflective even fully realize how much they’re doing it. I’m talking about the big numbers girls. Girls for whom the answer is 7 or maybe 5 or less probably come in fairly accurately, because they figure they aren’t really even supposed to be virgins anymore, THAT is rather shameful, and anything that’s well within single digits is probably ok for almost anyone but real prude/can’t get sex guys they don’t care about anyway. That’s the urban girl feeling.

But if you think girls for whom the true answer is 15 or more, not to mention 30 or more, give their true answers much at all except possibly to a guy that loves or they believe loves slutty girls, after much showing of same, you know nothing. Because I’m such a guy (who does love the extremes including sluts for some/many things, but hardly for having my babies or committing to durably) and I’ve gone through the process of getting good true slutty stories, and eventually true slutty numbers, out of numerous girls. I know what they say to begin with and I know what they finally say after all that. I know some/many of the rationalizations. (e.g. guys whose names they can’t remember don’t count. Guys who had no emotional impact on them don’t count. Guys they can barely remember at all, and then only with effort, don’t count. Only guys they had a relationship with count. And so on.)

When you’re a calculator, everything looks like a number, and the quantbloggers are living, breathing calculators who think everything can be reduced to a readout on an Excel spreadsheet. Good work, Doug1.

Honorable mentions go to the following:

Good Observation Awards go to Novaseeker for spelling out why any man should pay heed to the words of rakes:

The reason why rakes like Byron are useful for men to understand is because these guys understand the women guys are marrying, too, because in many cases they have bedded them, or at least turned down the dangling offer to do so. Pollitt is right, of course, that female sexuality is an unruly force. She’s wrong, because of her feminism, in thinking that unleashing this unruly force is a good thing, even for women themselves (it does not appear to make most women happy, long-term, to indulge their sexuality). But for men, in a culture which no longer restrains this significantly, it is critical to understand from people like Byron and his present-day analogues just how women, even married ones, behave sexually when the “right guy” comes along.

…z.g. for noting the four factors that have altered the sexual landscape for the worse:

All the theories of the “quantsphere” fall apart when these four are introduced:

Birth control

Condoms against STD’s

Abortion

Child support/State child support/state subsidized child care/birth money

Forget about laws, social support, other supports and welfare etc.

The above four are enough to let women loose from their given by nature shackles.

The rest is also as effective but it is more difficult for the effects of these (laws, welfare etc) to be seen by the q.bloggers in the sexual context.

Millions of years of natural restraints not existing anymore… This by itself is big enough.

…Mike T for this explanation as to why the higher education scheme will soon collapse:

WRT the college scam, the biggest problem is the fact that most of the college graduates have no marketable skills, or they have demands that are completely unrealistic for what they do have. Most liberal arts majors should feel lucky to just have jobs, and most business majors probably don’t know much more about actually running a business than the average manager at McDonalds who worked their way up the management chain.

…Thursday for pointing out how sex ratios affected the sexual revolution:

I have long maintained that the sex ratio favouring men from the 60s through the late 70s helped ease men’s acceptance of the sexual revolution. Michael Blowhard, for example, doesn’t remember anything like the kind of anger on the dating scene back when he was a young buck. The hangover for men really came in force in the 90s by which time the sex ratio had shifted in the other direction.

…and Sebastian Flyte for this note on PDA:

I think excessive PDA is a good indicator that the man has not yet slept with the woman.

Great job, all.

mike wins the Witty Comeback Award for this zinger aimed at haterette shesadandy, who was caught parroting a tired lie about men who date younger women:

Yeah, because when I look at a young fertile girl with tight, cellulite-free skin the first thing I think is “Wow, I’d like to have a conversation with her!”

Technically, mike made this comment in August, but AFTER the comment awards for that month had been issued, so I get to make an exception for awesomeness.

Justin wins the Dunce Cap Award for this spectacularly clueless statement on picking up strippers:

Strippers are not difficult to pick up. They are just always taken. There is a big difference there. In fact, the “always taken” status of strippers is due to the fact that they are not difficult to pick up.

Strippers are easy to pick up IF you have extremely tight game, which ninety-five percent of men don’t, dum-dum. Now, go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done.

The Elusive Wapiti wins the Graphic Prediction Award for this remark on Ron Guhname’s comments about his wife:

Yeah, I’d like to see that fella’s stance on how wonderful his sweet wittle woman is if she ever leaves him.

I suspect his being forced to witness his testicles sliced off before his very eyes, his kids kept from him with the approval of the State, and his ass being sold into slavery will force him to eat a lot of crow.

No man thinks his wife will divorce him until the process server shows up.

Sofia wins the Public Service Announcement Award for her advisory on how to avoid sleep deprivation:

Seriously though, over time insomnia will affect you adversely. I had to put up with a lot of crappy, biological issues because of my involuntary sleeping habits. UNFORTUNATELY, I do get panic attacks and most sleeping medications are benzodiazapenes, which I’m pretty much immune to at this point. If you have sleeping problems, and also suffer from anxiety, request barbiturates, though I don’t know if they still prescribe that in the U.S.

Me personally, I prefer OTC allergy pills or Cruzan Blackstrap when it comes to sleeplessness.

RT wins the Tinfoil Hat Award for this insane response to Satoshi Kanazawa’s contention that Asians can’t do science:

LMAO – what a laughable joke!

China beat the West in most scientific inventions (until hitting a cultural cyclic low the last 2 centuries) by centuries. Read “The Genius Of China” by Robert Temple.

And Yoshiro Nakamatsu singlehandedly invented most of our modern technology today – including the floppy disk, CD, DVD, digital watch, etc.

The US took a leap past them in the last 2 centuries due to Asia losing wars and the US winning them. Not to mention secret technology transfers from the Grey aliens. The truth comes out and normalizes over time, though. [emphasis mine - ed.]

Remember to watch out for the black helicopters, dude – the Illuminati’s coming for you!

Finally, dagezhu wins the Creativity in Bigotry Award for “correcting” me on Roman Polanski’s ethnicity:

Polanski is not a Polack, he’s a Jew.

There’s a big difference, one that would have gotten your face beaten in if you said that to the wrong people.

He raped with his Jew cock, not with his Polack cock. Get it right.

That comment cracked me up beyond belief when I first saw it. I’m a very bad person. And I would think that “the wrong people” would be less concerned with my omission of Polanski’s Judaism and more concerned with the fact that I referred to a Pole as a “Polack.”

Senate Finance Committee - with Baucus leading the way - votes down the Public Option.

This is dismal. Both Jay Rockfeller (my Democratic Senator from here in WV) and Chuck Schumer, D-NY, proposed Public Option amendments to the Finance Committee’s bill… and 3 Democrats voted against Schumer, 5 voted against Rockefeller. The leading Democrat to step on the Public Option was Chairman Max Baucus. The one Republican who people seem to think might go along with a bill, Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, also voted against both amendments.

Senator Schumer:

My amendment to add a public option to the Senate Finance Committee bill came up just two votes short of being adopted by the full committee this afternoon.

This is unfortunate news but not a surprise. Remember, the Senate Finance Committee is more conservative than the Senate as a whole. And 4 out of 5 Congressional committees with jurisdiction over health care reform have passed a public option.

This is the opening day of our fight, and I will continue to work to improve the health care reform bill as we take the legislation to the Senate floor.

Some of the other Democratic Senators are now looking at bringing the Public Option to the Senate Floor and polling is showing increasing support by the voting public. Baucus is sitting on the $3.4 Million that the Insurance companies have invested in his campaigns and working as hard as he can to keep them in the catbird seat.

Snowe is getting pushed hard by her constituency as well:

So far the 4 proposals from House Committees and the one other Senate Committee bill HAVE a Public Option… Eventually this has all got to be brought together as one bill… and whether it can get 60 Senate votes to avoid a Republican filibuster, or the mere fifty votes necessary for a “reconciliation,” will remain to be seen.

I’m willing to campaign against ALL Democrats who work against what the majority of Americans want and need. Millions of others will be playing on the same team. Baucus should wise up.

Let Some Banks Die

Recent news stories and blog postings have reported on the continued hemorrhaging of red ink at US financial institutions, despite the presence of the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).  I have had my own misgivings about how the TARP has been implemented and said so in two postings, “Secretary Paulson, Please Change Your Mind Again” and the more recent “Update on ‘Secretary Paulson, Please Change Your Mind Again.’”

Now comes word that the losses at a number of financial institutions are so bad that the Obama Administration is seriously considering the nationalization of the banking system.  Nationalization!!!  This means the takeover and operation of formerly private firms by the government.  This possibility is galling because, first of all, the TARP was supposed to provide enough monetary support to get financial institutions to recover and start lending again, and secondly, it opens the American taxpayer to a greater exposure to financial losses than was under the original plan of purchasing the problem assets with the TARP funds.  In addition, there is no telling if hired bureaucrats can run a financial institution any better than its former managers, although it must be admitted that the bureaucrats perhaps can’t do any worse either.

Nevertheless, with over 8,000 banks in the US, there are too many banks in operation just as there currently are too many retailers.  Just as many retailers are restructuring and some are going out of business, the banking industry needs to become rationalized, not nationalized.  Even after rationalization, there will be thousands of banks with tens of thousands of branch offices available for depositors and borrowers.  And we should not be concerned about the so-called “too big to fail” doctrine in which some banking organizations are so large that their failure will cause wide-spread panic and dislocations in the global financial system.  First, a great deal of panic and dislocation in the financial system has already occurred that has gotten our attention of how bad the situation can get and has gotten the authorities to make plans to save what remains of the banking system, and second, those large financial institutions have become smaller on their own as a result of the losses incurred and their efforts to save themselves by downsizing.  These “too big to fail” banks are not as big as they once were.

