Here we go again with the corporate welfare?

So here were go again, another big bank facing huge loan write offs, anyone want to guess how long it will be before Bank of America or perhaps Wells Fargo will be at the Fed with cap in hand asking for a big bail out like Bear Stearns? My guess is there will be at least one more big bank headed that way, if not several more. We are always told that the consequences of letting on of these banks go under would be catastrophic - apparently because it will spark off a bank run where everyone rushes to their own bank and asks for their money. At this point people will realize that dirty little secret that banks only have 10% or thereabouts of their deposits in hand as cash and can't possibly give everyone their money. Then there is mass panic, markets crash, economies take a dump and bad times are here again. This kind of thing used to happen all the time when there was much less control about how much cash banks had to have on hand and before the government was in the business of bailing out banks.

Of course it is not actually a secret that banks don't have everyone's money - anyone who has done Economics 101 should remember that - it's quite a revelation. But then again while it is not a secret it is not someone banks, economists or the government every shout out about. They all hide behind the FDIC insurance that you'll always get your first $100,000 bank come what may (assuming your account has that insurance, not all do), even if the bank pisses it all away on a big new downtown HQ and goes belly up in the night after a particular bad binge drinking session.

But despite the alleged consequences (and no one has seen a bank run in decades) I still see this stuff as corporate welfare, because on the face of it it just encourages bankers to keep on with their bad behavior - it is exactly the wrong kind of feedback to give them and will cause the opposite of evolution in business practices. Even if Bear Stearns was sold off for a song at the end of the day someone took the benefit of that huge infusion of cash from the Fed - prior profits and many benefits from soaring stock prices were creamed off for years while they cashed in on sub-prime mortgages. Also there's a whole raft of bankers and executives who will just cruise to the next cushy job - probably taking fat payoffs from Bear Stearns at the same time. Just where is the incentive for them to do anything differently next time a chance to slash and burn our economy comes along?

Those who are continually asking for more deregulation and getting government out of everything but killing people must be crazy - or they are stinking rich and know that actually boom and bust cycles like the old times are bad for everyone except them. I mean at what time were all those vast fortunes of the Rockefellers, Stanfords, Hearst and the like made? Yes, while we had little or no banking regulation - open season on everyone's money, winner take it all time - just like the good ol' wild west!

If I had my way I'd shut these corporations down completely - revoke their charter, ban all the exec from running a corporation for a number of years and bail out *only* the investors, to their FDIC amount. People would get used to the idea they shouldn't be more than $100,000 in any one bank, there would be more banks more competition, and banks themselves would be more careful about screwing up. Then again what do I know, I'm not an economist and I don't have more than $100,000 anywhere to loose.

Perhaps it is time for people on the street to start voting about their disgust of how this is all panning out. They can do it voluntarily with their money, no need to wait for a bank run - if everyone withdrew just 10% of their cash from banks it would really send a message. Or if just 10% of people took out all of their money that would do the trick and you can pick pretty much any reasonably small demographic and mobilize them to do something. Probably just the threat of it happening would cause a panic. So this year perhaps, instead of "buy nothing day" we'd have "withdraw everything day". Now wouldn't that be interesting - I have a feeling I know which would get more publicity.

We are not alone!

Great news - we are not alone! No, it isn't a message from the stars decoded by SETI, or a monolith dug up on the moon - just the latest U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum. Their massive survey has concluded that a full 16.1% of adult Americans are either atheists, agnostic or believe "nothing in particular". That's a huge result and well inline with other recent surveys that conclude a very significant percentage of American's could care less about religion. And that is without any consideration of those who are quick to label themselves as one thing or another if only out of habit or just to fit in, but actually know, practice or care less about that particular religion. I mean we all know of have heard of people who profess to some religion or other just for "tradition" or because their parents raised them that way or just because its a gamble that has no downside after death.

But let me tell you, 16% of adult Americans is a huge number of people and most likely they are all plenty sick and tired of hearing about religion and seeing it dictate the misdirection of our countries forces, resources and future at the expense of humanity as a whole. I just hope some people in Washington finally take note and decide that maybe, just maybe, it is time they stopped pandering to the some elite band of Christians or other that excepting Catholics, all number fewer than the "none of the above" crowd. I mean just look at all the myriad categories of Evangelicals and Protestants, let alone the rest, can anyone say "Factions" or "Splinter cells"??? Why would anyone ever believe that given their own way and opportunity at the helm each one of these factions would denounce all others as the wrong kind of religion and seek to stamp out and destroy them while at the same time as they themselves go off and faction even more as they race backwards to Old Testament values (think stoning, slavery and stuff that make even hardcore Sharia laws look civilized).