Yet people who have deposits with these institutions do have a great concern about whether or not there is enough deposit insurance to recover from large bank failures.  It is here where the Obama Administration and the Congress can do something constructive to reassure depositors.  Instead of another bailout fund for businesses, the Congress can authorize tens of billions of dollars to ensure the solvency of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in case the failure of some large banks should deplete the deposit insurance fund.  Any deficit in the insurance fund can be made up in the future and the US Treasury paid back by collections of deposit insurance from the surviving banks over time.  Furthermore, the obligations owed to the failed banks can be reassigned to the survivors as part of the industry restructuring by federal banking regulators so that banking relationships can be maintained and disruptions kept to a minimum.

This continued deluge of losses and mismanagement in the financial sector cannot be maintained indefinitely.  The fact that the government is seriously considering the nationalization of the banking industry should be considered a wake-up call to finally cut at least some of the losses that this sector has imposed on US society.  There are far too many banks for the US economy to support.  Just let some of those banks die.

Christians for Socialism

It sounds like an oxymoron, right? Or, at the very least, like a moron wrote it. How could Christians be for socialism, the political and economic philosophy that wanted to wipe out religion, especially Christianity?

In our current political system, just about anything the President does is deemed “socialism:” The bailout – socialism; environmental reform – socialism; health care – socialism. Anytime we hear about regulation, big government, more government, or any of the other buzz words, we automatically start calling it socialism. The question needs to be asked, “Is that a bad thing?”

“Of course it is!” some might shout. But if what is being called socialism is such a bad thing, we need to make some changes.

First, no more driving on roads and highways. I am tired of government taking my hard earned money to make it convenient for me to get from point A to point B.

Second, we need to get rid of the pesky U. S. Postal Service. They keep loading up my mailbox with bills and junk mail I don’t want. That get’s downright annoying. I will just use FedEx or UPS from here on out. Let them deliver my Christmas, Easter, and Birthday cards. Besides, government competition is unfair and will drive people out of business – well, eventually.

Third, our kids are over educated. High school graduates reading at an 8th grade level is absurd. Why should I even want them educated that much? I could use that money for other philanthropic endeavors, like saving the endangered Key Largo Cotton Mouse. Let China pay for their students to do all that math and science stuff – the communists!

Fourth, we see how often planes get into crashes in the United States. Let’s get government out of air traffic control and do it ourselves. Private enterprise always does it better, just ask Enron, WorldCom, and AIG – they know. And what was Ronald Reagan thinking? Air traffic controllers should be allowed to strike.

Fifth, old people are a waste of money – they are about to die anyway. Starting yesterday, no, two days ago, we need to revoke all of their Medicare. Forget the little kids too. Do they pay taxes? No! Let’s scrap Medicaid while we are at it.

Seems a little extreme doesn’t it? But those are all “socialist” programs. Does that make socialism bad or good then? Like anything, it can be both, depending on how it is being utilized by those in power. But as a Christian, I should go to the Bible and see what it says. Obviously, Jesus and the early Christian Church would not support socialist type activities – that would be un-American. I can still be saved.

2 Corinthians 8:14 – “At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality” (NIV)

Matthew 19:21 – Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (NIV)

Acts 2:44-47 – All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. (NIV)

Acts 4:32, 34-35 – All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need. (NIV)

Sure, the early Church thought Jesus was coming right back, but people think (hope) that that is about to happen now, so what is the excuse? There are plenty of other passages to support a socialist-like approach, or a more compassionate capitalism, but as Jesus’ acts could not all be written down, because the world is not big enough for the books, there is not enough room in this column to write down all the Biblical passages that are socialist, errr, Christian, I mean, socialist.

You're our customer! We hate you!

It is axiomatic in modern American life: the longer you are a customer, the more some of our most common, everyday corporations come to disdain you.

Links: Comcast; Verizon Fios; DirectTV; Churn Rate;

Over the last couple of decades, there has been a steady slide toward monthly contracts for things in American Life. Phone. Cell Phone. Cable. Gym. Daycare. Banking Services. The list goes on and on. Think about how many recurring monthly charges you have. It can be … daunting.

Now, I am not here to make value judgments regarding what you are paying for in your life. Go forth and consume, as you wish. Rather, I want to examine the odd way companies treat their long-term customers.

Now, I’m a bit of a Comcast fan. I live in a pretty rural area with a less-than-ten-year-old Comcast installation. I get great network connectivity (16 down/6 up), lots of HD channels, and the phone works. I freely admit my experience may be atypical; that is not the point.

My wife and I have been a Comcast customer, across two houses, for sixteen years. Cable-modem internet was the first broadband experience I ever had, and it was a game-changer for me. Sixteen years is a long time, a very comfortable, regular time Comcast has been receiving a check from us. Has to make them feel good. They don’t hesitate to cash it, I note.

But everyday, I glimpse Comcast commercials. Commercials for Comcast, touting this deal or that. Triple Play, for $99; free Showtime for six months; etc. Great Deals! For new customers only.

Because those potential new customers are soooo much nicer than us crusty old customers. I guess we current, long-standing, reliable, loyal customers must smell bad; whereas those folks who are paying Comcast’s competitors are exactly the happy, shiny folks Comcast craves. At least that is the impression Comcast’s endless chasing after them gives me.

Cable companies worry endlessly about churn. Churn (attrition) is the amount of customers a cable company (or any contract-based company) loses in a given period. Contract-based companies hate churn, because it costs them money. Churn means people leave after only a year or two. And the real gravy for Comcast is found in the later years of the relationship. An example:

The first year of your triple-play with Comcast costs $99 a month (ignoring the pain of charges, taxes, fees, and bits of your soul unmentioned in the ad). So, $1200 for the year. After that, it jumps to somewhere around $140 a month, so $1680 a year. Check it out: Comcast is willing to pay you almost $500 to be their brand new customer! That is awesome, isn’t it!

Well, it is awesome in your first year.

Stick around awhile, and picture the situation ten years in. After ten years, assuming all the costs stay the same, you get to pay Comcast over $4000 to be their loyal customer! Ten year cost: just over $16,000. Sweet deal. For them. So they hate churn, they want you to stay put. Too bad they don’t make it attractive to stay put.

Every time I see a Comcast ad “For New Customers Only” I have the same thought: why don’t I get a break for being a loyal customer? If they really value my business, how about, oh, a discount based on how long I’ve been with them? Screw new customers, they are likely to leave (chrun!) anyway. Golden-handcuff me with a really sweet deal based on my longevity. To counter the above example, say I had started at $125 a month. Starting in year 3 I got a got a 5% discount each year, up to 30%. Not compounded, additive. So after nine years, I am at a capped at a 30% discount, for a monthly bill of $88.

So my cost for 10 years?

1. 3 years @ $125 ($4500).
2. Year 4 at $119 ($1428; 5% discount)
3. Year 5 at $113 ($1356; 10% discount)
4. Year 6 at $105 ($1260; 15% discount)
5. Year 7 at $100 ($1200; 20% discount)
6. Year 8 at $94 ($1128; 25% discount)
7. Year 9 & 10 at $88 ($2112; 30% discount)

For a total of just under $13,000 for ten years. Oh nos! Comcast loses money!

Please. The difference is that at ten years you’d have to pry my Comcast contract from my cold dead fingers. Doesn’t matter if Verizon FIOS will give me free unicorns and daily rainbows; DirectTV could offer me 100 free TV’s; I’m not giving up my long-term relationship with Comcast. I’m invested. I’m all in. Never leaving. Wouldn’t Comcast love to be able to count on that kind of customer loyalty? To be able to project that kind of future cash flow with such surety?

I left Verizon with nary a twinge to get an iPhone; likewise Comcast, and all the other contract-based service companies, will never build customer loyalty until they treat their current customers as if they are more valuable than prospective customers.

Fat chance of that happening.

Cash-prone capitalism

This is an excellent article put out in The New York Times

Annals of Economics
Rational Irrationality
The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone.
by John Cassidy October 5, 2009

Rational Irrationality;
Wall Street;
Economic Crisis;
Millennium Bridge;
Hyun Song Shin;
Great Crunch;
Financial Markets

On June 10, 2000, Queen Elizabeth II opened the high-tech Millennium Bridge, which traverses the River Thames from the Tate Modern to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Thousands of people lined up to walk across the new structure, which consisted of a narrow aluminum footbridge surrounded by steel balustrades projecting out at obtuse angles. Within minutes of the official opening, the footway started to tilt and sway alarmingly, forcing some of the pedestrians to cling to the side rails. Some reported feeling seasick. The authorities shut the bridge, claiming that too many people were using it. The next day, the bridge reopened with strict limits on the number of pedestrians, but it began to shake again. Two days after it had opened, with the source of the wobble still a mystery, the bridge was closed for an indefinite period.

Some commentators suspected the bridge’s foundations, others an unusual air pattern. The real problem was that the designers of the bridge, who included the architect Sir Norman Foster and the engineering firm Ove Arup, had not taken into account how the footway would react to all the pedestrians walking on it. When a person walks, lifting and dropping each foot in turn, he or she produces a slight sideways force. If hundreds of people are walking in a confined space, and some happen to walk in step, they can generate enough lateral momentum to move a footbridge—just a little. Once the footway starts swaying, however subtly, more and more pedestrians adjust their gait to get comfortable, stepping to and fro in synch. As a positive-feedback loop develops between the bridge’s swing and the pedestrians’ stride, the sideways forces can increase dramatically and the bridge can lurch violently. The investigating engineers termed this process “synchronous lateral excitation,” and came up with a mathematical formula to describe it.

What does all this have to do with financial markets? Quite a lot, as the Princeton economist Hyun Song Shin pointed out in a prescient 2005 paper. Most of the time, financial markets are pretty calm, trading is orderly, and participants can buy and sell in large quantities. Whenever a crisis hits, however, the biggest players—banks, investment banks, hedge funds—rush to reduce their exposure, buyers disappear, and liquidity dries up. Where previously there were diverse views, now there is unanimity: everybody’s moving in lockstep. “The pedestrians on the bridge are like banks adjusting their stance and the movements of the bridge itself are like price changes,” Shin wrote. And the process is self-reinforcing: once liquidity falls below a certain threshold, “all the elements that formed a virtuous circle to promote stability now will conspire to undermine it.” The financial markets can become highly unstable.

This is essentially what happened in the lead-up to the Great Crunch. The trigger was, of course, the market for subprime-mortgage bonds—bonds backed by the monthly payments from pools of loans that had been made to poor and middle-income home buyers. In August, 2007, with house prices falling and mortgage delinquencies rising, the market for subprime securities froze. By itself, this shouldn’t have caused too many problems: the entire stock of outstanding subprime mortgages was about a trillion dollars, a figure dwarfed by nearly twelve trillion dollars in total outstanding mortgages, not to mention the eighteen-trillion-dollar value of the stock market. But then banks, which couldn’t estimate how much exposure other firms had to losses, started to pull back credit lines and hoard their capital—and they did so en masse, confirming Shin’s point about the market imposing uniformity. An immediate collapse was averted when the European Central Bank and the Fed announced that they would pump more money into the financial system. Still, the global economic crisis didn’t ease up until early this year, and by then governments had committed an estimated nine trillion dollars to propping up the system.

* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this

A number of explanations have been proposed for the great boom and bust, most of which focus on greed, overconfidence, and downright stupidity on the part of mortgage lenders, investment bankers, and Wall Street C.E.O.s. According to a common narrative, we have lived through a textbook instance of the madness of crowds. If this were all there was to it, we could rest more comfortably: greed can be controlled, with some difficulty, admittedly; overconfidence gets punctured; even stupid people can be educated. Unfortunately, the real causes of the crisis are much scarier and less amenable to reform: they have to do with the inner logic of an economy like ours. The root problem is what might be termed “rational irrationality”—behavior that, on the individual level, is perfectly reasonable but that, when aggregated in the marketplace, produces calamity.

Consider the freeze that started in August of 2007. Each bank was adopting a prudent course by turning away questionable borrowers and holding on to its capital. But the results were mutually ruinous: once credit stopped flowing, many financial firms—the banks included—were forced to sell off assets in order to raise cash. This round of selling caused stocks, bonds, and other assets to decline in value, which generated a new round of losses.

A similar feedback loop was at work during the boom stage of the cycle, when many mortgage companies extended home loans to low- and middle-income applicants who couldn’t afford to repay them. In hindsight, that looks like reckless lending. It didn’t at the time. In most cases, lenders had no intention of holding on to the mortgages they issued. After taking a generous fee for originating the loans, they planned to sell them to Wall Street banks, such as Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, which were in the business of pooling mortgages and using the monthly payments they generated to issue mortgage bonds. When a borrower whose home loan has been “securitized” in this way defaults on his payments, it is the buyer of the mortgage bond who suffers a loss, not the issuer of the mortgage.

(Click on the link to continue. There is MORE)

POLITICAL: Socialism defined

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=110291

Smack out of money
Posted: September 19, 2009 1:00 am Eastern
By Dan L. White

*** begin quote ***

Socialism is stealing by the government. It takes from one person and gives to another, and the government bureaucrats always take their cut out of the middle. If I go to your house and take your stuff and carry it back to my house, that’s called stealing. If the government does the same thing, it’s called compassion.

*** end quote ***

I always am amazed that I am robbed by the Federal Gooferment. They take their cut. Send it to the State Gooferment. They take their cut. And, send it to the County Gooferment. They take their cut. And, send it to the Municipal Gooferment. They take their cut and provide a service. A service I may not want, can’t use, or can’t afford.

And, I pay taxes to every level!

Argh!

# # # # #

William Safire, R.I.P.

One of the great lights of our discourse died today. There was no prequel, only the announcement that William Safire had died in a hospice in Maryland of pancreatic cancer.

To me  for the past several years there was only one last reason left to read the New York Times, and it was Safire. His common sense, his gift for the English language, and his conviction in the common sense of most of us were a beacon in a world driven by emotion, by the volume of rhetoric, and by self interest. He truly believed in the greater good.

I sometimes did not agree with him, but I delighted in his arguments. Logical, well stated, and always a joy to read. Truth be told, he and Buckley and Wolfe have been the best that the OTL (Other Than Left) have had over the past 40 years.

His columns on language in the Times Magazine on Sundays were always illustrative and helped us in a world that has lost touch with our original principles. He was a touchstone who helped us better ourselves. He said something a long time ago that made complete sense. “Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation and is thus the source for civilized delight”.

Safire understood that depth is critical to perception. In todays society we seem to only study surfaces and even then only according to preconceptions. It is the height of dishonesty when the Journo-list dictates media talking points.  Safire lived his life with open eyes and common sense and an incredible perception and joy. His ability to translate this into words was unparalleled. We should all hold ourselves to his standard. The world would be a better place.

How to use Twitter to find your Dream Job

My natural question to you is what is a dream job?
In my book, “How to find your dream job, even in a recession” I outline a dream job as being similar to a square; I call it the Euclidean Career Square – Dream Job Formula
1. At the top of the square is the People side. Often, you spend more time working then you spend with family. Consequently, it is important that you not only like but love the people with whom you work.
2. The bottom side represents Money; You MUST make enough money to sustain yourself, or you will eventually leave, even if you love the people.
3. The right side represents Growth; one of the six basic human needs. If there is no opportunity for healthy growth, the roots of a plant will become tangled and kill the plant.
4. The left side represents Work/Life Balance; If you love the people, money and have growth but no balance, you WILL experience discomfort in some part of your life, i.e. health, relationship, happiness, etc.
Here are 5 strategies on how I recommend using Twitter to find your Dream Job!

Connect direct to recruiters and hiring managers. Twitter is a social networking site so you can search out recruiters and ‘follow’ them. One of the best tools on twitter to help you achieve this is Tweetmyjobs.com.
• Have access to over 5700+ targeted job channels
• Receive INSTANT notification of new jobs on your mobile device
• Learn of new posting from 6000+ companies
• Post (and tweet) your resume and custom profile to thousands of recruiters and hiring managers
• Forward jobs to friends
• Receive daily job updates

Step One:
Create a FREE account on Tweetmyjobs.com.
• Go to www.Tweetmyjobs.com and follow the 5 steps on the user interface; this will help you begin utilizing the power of twitter.

• Create a professional profile; HR Professionals are paying closer attention to job seekers social media appearances – this can work for you or against you; be smart about how you want to be perceived.

Step Two:
Create a targeted search.

• Create a list of 50 target companies by using;

o Twitter search (search.twitter.com) facility to search for opportunities all over twitter – type in the key words (for example ‘cardinal health’) and you will be able to see who what opening positions cardinal has.

o Twitter search (search.twitter.com) to search specific job opportunities, i.e. Marketing Vacancy

The great thing about Twitter is that you can you can subscribe to receive updates so you can get updates of people talking about opportunities; this can help you create new relationships with people in your industry.

Here are some additional tools for job searches on twitter:
TwitterJobSearch.com

TwitterJobSearch.com is a job search engine that searches Twitter for jobs that match the keywords that you enter.

JobShouts
JobShouts.com is a free resource for both employers and job seekers. Employers can post their jobs for free; those jobs are then automatically “tweeted” to users on Twitter.

JobAngels
JobAngels started with the objective of asking those who could to help one person find a job.

Many other companies have a corporate presence on Twitter. Search by the company name to find them.

Twitter Name Search

Twellow Twitter Search

Step Three:
Use my Linkedin Strategy at this point!!!
I recommend that you to listen to my previous two highly acclaimed episodes “How to Use LinkedIn like a Headhunter I & II. Go to www.Blogtalkradio.com/thecareercatalyst.com. This is a crucial piece of my Twitter Dream Job strategy!

Most importantly, use these strategies in tandem – do one with the other in both directions. i.e. Find companies on Twitter and search Linkedin, visa, versa. This will help you to find profiles of people inside of companies that you can develop rapport and deeper relationships with.

Step Four:
Go to www.TheFriendZoneTV.com

• Go to the menu bar and click on Twitter Tab

• Follow me on Twitter (Career Zone)

Step Five:
Nurture your network by sharing knowledge and resources
Again, don’t be a taker, be a giver! Twitter provides an amazing opportunity to show that you have expert knowledge and skills make sure there is a balance between what you Tweet and providing tips or resources sharing your professional knowledge. Use this opportunity to participate in strategic Twitter conversations and rapport! You only have 140 characters to achieve this with; be very concise. Consider using a Tiny URL to direct individuals to longer posts – www.TinyUrl.com.

Ron Nash
Master Career Strategist
www.TheFriendZone.Tv
“If you’re not a Friend, you’re just another job seeker”

Is Minimum Wage an Effective Anti-Poverty Policy in Japan?