Obama get some balls!

Hopefully that title got your attention. I'll be the first to admit I'm an Obama supporter - I wish somehow Edwards had got the nomination but given the current field my choice is Obama. I actually think it is high time this country had a female President, a break in the long history of old white men running the world is clearly long overdue. But I just don't think Hillary is the woman for the job, I have a strong feeling she would be a bad president for future female candidates. So I just hope I live long enough to see some future woman candidate get the support of the nation, become President and do a great job.

Oh well, want I really wanted to blog about was Obama and this whole "scandal" about him being photographed in Muslim clothing. I was getting somewhat irritated that Obama in denying he was a Muslim never took the opportunity to denounce the idea that being a Muslim is a problem, and even being a Muslim President is a problem. But then I came across a column by Naomi Klein from The Nation that said exactly the same thing and I felt vindicated, I'm not the only person thinking Obama is copping out and treading a dangerous path towards sucking up to "special interests". Sure he's probably thinking this is a really bad time to be pissing off all those Christians and making Hillary happy, but face it - is there ever a good time to be controversial in American politics? Isn't it just a huge game of who can suck up to the most demographics the most, and piss off the fewest demographics the least? Never mind about "doing the right thing" any more...

Lets not forget that at one time the country was apparently having a hard time contemplating even a Catholic President (Kennedy), and that back then a black President would have been unthinkable. And not too much before that a woman president would also be unthinkable - long after they were actually allowed to vote. If someone were to fault Obama for being black would he not run to the bully pulpit to level their preposterous racist hate speech? And wouldn't Hillary or any right thinking Democrat do the same thing?

So why do a turnaround and tacitly accept vilification of Muslims or the notion that a Muslim might ever been President of this country? Surely it is only the severe erosion of the church and state separation by out current President that would ever make the religion of the President an issue - ever. Period. When religion, racism, sexism, hatred, bribes, corruption, money are all kept out of government then these things are just not a problem - any honest hardworking person is a potential candidate who can be weighed entirely on valid merits and not bogus ones dreamed up by FUD mongerers with nothing better to do than spend their lives pandering to their own favorite special interest - themselves.

So come on Obama, this is your chance to label racial, religious and other intolerance exactly that - intolerable! Tell those bigots that if they want to label religion a problem then they are part of the problem that is bringing this country down. You either accept all religions or you have to throw out all religions - even (and especially) in government. Otherwise one day we'll have Christians arguing about which particular brand of Christianity is the right one for a President (which arguably what they are doing already hence no President Romney)

If Obama can speak out about religious intolerance towards Muslims then where's he going to stand when the come for the blacks, the gays, and the atheists?

Sub-prime vs. Consumer The Resurrection

And I thought the banks were supposed to be repentant, and had learned their sub-prime lesson. Cash handouts were made by the government to keep the ol' he-con-o-me [economy] going and they were going to be good.

So is it any surprise I find myself deluged with even more 0% interest teaser credit cards with super-prime rates of 15% or more after the sting is in. And unlike the "good times" every single one comes with a transfer fee so its really 3% interest. Nope, you can't fool me, but I'm sure there are many in-debt mortgage payers going for broke in these babies only to get sub-primed all over again.

I mean what gives? First its the energy crisis, then its the stock market collapse, then its housing market collapse (forgive me if I skipped a few there). Has the entire US economy finally simplified itself down to some perpetual tag-team pyramid scheme not unlike Orwell's perpetual war against Oceania, no scratch that East Asia, no scratch that. Anyway, you get the picture...

I would be a little less bitter but last night I watched, well listened to, Zeitgeist, that well known training flick for neo-conspiracists. It was nothing I hadn't seen already in separate pieces and from different sources but as a whole it certainly either beats you down or sends you away laughing at people's stupidity.

The one striking claim that I took from it was that the Federal Reserve bank at one time manufactured a collapse by pumping cash into the economy causing a spate of lending by small banks. Then a little while later they deliberately tightened the drawstrings causing thousands of small banks to fail and end up getting bought up at a bargain by the big guys - which was the intended purpose. I mean you really can't have just anybody loaning out money...

So as I hear about the billions being pumped into the economy by the central banks of the world, a rash of credit card offers to consumers, I keep wondering how long it will be before fiscal policy is tightened and the next boatload of banks will go tits up. Oh well, as the Captain of the Exxon Valdez said as he swigged on his tenth beer for the night and parked his vessel into the side of Alaska for the night - "It's all good for the economy!".

(Yeah, I know he didn't actualy say that, but it is - as government paid economists currently measure "good").