Kawaguchi Daiji  (Faculty Fellow, RIETI) and Mori Yuko  (Hitotsubashi University) have recently released a study on the effectiveness of minimum wage as an anti-poverty policy in Japan. Below is the abstract:

This paper considers whether minimum wage is a well-targeted anti-poverty policy by examining the backgrounds of minimum-wage workers, and whether raising the minimum wage reduces employment for unskilled workers. An examination of micro data from a large-scale government household survey, the Employment Structure Survey (Shugyo Kozo Kihon Chosa), reveals that about half of minimum-wage workers belong to households with annual incomes of more than 5 million yen [$55,615] as a non-head of household. A regression analysis indicates that an increase in the minimum wage moderately reduces the employment of male teenagers and middle-aged, married females, while it encourages the employment of high school age youth.

In other words, overall employment drops while higher wages push high school aged youth to pursue employment instead of education.

Going to the dogs

Phoenix Greyhound Park, one of three remaining dog tracks in the state, plans to shut down by the end of the year.

The Phoenix track, near Washington and 40th streets, opened in 1954 and runs live races seven days a week. The business has faced a number of challenges in recent years, including increased competition from casinos, declining revenue and dwindling visitor numbers. On-track attendance at the track dropped 14 percent last year to about 106,000 annual visitors, and has declined 56 percent since 1998, according to its annual reports.

In a letter to the Arizona Department of Racing on Thursday, track officials said the park would remain open for live racing until Dec. 19, continue to simulcast races until Dec. 31, and then shift some of its simulcast operations to Apache Greyhound Park in Apache Junction.” As you can imagine, it’s budget time for a lot of businesses, and this is our budget time,” said Phoenix Greyhound Park General Manager Dan Luciano. “Nobody’s going to be happy.”

Read the complete report in the Arizona Republic here, along with information on  greyhound adoptions  here.

Pricing illiquid assets

The New York Times had a recent article on the sharp decline that university endowments have suffered over the twelve months ending in June.  The worst of the results reported, those from Harvard and Yale, are roughly the same loss as the S&P 500 suffered over that period.

One question jumps out at me that this article, and other similar recent articles chronicling college endowment woes, doesn’t address:  How do they know?

The hallmark of university endowment investing strategy for more than ten years has been deep involvement in illiquid “alternative” assets.  Yale and Harvard have been leaders in this movement.  In the case of the S&P 500, Standard and Poors furnishes the index numbers, which are supported by billions of daily transactions in the S&P 500 constituents.  The main feature of illiquid assets, on the other hand, is just that.  They’re illiquid–they seldom, if ever, trade. So where do the prices that the holders use come from?

In approaching the issue of how private equity, hedge fund or exotic emerging market assets are valued, it might be useful to look first at some simpler past instances of illiquid asset problems.

Real estate

The academic world, as usual, was pretty slow on the uptake about illiquid assets.  When I was entering the business in the late Seventies, the “wonder asset” was real estate.  Numerous academic studies reached the remarkable conclusion that, among stocks, bonds, cash and real estate, the last had not only the highest return but lowest risk.  (Risk was defined, in the academic way, as short-term volatility.  Yes, that makes no sense for most investors.  But the data for making the calculations are easily available, and that’s usually enough for the ivory tower.)

Many institutions took this research seriously, backed up their trucks and loaded the real estate in.

A couple of real estate crashes later, we know property doesn’t have all the virtues business school professors claimed for it.  What went wrong?

The research based its calculations of price volatility on transactions–unaware that in bad times buyers get cold feet and are unwilling to commit.  All but the most desperate sellers pull their properties off the market–sometimes for years–to await price recovery.  So very few transactions occur.  What otherwise might be a 30%-40% decline in prices never gets documented.

High-yield (junk) bonds

The first junk bonds were “fallen angel” corporate bonds.  That is, when they were issued, they were high-quality corporate obligations, with appropriately low coupons, whose issuers subsequently hit on hard times.  Drexel Burnham Lambert, an early player in this market, had the clever idea of making original issues of high-yield bonds.  The market for this “junk,” previously the province of commercial bank lending departments, exploded.  The money to buy the IPOs came, not only from insurance companies and pension plans, but also from  specialized bond mutual funds that focused on high-yield.

Mutual fund involvement added a new dimension to the illiquidity issue.  After the IPO, however, trading in junk bonds may be extremely thin–or there may be no trading at all.  Nevertheless, junk bond funds have to calculate a daily net asset value and process daily transactions in shares of the fund.  What to do?  The answer:  mark to model!

Whose model do you mark to?  Initially, fund groups typically used their own internal models (the same way the banks calculated the value of their derivative portfolios–and we all know how that worked out).  But as the junk bond crisis of the late Eighties unfolded, mutual fund companies realized the potential trouble this approach could cause, and switched to outside pricing services.

Third-party pricing services

When we’re talking about financial assets in the US, there are plenty of highly computerized third parties who are available to provide pricing services.  Many bond mutual funds routinely use them.   Equity funds that have large foreign holdings get New York closing values that factor in global market movements that have occurred after overseas markets have closed.  US index values are calculated and disseminated every 15 seconds.

These services can be wrong.  The rating agencies might be seen as an extreme example of pricing gone bad.  (To be honest, I still find it hard to believe that anyone depended on ratings without doing some checking themselves.  In my experience, Wall Street has always understood that the rating agencies were way behind the curve in assessing risk.) Nevertheless, the methodologies are well-understood, there are plenty of finance MBAs to do the work, and in each field there are a number of firms competing for the business.

Other assets aren’t so easy for investors to get a handle on, however.  Take private equity.  We know that these firms bought large numbers of low-quality, commodity-like–and in the case of the semiconductor firms they acquired–highly cyclical companies at peak valuations when money from the banks was flowing freely a few years ago.  There is no public market any more for these acquisitions.  The private equity firms, which have already taken hefty writedowns, are effectively the only source of information about them.  How do we know these writedowns are enough?   We might think that the private equity firms have a vested interest in reporting optimistic values, to collect higher management fees and to encourage the flow of new money.  But the short answer is that, as outsiders, we don’t know.

Guy Hands, one of the leading lights of private equity, gives his thoughts on this topic in a recent New York Times interview.   He says,”Many P. E. firms are hoping that daylight doesn’t shine on the corpses of their companies, so they are reluctant to restructure too quickly…Neither the banks nor P.E. want to come clean about mistakes.”  Hmm.

More exotic assets, like direct ownership of natural resources (mining, oil and gas, timber…) present more complex valuation problems, and thus, much wider scope for a very wide range of expert opinion.  Also, unlike financial assets, they require specialized technical knowledge, which a finance MBA will probably need years to acquire.  They’re also typically very long-lived assets, creating still another dimension, the time value of money, for possible valuation differences.

Emerging markets have their own issues of language, culture, legal systems and attitudes toward foreign investors.  Everyone involved in this area has numerous stories of people being bilked because hey didn’t understand the unwritten rules of doing business in a certain country.  But an equally serious issue, I think, is that the more “emerging” a market gets, the fewer experts on that market there are, and the greater the likelihood that the person who prices your investment is also somehow involved in managing that asset for you.  So investing in truly frontier emerging market areas becomes a lot like private equity, only with a greatly magnified level of risk.  Again, as in private equity, it’s hard to see who there is who doesn’t have a vested interest in providing a very optimistic assessment of your investment’s value.

Back to the endowments

Announcements of capital project postponements and other belt-tightening measures suggest that universities were caught by surprise by the downdraft in world financial markets over the past year.  More than that, they imply that income is less than expected, not just capital values.

The university endowments have no legal obligation to report their results to the world at large.  Further, assuming they have no outside clients, they would seem to face no legal sanctions for being excessively optimistic in their assessment of the value of their investments.  That alone would make me want to take the reported investment results with a grain of salt.

The bigger issue, though, is that the endowment managers probably don’t have the skills or experience in the narrowly specialized areas in which they appear to have invested to be able to second guess the reports they are getting from the managers they have hired.  In the cases of private equity and emerging markets hedge funds, the managers have no incentive at all, so far as I can see, to report conservative asset values.  And they have wide scope, given the high level of uncertainty with which they are dealing, to make excessively favorable (for them) estimates of future revenues and costs.

If I had to make a guess, for which I could give no justification other than intuition born of thirty years of investing experience (a pretty weak justification), I’d say the weakest endowment results are in economic terms down 40%, not the down 30% reported.

NYC Activists Unfurl 35-foot Banner on High Line to Protest Park's Use of FSC-Certified Amazon Wood

“We think there are well-intentioned designers and architects who have no idea that the FSC certifies wood from ancient primary forests, including the Amazon”….Ipê trees are typically 250 to 1,000 years old and grow an average of one or two trees per acre.

EcoEarth      Rainforest Portal

Empowering the Environmental Sustainability Movement

September 24th, New York: This morning, environmental activists unfurled a 35-foot banner blocking the iconic view of 10th Avenue from the High Line park to protest the Amazon wood used in the park for bleachers, benches and decking. The banner read, “High Crime on the High Line! FSC Lies: Amazon Wood Is Not Sustainable!”

Two New York City-based groups, Rainforest Relief and New York Climate Action Group, coordinated the banner action to confront the “First International FSC Friday,” an event held on September 25th by the Forest Stewardship Council to promote their certification scheme.

According to Friends of the High Line’s website, the tropical hardwood used throughout the High Line was certified by FSC-accredited agencies. The wood, called ipê, originates from primary Amazon forests in Brazil and Peru. Ipê trees are typically 250 to 1,000 years old and grow an average of one or two trees per acre.

“We targeted the High Line because it’s one of the highest profile parks in the world,” said Tim Doody, a spokesperson for Rainforest Relief. “We think there are well-intentioned designers and architects who have no idea that the FSC certifies wood from ancient primary forests, including the Amazon. That kind of logging destroys vital carbon sinks and opens the forest to land speculators, cattle ranchers and plantation farmers.”

Formed in 1993, the FSC accredits agencies that in turn certify logging operations according to a set of principles that the FSC claims will protect forests and local people. However, a growing number of environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth UK, Rainforest Foundation, Ecological Internet and World Rainforest Movement, are accusing the FSC of violating their own principles.

 ”Instead of launching vacuous marketing ploys such as ‘FSC Friday,’ the FSC would be better off trying to address some of their underlying issues,” said Simon Counsell. Counsell, a founding member of the FSC, now monitors the agency on FSC-Watch.org.

Citing a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, Counsell stated, “Research in the Amazon has shown that, over a period of years, commercial logging greatly increases the overall propensity of the forest to dry out, burn and disappear. This happens regardless of whether the logged areas are certified or not.

” On July 12, 2009, the Brazilian government announced that federal police had broken up a timber-laundering ring in the Amazon involving 3,000 “eco-certified” companies that had been receiving illegal wood for years. FSC-certified companies are among the implicated.

Dr. Glen Barry, founder of Ecological Internet, said “It has become evident to environmentalists in the know that FSC has become an obstacle to ending ancient-forest destruction and addressing climate change and biodiversity loss.” EI is demanding that FSC stop certifying wood from ancient primary forests around the world — and has been carrying out high-profile protests against groups such as Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace who are leading the greenwashing of FSC logging. Further actions are planned soon.

 The government of Norway has turned criticism of “eco-certification” schemes into policy. In 2007, officials there banned the use of all tropical timber in public buildings. “The government wants to stop all trade with unsustainably or illegally logged tropical forest products,” stated Norway’s Directorate of Public Construction and Property (Statsbyyg). “Today, there is no international or national certification that can guarantee in a reliable manner that imported wood is legally and sustainably logged.”

“What’s missing in the certification debate is the broader issue of simply reducing the consumption of wood products,” said Tim Keating, Executive Director of Rainforest Relief. “All the world’s forests cannot be industrially logged, and there are so many alternatives—like post-consumer plastics—that should be considered first.”

DISCUSS RELEASE: http://www.rainforestportal.org/issues/2009/09/new_york_city_activists_unfurl.asp

LINKS:

High Crime on the High Line: Why Is NYC’s Highest-Profile Park Using Amazon Wood? http://www.alternet.org/environment/142327/high_crime_on_the_high_line:_why_is_nyc’s_highest-profile_park_using_amazon_wood/?page=entire 

Report from The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States: Condition and Fate of Logged Forests in the Brazilian Amazon http://www.pnas.org/content/103/34/12947.full?sid=0fbcc483-fde9-4c7d-96a6-cdd6bfb4e1d2 

http://RainforestsOfNewYork.org

http://www.RainforestRelief.org 

http://www.FSC-Watch.org

http://www.EcologicalInternet.org/campaigns/

http://www.fsc.org/fscfriday.html

These green shoots are delusional illusions

Watching the mainstream media it’s easy to believe that the economic downturn is coming to an end – we’re out of the woods, it’s green shoots all round, growth across all sectors and happy times ahead – in the words of Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernake, “The recession is very likely over”. Having dedicated considerable effort to downplaying the severity of the economic downturn as it unfolded – which involved shifting much of the blame onto consumer borrowing and absolving the banks of their role in the crisis – the media then went on to downplay or completely ignore the criminal nature of the bailouts, which in actuality amount to a brazen looting of the economy for the enrichment of private interests.

The banks, of course, measure the success of the economy in completely different ways to the rest of us – Michal Froman, Obama’s representative to the White House at the upcoming G-20 Summit, wrote in a confidential memo to the 20 heads of state that, “Global equity markets have risen 35 percent since the end of March” – the stock market is up so everything is fine. When Alistair Darling spoke of the recession ending “round the turn of the year” the BBC repeated this without any contextual analysis or counter-argument; similarly, the mainstream press has been clamouring over the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) declaration that the global downturn is over – many disagree, but their voices are rarely featured amongst the talking heads on mainstream television.

Of course, these pronouncements are accompanied by the caveat that “conditions will remain tough” for several months, which roughly translates into the unspoken fact that job losses will continue to rise and any “growth” will occur almost exclusively in the bank balances of the bailout recipients. After all, it was only recently that a furore was caused by the announcement of Goldman Sachs profits and another round of record bonus payouts – few are under the illusion that it’s been hard times for the banks as well as the commoners. It’s a cushy gig for the banks – get your friends at the Fed to threaten martial law if the government doesn’t bail the banks out then pocket the cash, prolong the crisis, and demand more bailouts.

One of the main problems is that the banks simply aren’t issuing new loans. Unlike the Chinese, who ordered the banks to increase credit, who complied by expanding credit by 30% which surged the economy out of recession and into double-digit growth, the banks in the US, contrary to expectations, did not use the bailout money to issue new loans, but rather used the billions for mergers and acquisitions, encouraged by tax breaks put in place in late 2008 by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. It is a clear case of class interests trumping the needs of the wider economy – the looting of public money with the full complicity of the political classes. According to Congressman Alan Grayson, the Fed secretly “stuffed” $500 billion into “foreign private pockets” and gave a further $230 billion to Citi “as a secret bailout”. Grayson went on, “They are performing a truly remarkable, surreptitious transfer of wealth from public to private hands. They are taking their ability to print money and shore up failed banks. They are simply stuffing money into the pockets of private interests.”

In a further move which comes across as a bitter twist of the knife, the banks are now talking of using the bailout money to privatise public services. Moves are being made to buy up the highways in the US, and similar proposals have been made by the Rothschilds to privatise motorways in the UK. Professor Chossudovsky explains how the bailouts, far from being intended to solve the financial crisis, are being use for the exact opposite:

The far-reaching implications of this points towards the collapse of the dollar as the global reserve currency. Max Keiser on Russia Today elucidated the implications of the bailouts, the collapse of the dollar and the social impact current trends are likely to result in; despite the cheery optimism in much of the mainstream media, the prognosis is anything but rosy.

From MysteryHedgie: More On Copper... And Other Stuff

Sorry to all you MysteryHedgie fans: we moved offices today and so I was unable to get this posted until now.  Sorry for my tardiness. 

Take it away, MH…

To hedge or not to hedge?  Yesterday’s post-Fed reversals in stocks, the $, bonds and weakness in commodities have left many wondering if the recovery has been fully discounted.  Perhaps  you’ve hedged once or twice since the March lows; puts expiring worthless, reduced longs keep running, shorts run even harder. 

By the numbers, options aren’t cheap (see chart), the spread of implied to realized volatility is very wide as it frequently is near turning points.  We suggested yesterday that copper was once again becoming a lead barometer; below $2.66 lb. turns the picture negative; gold continues to act queasily and overowned…. Hedging has been costly since March, but if it  is part of your risk management framework, it is time to consider defense once again.  Thoughts?

Insurance Isn’t Cheap Here

An Observation on the Public Option

September 17, 1787, was the day the Constitutional Convention signed the U. S. Constitution in Philadelphia. That date is now a federal holiday known as Constitution Day and Citizenship Day. Luckily, after a long hiatus, we now seem to have a president and a Congress that understand and even like the U. S. Constitution.

President Barack Obama is a constitutionalist, and sometimes it’s to a fault. Respecting the separation of powers, he wanted the Congress to originate the health care reform bill. Of course, he was also trying to avoid the Clintons’ mistake of creating a health care plan almost solely by the executive branch. However, the president should have submitted his own bill for the advice and consent of the various committees. He needed to be clear what he wanted in it.  The powerful speech he gave September 9 to the Congress should have been given in April or May. We probably would have received an excellent health care reform bill before August – and better than the one we will get now.

The Republic an Party, of course, is not going to support any reform bill, and it took advantage of the August recess to confuse and mobilize its increasingly shrinking base. Radicals and reactionaries showed up at right-wing-organized rallies and at town meetings to shout lies and misinformation. Hopefully, some of the attendees were only curious spectators, but it was distressing to think that these people had insurance themselves and didn’t want those without insurance to have the chance to get it. The purpose of these noisy protests apparently was to frighten moderate Democrats into fearing their reelection chances if they vote for the public option. In Arkansas, Senator Blanche Lincoln and (Blue-Dog) Representative Mike Ross have since publicly stated their opposition to the public option insurance plan.

The Republicans know that without the public option there will be little, if anything, to keep down the costs and profits of the profit-motivated private health insurance companies. Moderate Democrat Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, foolishly kept compromising with Republicans who wanted to weaken the bill. His committee recently proposed a plan that is essentially a boondoggle for private insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. His is the only plan in consideration that does not offer the essential public option. Hence, it is the only proposal that may be worse than having no bill at all. Sadly, even Mike Ross over in the House might be sympathetic to the Baucus plan – Mr. Ross used to own a pharmacy in Prescott, AR, which he sold to USA Drug for much more than it was reported to be worth.

Fortunately, I have a full-time job that provides me with excellent insurance coverage. Thanks to government regulations, every full-time employee must be accepted in our group policy regardless of pre-existing conditions (although, any complication of that pre-existing condition may not be covered). I also have an excellent primary-care physician of my choice. Nevertheless, it would certainly be comforting to know that a public option health plan was available if I ever needed it.