Another solution to the fuel/carbon/resource crisis

This is one solution to the fuel/carbon/resource crisis that few people are talking about - taxing production, human production. It's pretty clear a sure fire way to half consumption is to halve the number of consumers, it will just take 100 years to have full effect.

I guess China tried a variant on this a while back with their one child policy and it wasn't very popular or successful. The Australian proposal has the interesting twist that it makes procreation a luxury the rich can afford easily which surely has some unpleasant eugenic implications.

The next "big thing" and the next anti-"big thing"

So first it was the dot com crash - everyone saw that coming right? Well they should have done - people were predicting it for years. My friend the Tin Man started bugging me about it before most even realized the dot com era was here, let alone on its way out. There was never really any "if" about it, it was just a question of when the merry-go-round would stop sending everyone flying off into economic disarray.

Then there was 9/11. Of course most of us never saw the planes coming, either actually or metaphorically (apparently the CIA/FBI/NSA and Bush government did the latter), but some of us wondered just how long the government could keep the FUD masquerade up. They made it easier by pumping over a $1,000,000,000,000 of borrowed cash into the national economy while simultaneously pulling cash out of the local economies. It was kind of like sitting in foamy bath tub of bubbles with air coming in an bubbles getting bigger and fewer, rising over our head, popping here and there, their connections getting more and more strung out (like local economies and our bank balances) until we are all sitting under this single tenuous shiny impossibly thin veil of something not quite sure of what is holding the bubble up there. Then one day along comes a butterfly called "sub-prime" that flaps its wings and brings it all crashing down. Pooh - no more bubble and we're sitting cold, wet and alone in the tube crying for mother to bring us a warm blankey.

There, there, America, Mama will keep baby cosy and warm, Ooooh Babe Ooooh Babe Ooooh Babe, Of course Mama's gonna help build the wall...

So I ask you - what will be the next big thing and what will be next anti-"big thing" to bring it all crashing down. I mean I'm only 40 and I've already experienced a whole bunch of these - oil crisis, 1987 stock market crash, dot com crash, and now the sub-prime implosion (it's an implosion because Uncle Sam doesn't like to talk about banks crashing any more).

Be my guest - post your best guesses as a comment and let's see who gets it right!

Torture

This article got me thinking - what is worse: a President who protest his innocence of lying by arguing about what the definition of "is" is, or one who wants to protest his innocence of torture by arguing about what the definition of "torture" is?

Read the second to last paragraph and you'll realize that times really have changed, and when brute force is substituted for intelligence it is definitely a change for the worse.

Dog mauling

Analogy - if cars randomly went crazy and killed people. Find dog mauling statistics.

How to arrest 2,000 people a day

I guess I'm going to have to read the book to get the real facts, but this Alternet article reveals more staggering figures on how the USA wastes staggering resources busting people for petty drug charges. Over 600,000 arrests a year for simple possession of pot - not dealing or trafficking, just possession. That's one an a half times the population of Oakland getting a criminal record every year. Okay, I'm ignoring the possibility of multiple arrests of the same person but even so. And the combined figure for all pot (not other drugs, just pot) arrests at over 800,000 per year exceeds all violent crime arrests.

Isn't that just mind numbingly crazy? Does anyone see the huge problem with this? Never mind the economic arguments - that legalizing pot could add $30-odd billion in tax revenue to the governments coffers, and remove a $100+ billion source of revenue from the criminal underworld.

This country has...

This country has jumped the shark.

Yes, that's right - I'm saying "The United States of America aka Team USA has JUMPED THE SHARK". I hear that phrase applied almost every day to some thing or other and a few weeks ago I started realizing it applied most appropriately to the USA. The signs are everywhere and if you don't see them you have jumped they shark with Team USA too.

Birthdays without pressure

Being child-free I get invited to precious few kids birthday parties but I know they can be veritable orgies of proto-consumer excess and sugar infused excitement - and I probably haven't experienced anything like the examples of birthday party hell out there. I like to think our friends with kids are better than those examples but I know how easy it can be to sucked into the madness. We've certainly seen some bad examples at "pre-birthday party" baby showers... kids not even born yet with enough clothes for the next three years, and three of everything a new parent could need.

I used to think that feelings about too many gifts at parties were because I'm an old fart, or I'm just jealous that when I was a kid I probably only had one or two parties where anyone other than my immediate family was present. Furthermore I don't recall ever getting more than one major present per birthday and that was always from my mum and dad. When I got older my big brothers managed a few cool gifts but other relatives usually gave money or clothes - my grandma was always good for a hand knitted sweater at Christmas, or a few 50p coins stuck in an envelope. Mind you 50p was serious dough back then - it could by a lot of crisps or bottles of soda!