 One valid concern that I have heard against establishing universal health care in the United States is that we may not be able to get an appointment to see our doctor as early as we would like. Apparently, there are not enough primary care physicians to handle the 40-plus million who do not currently have insurance. I hope I won’t be so self-centered as to be unsympathetic to those in need. I am reminded of the character played by Maggie Smith in the movie Titanic. Knowing that 1500 people were going to drown, she said of her lifeboat, “I hope it won’t be too crowded.”

by David Offutt
A version of this essay was published September 18, 2009, in the El Dorado News-Times as a letter to the editor.

Of Oracle Bones and Excel Sheets: Humanities Hatred of Uncertainty

Last week the National Academies Press released a symposium report entitled: Avoiding Technology Surprise for Tomorrow’s Warfighter. (see:  www.nap.edu/catalog/12735.html) This is part of an ongoing project of the National Research Council’s Air Force Studies Board. While it is certainly a laudable goal to try to minimize the degree to which one is caught off guard by the technological developments of other states (and, more dauntingly, how those new technologies will be used), the report revives my concern about whether we are fooling ourselves about our ability to make accurate predictions in the domain of social activity.  It is interesting that the report notes, as suggested above, that predicting the technologies that will develop is not the hard part, but rather determining how they will be used. The latter has a lot to do with behavior and human decision-making, which are subjects humanity seems to have much less of a handle upon than that of modeling the physical world (spoken by someone whose education is in Economics and Political Science.) We still don’t have a definite answer to the most fundamental question relevent to this discussion- does free will exist?

This is not to say that we are outstanding at getting the technology piece right. There are many hilarious examples of both over- and under-prediction of technology development. With respect to over-prediction, Alex Lewyt, president of a vacuum company, said in 1955  that “Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners probably be a reality in ten years.” On the under-prediction front, there is, of course, the famous Ken Olson quote that “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”

It seems to me that we (as a society through tax money) have spent tons of money on forecasting models that don’t work. We do this because nothing scares humanity like uncertainty.  I think we may be more terrified of what we cannot know than any certain calamity imaginable. I’m not an anthropologist or a geneticist, but I would guess that this visceral fear of the unknown is probably evolutionarily hard-wired into us. At any rate, it is certainly engrained.

I have seen at least two or three different papers that were all essentially probabilistic models of the likelihood that we will suffer a nuclear terrorist attack withing “x” years. At the risk of creating  more enemies than my al-Megrahi release post, these papers are complete crap. Mathematically they are invariably sound as they are usually fairly simple and straightforward  probabilistic models. However,  when the authors pluck probability figures from the air to insert into the model, they are just making a smooth-running garbage-in garbage-out machine. 

I am not saying that we should give up on developing a better predictive ability, but I scratch my head at the fact that we keep paying to have people misapply the same methods to similar problems. I am also by no means a critic of probabilistic and statistical models, we just need to know what problems they work for, and which they don’t. Even with all the popular works about the limitations of probabilistic models (perhaps most famously Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan), we are still enamored of applying these methods to problems for which they lack utility.

Unfortunately, I think that we will continue to give big grants to people to build fallacious predictive models, and will probably continue to spend far too little on models of how to achieve an optimal outcome where uncertainty is a given. The former give people a measure of comfort, and policymakers can readily understand the output of such models. Just as policymakers would usually rather throw money at an activity that gives  [false] hope of preventing calamity than management of the consequence of a disaster that has already transpired. I think there is little support for activities that work from the assumption that things are going to happen that catch us off guard, and we need to minimize this impact.

Amazing Panerai Replica Watches

Now replica watches are becoming famous all over the world and you can find most celebrities wearing them. Nowadays Replica Watches are not limited to celebrities. There was a time when people used to buy one or two watches that lasted a lifetime. Things have changed a lot and the new generation wants to show off their watches. They know that wearing replica is a fashion statement. Panerai Replica Watches provides them with an opportunity to show off the best for the minimum cost. So what does one stand to gain if they are purchasing Panerai Replica Watches? For one the monetary savings is obvious. A person may have one original but to constantly wear the same thing is not something the younger generation can be expected to do. So a replica creates a wrist makeover without killing the bank. Apart from that there is the peace of mind associated with not having to worry about losing it or parting with it in case of a burglary. The main advantage of using these Panerai Replica Watches is that one can purchase more than one of them and not be worried about creating a dent in the wallet. That said these watches do not come cheap with almost all of them in the three figure category. Yet for the price of one original, one can purchase a number of replicas. The manufacturers of these watches always keep their stock up to date so that everything is cloned to the last minute detail. As a general rule Panerai Replica Watches do not contain real jewelry or have a casing made of gold. The craftsmen who manufacture these watches give extra attention to ensure that the user of their Panerai Replica Watches get the best in craftsmanship. They see to it that the end user gets something that cannot be differentiated from the original since the whole pleasure would be lost if others discovered that ones not flaunting the real thing. Usually these watches come in classic designs so that they may be worn for a longer period of time without worrying about a change in trends. But at the same time Panerai Replica Watches are a good source to collect the latest designer watches that come in colored straps funky dial designs. If you are seeking true value for your money and at the same time want to carry a fashion statement on your hand, definitely try Replica Panerai Watches. So if you do not wish to wait any longer till you actually buy your first Swiss watch, the definitely splurge on a Replica Panerai till you get to the real thing. Buy it as soon as possible.

Watch That Thesis! (FOMC Announcement)

 

 

From Market-Ticker.org:

Watch That Thesis! (FOMC Announcement)
All investment and trading decisions beyond an hour need a thesis.
Today’s FOMC announcement ought to result in the realignment of yours:
Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in August suggests that economic activity has picked up following its severe downturn. Conditions in financial markets have improved further, and activity in the housing sector has increased.
We have monetized a scad of debt and that cash has wound up in equity markets. They have risen in response to the dynamic of supply and demand. Speaking of activity in the housing sector we’re referring to the rocket-shot defaults on FHA mortgages.
Household spending seems to be stabilizing, but remains constrained by ongoing job losses, sluggish income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Businesses are still cutting back on fixed investment and staffing, though at a slower pace; they continue to make progress in bringing inventory stocks into better alignment with sales.
Watch That Thesis! (FOMC Announcement)
All investment and trading decisions beyond an hour need a thesis.
Today’s FOMC announcement ought to result in the realignment of yours:
Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in August suggests that economic activity has picked up following its severe downturn. Conditions in financial markets have improved further, and activity in the housing sector has increased.
We have monetized a scad of debt and that cash has wound up in equity markets. They have risen in response to the dynamic of supply and demand. Speaking of activity in the housing sector we’re referring to the rocket-shot defaults on FHA mortgages.
Household spending seems to be stabilizing, but remains constrained by ongoing job losses, sluggish income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Businesses are still cutting back on fixed investment and staffing, though at a slower pace; they continue to make progress in bringing inventory stocks into better alignment with sales.
Neither business or consumer activity supports stock prices or provides us with any sort of indication that credit demand growth is going to return any time soon.
Although economic activity is likely to remain weak for a time, the Committee anticipates that policy actions to stabilize financial markets and institutions, fiscal and monetary stimulus, and market forces will support a strengthening of economic growth and a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization in a context of price stability.
We believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus too, as shown by the clear contradiction with our previous paragraph.
With substantial resource slack likely to continue to dampen cost pressures and with longer-term inflation expectations stable, the Committee expects that inflation will remain subdued for some time.
Prices are deflating, but we never use that word.
In these circumstances, the Federal Reserve will continue to employ a wide range of tools to promote economic recovery and to preserve price stability. The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.
We told you there was no credit demand and that neither consumer or business conditions warranted any sort of real optimism, but since you’re hard-headed we’ll say it again.
To provide support to mortgage lending and housing markets and to improve overall conditions in private credit markets, the Federal Reserve will purchase a total of $1.25 trillion of agency mortgage-backed securities and up to $200 billion of agency debt. The Committee will gradually slow the pace of these purchases in order to promote a smooth transition in markets and anticipates that they will be executed by the end of the first quarter of 2010. As previously announced, the Federal Reserve’s purchases of $300 billion of Treasury securities will be completed by the end of October 2009.
The flood of monetization that powered the market from 666 to 1070 is ending. We’re going to taper this program down, mostly because we’re rapidly becoming the entire market, and that’s bad news (never mind that we might wind up with ALL of the credit risk, especially in the MBS market, which is substantial! That would suck.)
The Committee will continue to evaluate the timing and overall amounts of its purchases of securities in light of the evolving economic outlook and conditions in financial markets. The Federal Reserve is monitoring the size and composition of its balance sheet and will make adjustments to its credit and liquidity programs as warranted.
We’re sitting on a metric ton of used dog-food and are having trouble sleeping at night.
Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman; William C. Dudley, Vice Chairman; Elizabeth A. Duke; Charles L. Evans; Donald L. Kohn; Jeffrey M. Lacker; Dennis P. Lockhart; Daniel K. Tarullo; Kevin M. Warsh; and Janet L. Yellen.
We all hold hands now as we head for the cliff…. Wheeeeeee!
The only important sentence in the entire announcement is in bold.
Ignore it at your peril.
Nice shelf to get short at; take it down if we break materially over 1080. Either economic fundamentals assert themselves as deserving of these valuations or we’re a solid 2,000 DOW points (and 200 SPX points) or more above where we should be. As a trade the risk:reward looks better than it has in months; you’re risking ~10-20 handles on the SPX to potentially capture 200!

From Market-Ticker.org:

But What Now?

Menzie Chin piles on the years long and miles deep criticism of Bush era fiscal policy

the results based on the small-scale regressions suggest that economies with larger current account deficits, rising inflation, and a deteriorating fiscal balance before a crisis experienced significantly larger output losses [from financial crises].

but he also adds the presumably still applicable

[America] needs a combination of policies to reduce the deficit substantially so that its indebtedness to the rest of the world stops rising at some point. These policies include… A concerted effort to reduce the federal budget deficit…

I applaud Chin for still pushing balanced budgets even after his political foes have lost the reigns of power. 

I am becoming more convinced that silence from the center on fiscal soundness is a bad policy. Yes, the current administration should be given a chance. Yes, these are the worst of times to curtail spending or more realistically raise taxes. And, yes the loud elements of the opposition are spouting all brand of insanity.

At a minimum, however,  silence reduces the leverage the admin has to push deficit reducing policies when reasonable people are silent about the long run deficit. General statements that “when this is all over we’ll definitely work on the deficit” are not enough.

Ideally I’d like to see long run deficit targets floated. I understand that in the middle of this fight, no one wants to talk about actually cutting entitlements. Of course no one ever wants to talk about tax hikes when political tensions are high.  However, what level deficits do they see as generally achievable over a 10, 20, or 30 year horizon?

Paternalistic regulation and the knowledge problem

Lynne Kiesling

A recent essay from legal scholars Todd Zywicki and Josh Wright analyzes the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and over at Volokh, Ilya Somin adds to their analysis based on his own research. Both pieces are founded on an important core idea — paternalistic regulation that is grounded in the desire to mitigate the effects of individual cognitive errors and biases ignores the effects of the same cognitive errors and biases when incorporated in the political process. Put another way, political processes amplify and distort the effects of our inherent cognitive traits, by inserting them into processes that are also characterized by voter ignorance and that are prone to regulatory capture.

Much of the “nudge” literature on paternalistic regulation commits a Nirvana fallacy by overlooking the effects of our cognitive characteristics on the decision-making and outcomes from political processes. If we are going to evaluate the effects of our cognitive characteristics on outcomes from decentralized market processes, then the only apt comparison for making policy recommendations is to evaluate the outcomes of centralized political processes with those same cognitive assumptions.

And you'd enjoy the same life today?

I’ve often been asked that question about a libertarian world. I answer no, I’d enjoy a much richer, happier, freer, and more peaceful life.

First, what would a “libertarian world” look like?  Or, to paraphrase a couple of colleagues queries, “okay, so you’re in charge” or even better “okay, we do things your way”.

I can only laugh, or maybe cry, at their ignorance.  Well meaning folks all, even intelligent and educated, but nonetheless woefully misinformed.  One thing is clear in a libertarian world, neither I, nor anyone, would “be in charge”.  Corporations?  Hardly.  Without a massive state to subsidize with mercantilist policies, imposing high taxes and regulations that destroy competition, fund the bailouts, pass and enforce special legal privileges that only lobbying leviathan can deliver, “corporations” would be at the mercy of the consumer.  Consumer sovereignty I believed Mises called it.  The only thing I’d be in charge of is myself.

As for doing things “my way”, again, the only person who’d do things my way is me.  Laws would never be construed to encourage, or prohibit, the peaceful and mutually beneficial transactions between private, consenting parties.  No wealth nor product would ever be stolen from one and given to another.  No laws nor regulations would exist to direct resources towards any particular interest favored by one or more political groups.  My way would be only mine.  While all sides seem intent on forcing others to bend to their will, that’s the exact opposite of a society based on liberty.  It would be marked by what is NOT done, and more specifically, what is not done to people.

I know the arguments coming.  Who would build the roads, police the streets, teach the children?  Yes, there is a need for a state to some degree.  Professor Block has made an outstanding case for privatization of roads.  I find many of his arguments fascinating and relevant.  However, on some issues, yes, even libertarians have disagreements.  I cite only one example: interstate 5.  The value to California is enormous (at least the section that runs from north Los Angeles to Sacramento.  As for “interstate” however, lest anyone forget the real reason for the interstates system: the cold war.  The need to be able to transport the military was the primary concern.  That one could drive across the country was hardly a concern.)  The economic incentive to a private firm to build such a highway seems to me at the least, non-existent.  Thus, I accept the need, in a few and narrowly defined instances, for the state to build public roads.

And of course, the road directly fulfills, from my perspective, a fairly legitimate use of government expenditure.  Not in every case to be sure, but in some. Considering the public use nature of roads, and as long as the roads are funded directly by taxes, then yes, that state would have a role.

There are other areas for sure, namely courts to adjudicate contractual issues between parties as well as address violence and coercion among its citizens.  Most importantly, these magisterial offices would be as close to its citizens as possible, and be directly accountable to them as well.

The hardest concept to understand is that the state would be such a small factor, perhaps even invisible, in people’s lives.  That is the saddest part of all, the massive intrusion into our lives, affecting almost everything we do.  How much of our day is spent dealing with forms of taxation, regulation, and other policies all designed to interfere with, modify, alter, or punish us in subtle and nefarious ways?  How much effort and time is invested by groups and other interests trying to exert their influence via the machinations of government?  How sad it is we take for granted that anything that government does is acceptable provided it’s democratic.

As I write this, my kids are watching the Hannah Montana movie.  The plot revolves around a fundraiser to save a family farm from foreclosure.  But get this, the reason the farm is in jeopardy is that the owners are unable to pay…the taxes.  And how sad, how terribly sad, that that would be, could be, and most definitely is, a plausible story line.  Worse, it isn’t even a story line, but awful reality for so many.  The greatest threat in their lives, to their liberty and property, is the state.

And if I had “my way”, that wold be a most ridiculous story line, one so far fetched that not even a 9 year old girl would buy the plot.

And in that world, people would be free to make their own way, to pursue their dreams, exploit their talents, and be completely in charge of their own affairs.  And how would that make us wealthier?

For that I turn to Aristotle, who perhaps more than anyone else perfectly understood the nature of man and a society based on private property:

When the husbandmen are not the owners, the case will be different and easier to deal with; but when they till the ground for themselves the question of ownership will give a world of trouble. If they do not share equally enjoyments and toils, those who labor much and get little will necessarily complain of those who labor little and receive or consume much. But indeed there is always a difficulty in men living together and having all human relations in common, but especially in their having common property. The partnerships of fellow-travelers are an example to the point; for they generally fall out over everyday matters and quarrel about any trifle which turns up. So with servants: we are most able to take offense at those with whom we most we most frequently come into contact in daily life.

These are only some of the disadvantages which attend the community of property; the present arrangement, if improved as it might be by good customs and laws, would be far better, and would have the advantages of both systems. Property should be in a certain sense common, but, as a general rule, private; for, when everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business. And yet by reason of goodness, and in respect of use, ‘Friends,’ as the proverb says, ‘will have all things common.’ Even now there are traces of such a principle, showing that it is not impracticable, but, in well-ordered states, exists already to a certain extent and may be carried further. For, although every man has his own property, some things he will place at the disposal of his friends, while of others he shares the use with them. The Lacedaemonians, for example, use one another’s slaves, and horses, and dogs, as if they were their own; and when they lack provisions on a journey, they appropriate what they find in the fields throughout the country. It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition. Again, how immeasurably greater is the pleasure, when a man feels a thing to be his own; for surely the love of self is a feeling implanted by nature and not given in vain, although selfishness is rightly censured; this, however, is not the mere love of self, but the love of self in excess, like the miser’s love of money; for all, or almost all, men love money and other such objects in a measure. And further, there is the greatest pleasure in doing a kindness or service to friends or guests or companions, which can only be rendered when a man has private property. These advantages are lost by excessive unification of the state. The exhibition of two virtues, besides, is visibly annihilated in such a state: first, temperance towards women (for it is an honorable action to abstain from another’s wife for temperance’ sake); secondly, liberality in the matter of property. No one, when men have all things in common, will any longer set an example of liberality or do any liberal action; for liberality consists in the use which is made of property.

No comment is really necessary.  Has anyone ever said it better?  And to think, that was 2500 years ago.  Nothing has changed.  Man is corrupted by the state, and only lives in peace in its absence.  That would be “my way”.

"We Can Reverse Climate Change"--President Barack Obama--Liar or Fool--Or Both--You Be The Judge!

Obama: We Can Reverse Climate Change

 

First, climate is always changing.

Unstoppable Solar Cycles

Global Warming – Doomsday Called Off (1/5)

 

Global Warming – Doomsday Called Off (2/5)

 

The Lies Of Global Warming pt 1

 

Second, the main driver or cause for climate change is the sun.

 

Professor Fred Singer on Climate Change Pt 1

 

Professor Fred Singer on Climate Change Pt 2

 

While there are many other causes and drivers including man, man’s impact on climate is minimial and immaterial.

Man is not the primary cause of driver of climate change.

Third, temperatures have been falling for the last ten years.

Fouth, the polar ice caps are always expanding and contracting and moving:

 

The Man-made Global Warming Hoax (Part 6)

Global Warming – Doomsday Called Off (4/5)

 

 

Background Articles and Videos

 

Newt Rips Gore’s ‘Facts’ To Pieces

 

Al Gore sued by over 30.000 Scientists for Global Warming fraud / John Coleman

 

Al Gore is a Self Serving LIAR

 

Related Posts On Pronk Palisades Global Warming/Climate Change John Holdren–Science Czar–Videos John Holdren: Global Warming: What Do We Know and Should Do–Videos The Obama Depression Has Arrived: 15,000,000 to 25,000,000 Unemployed Americans–Stimulus Package and Bailouts A Failure–400,000 Leave Labor Force In July! Facing Fundamental Facts Gore Grilled & Gingrich Gouged–American People Oppose Massive Carbon Cap and Trade Tax Increase–Videos National Center for Policy Analysis–A Global Warming Primer Global Warming is The Greatest Hoax, Scam and Disinformation Campaign in History Global Warming Videos Global Warming Books Global Warming Sites  The Heidelberg Appeal: Beware of False Gods and Prophets

 

Al Gore Cap and Trade Carbon Dioxide Tax: Gore’s and Obama’s Revenge on The American People–Let Them Freeze and Sweat! Gore Grilled & Gingrich Gouged–American People Oppose Massive Carbon Cap and Trade Tax Increase–Videos Al Gore 2.0 and The Coming Renewable Energy Ice Age–The Big Chill Al Gore: Agent of Influence or Useful Idiot of Disinformation Al Gore: Agent of Influence and Planetary Propeller Head! Al Gore’s Little White Lie: Man-Made Global Warming Causing Polar Bears To Drown Al Gore’s Big Whopper–Sea Levels Rise By 2100: Gore 20 Feet vs IPCC 2 Feet?

 

Carol Browner Crazy Corrupt Climate Cult Czarina Carol’s Crystal Clear Criminal Communication–Coverup! Barack Obama’s Socialist Green Commissar Carol Browner

 

John Holdren John Holdren–Science Czar–Videos John Holdren: Global Warming: What Do We Know and Should Do–Videos

 

EID MOBARAK!

My First Eid

It was my first Eid that I am far from home and away from family’s warm hug. Although I am happy and satisfied here at AUW, I wanted to be with my family members; 

With my Granpa,Grandma,Father,Mother,Uncles,Uncle’s wives and my two sweet  brothers and six sisters.

I want to say Eid Mubarak to them from a far distance but with the nearest hearth full of love .

 

Meditation  

MEDITATION is called for a deep thinking. It has a common concept among various religions and is well known for numerous prayers around the world and the ones who want to have a deep quest on universe and human’s life. In simple words it is a journey through one’s mind and transferring human in a connecting state with universe, God and some special or hidden spiritual worlds.

At my first time I couldn’t shake the combination of fascination and amazing that I had at Gym class. After we had exercises, all sat on ground and closed our   eyes while two thumbs were touched on each other in a point. It was my first time that I was hearing about that and performing like that.

At third day of Fall Break, I received an email from my Grammar Instructor, Miss Diana Davies. The message was this:-

Dear students,

I’m pleased to discover that the Office of Student Affairs has planned several activities and outings for you guys. That’s great! Please attend as many as you can. I hope to add a few optional things to do if you’re interested. At first I want to inform you about a special program, if I can find candles to buy, I’d love to have a morning meditationtime for those who are interested. This would be an inter-faith activity–just a practice of purity, mindfulness, and peacefulness. A good day for this might be Monday, Sep. 21 as it is the International Day of Peace. I think after that would be a nice time to have a free-form art activity. I have a few art supplies like pastels and colored pencils–the roof of 20A seems to be a nice place for something like that. The meditation room looks small.

Good night!

Ms. Diana 

 This message brought incredible joy and hope for me. Because, I am really interested in having such opportunity for being alone with my own thoughts and feelings even though for a while. 

Finally, at 7:00 A.M I found myself at roof top while was sat, traveling through my universe. My eyes were focused on a candle and the wind was blowing softly. We were four students from Afghanistan, Nepal, Sirilanka, Vietnam and our instructor Ms.Diana from U.S.A. She congratulated the two special anniversaries that we had yesterday. The first Muslim Eid and another Peace Day. She passed us peace cards, impressive postcards and blank papers to paint on them with the colors that we want and to draw our thought.

I draw and paint a simple view of my sense, combination of warm and a little cold color.

The weather was rainy; it was raining a lot with the high speed that’s why, there was one feet water on the ground. I run at roof and looked at sky while it was raining faster and faster. I stand there until raining  stopped and that was my second meditation.

And…..

It was my first Eid day that I celebrated as I desired for.

Comparing Reporting On Sudan: Sept. 21

“The New York Times” began their report on the latest in the Sudan with this: “More than 100 people were killed when tribesmen raided a village in the south, burning buildings and attacking churchgoers, officials said Monday.” The beginning of the article does not, however, specifically mention the Sudan. This is only mentioned in the “Times” headline: “Sudan: 100 Dead in Raid on Village.” Their version of the story is brief and buried in the world news section.

“Arab News” gets more specific and detailed in its report. Their lead is “JUBA, Sudan: More than 100 people were killed when tribesmen raided a south Sudan village, burning buildings and attacking churchgoers, officials said on Monday, in a further escalation of violence in the oil-producing region.” Their version is one of the top world news stories. The Sudan story means more to this paper’s audience, given the role of Muslims in the conflict. Their longer version of the story even mentions this: “Around two million people died in the 1983-2005 war between Sudan’s Muslim north and mostly Christian south.”

A Pow Wow With Raven, Jesus and the Great Spirit

“Raven came. All the world was in darkness. The sky above was in darkness. The waters below were in darkness. Men and women lived in the dark and cold. Raven was sad for them. He said, ‘I will search for light.’  “

- from Raven: A Trickster Tale From the Pacific Northwest, as told and illustrated by Gerald McDermott (Harcourt Brace & Co.)

In my menswork and other church work, I’ve gotten back recently to telling and using the American Indian mythic story Raven Brings the Light. It has many parallels to Christianity, especially the Nativity story about the birth of Jesus. Thus it has special significance at Christmas among Native American Christians in the Athabaskan tradition, from Oregon up into Canada, and on into Alaska ( I think… unless I’ve been misled, which is always possible, as lies and convenient fallacies abound in these mixed-up multicultural times).

I first heard the Raven folktale on tv, in the context of the early 1990s show Northern Exposure. Below is the version they staged on one of their Christmas shows. Thanks, YouTubers!

I didn’t watch Northern Exposure show very much when it was originally being aired, but discovered it soon after, in syndication. It soon became one of my all-time favorites though, one of the early “dramedies” –one hour long, no laugh track, occasionally taking on serious subjects. I liked Northern Exposure for the quality of the writing, for its whimsy with a purpose, and for the accessible way that it portrayed Indians’ role in the American (and Canadian) experience.

As for those of you, Native and European alike, who would get on my case for using the word “indian” above –instead of the more P.C. version “Native American”– well, go soak your head. You’re just naive Americans. Things change. Yeah, I know the difference. I know my history, too. And I do care. But if the highly political Russell Means and the American Indian Movement found the word good enough for them, then it’s good enough for me. For now. More important fights should take priority, and positivity will go a lot further than intellectual gibberish.

Take for example the upcoming 56th Annual Powwow, sponsored by the American Indian Center of Chicago. This is one of the bigger ones, on Nov. 7 and 8 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Attening this event a few years ago was deeply moving for me, and yet I have not one ounce of Indian blood to brag about. I just want to understand the community. To be taught by them. And the thunderous sound of  those ten-foot drums, played loud and proud by committed members of an authentic community, still rings in my ears. If I let them, those drums (and the important conversations in-between) have the ritual power to change me – as much as any church service can, and probably more than any classroom ever could. They widen and deepen community, and strengthen the love between equally valuable citizens within various communities.

And yet, isn’t UIC a branch of the same state university that many self-serious people have criticized for using Chief Illiniwek as its mascot? So what’s up with that? Why would Chicago’s own Indian population have their event there? I suspect that the only people who argue ad nauseum about silly semantics are those who prefer arguing to actually DOING SOMETHING about the real problems today’s Indian (and other impoverished communities) still face. The local and regional participating organizations and Native Americans don’t seem to mind using the word indian, the so-called racist or inaccurate term. Or at least they don’t take themselves or the word or Chief Illiniwek too seriously. So why should I?

Maybe today’s American Indians are reclaiming and reinventing the word indian. In which case, more power to them. Especially when my cousin Tom’s mid-level engineering job (at Lucent?) was just this month shipped overseas to the REAL India — by a company more concerned with bottom lines than with its own employees and their families. Ah yes. Now I have seen the light. All bets are off in the ridiculous economy of present-day North America.

So steal the light back from the Sky Kings, Raven. We all need your help now. Not “by any means necessary”, as Malcolm X once said, but maybe it IS time to start becoming tricksters, maybe fight a little dirty, like the big boys in power ties have been doing for generations.

In the same way, this Italian American can reclaim and reinvent the words Dago, wop, or greaseball while still claiming my dignity and my rights and accepting my responsibilities. I really don’t mind if you use those so-called slurs. With me, anyway. Sticks and stones, as they say. Besides, I really do have oily skin. That only means I will have fewer wrinkles at age 50 than my counterparts of a more northern ancestry. So who has the last laugh now?

As long as you will eat with me at my table, and as long as you will respect and enlighten me like our beloved Raven and our beloved Jesus, and let me do the same for you, then call me whatever you want. We have more in common than we have differences. And we’re all stuck in the same mess of contradictions. Why claim otherwise?

So maybe I will see you in November at UIC, or at Evanston’s Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, or at some other event coming soon to a drum circle, health clinic or campfire near you. If I do, we’ll share a bit of  Indian frybread, pray together, and then dance dance dance!

Then we’ll get down to the real work, which is the hardest, but the most fun of all.

“Raven threw the sun high in the sky, and it stayed there. This is how Raven stole the sun

and gave it to all the people.”

ALL the people.