But I do get this feeling that I'm perhaps not the only one to think there could be a problem, as the Birthdays Without Pressure web site puts it, "children's birthdays are out of control" and that out of control parties contribute to:

• A too much stuff culture
• A me first culture
• A trash and waste culture
• An entitlement culture
• A envy culture
• A more of everything culture

and that is precisely what we don't need when the next generation grows up because it is exactly those things that brought us the baby-boomers who got and kept us in this big global warming over consuming mess in the first place. The last thing we need just when conservation might actually be cool again would be a whole new generation who couldn't give a damn and wont do anything without a gift bag at the end of it (don't you get it? - the gift is life and you get it up front with a whole lifetime to enjoy or squander it as you wish).

Okay, end of rant, this grinch is going home...

Birthday reform

I'll be the first to admit I'm a bit of grinch when it comes to birthdays. A big party once in a while is fine, but every year is over the top. And even "big" birthdays don't warrant big parties in my humble opinion. My big 3-0 was quiet a do, but my big 4-0 had prisely two attendees (not counting three cats), perfect. These days I have so few friends that live anywhere near me I just couldn't bring myself to throw a huge party when so many of the people I'd want to drag out to celebrate wouldn't be around. Yeah I know real friends would travel around the world for a party, but really its just not right to expect people to drop everything, plus a bundle of cash to show up for a few hours of boozing and cake.

So I guess I'm a birthday luddite because if I had kids of my own it seems like I would have a whole different perspective on birthdays. I'd be expected to throw a huge party for every kids birthday, and drag my kids to everyone elses presents in hand. And now even kids attending other parties expect to get presents, WTF? Being child free agent J and I get invited to precious few kids parties but those we've been too (and even the "pre-birthday" baby showers) are usually non-stop consumer good orgies http://www.birthdayswithoutpressure.org/

Graffiti as art

My neighborhood gets graffiti everywhere, and it sucks. I mean not just that it sucks we have graffiti, but the graffiti itself sucks too. These guys are amature scribblers of the worst kind - I've seen three year olds who could paint a better picture and even sign their name more leggibly. Of course most of these people are not trying to be artists - they really only qualify for the label "tagger" and are just trying to claim territory like a dog marking its territory.

Like I said, it sucks... oh that their sidewalk pissant efforts were something more like we find at The Wooster Collective.

That's graffiti as its meant to be, well executed, interesting (often inciteful) and an improvement on what is there already. If I was sure it wouldn't attract wannabe scribblers too I really wouldn't mind seeing more of this around - it would brighten up a lot of our drab and ugly post-modern condo buildings. Compared to some of the official "art" that public art dollars pay for I know which I would choose!

Executor in Chief

It's nice to know that George Bush is working (working hard!) on establishing his legacy as Executor in Chief.

I think I have a solution to the death penalty problem - make wrongful execution a crime punishable by death. I doubt anyone who's convictions that execution is right will by ready to step up to the plate - after all as the article points out, 123 people sentenced to be executed have already been proved to be innocent while waiting to die, so goodness knows how many were actually executed before their innocence was proved, or took their knowledge of innocence to the grave.

I guess George finds plenty of validation for his plans in the bible, that is if God didn't talk directly too him with instructions...

Dick "El Predicto" Cheney

Many thanks to the Tin Man for sending me a link to this You Tube wonder:

Holey [sic] smokes batman, who would have thought old Dick Cheney could have been so insightful, so forthright and just so, so, so damned RIGHT back in 1994? Just goes to show, in Washington you're made to be dumb as the dumb-ass you work for. I suppose Bush would argue that's why he has to be so dumb - because he works for the United States people. You know how that saying goes: "Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice... I must be an American voter"

Two dollar bill R.I.P. (just my $2.00 worth)

No that wasn't a typo, I really did mean $2 worth and not $0.02 worth (or 2 cents worth). I just got a copy of Utne Reader and couldn't help noticing an article about the two dollar bill. You know that just kind of funny looking bill that might turn up in your change but once a year, if that.

Well according to Utne the $2 bill is getting a new lease of life thanks to its use in strip bars who are rapidly catching on to the idea of giving their customers change in two dollar bills. This meant customers no longer had any bills smaller than $2 to tip waitresses and performers. The idea of handing out $2 bills apparently started in Texas at a club called Baby Dolls, and this fact became so well known in the town that it was assumed any man spending a $2 bill had obtained it from Baby Dolls. The upshot was that actual patrons of the club would feel obliged to spend every one of the bills before leaving the club to avoid future embarassment next time they opened their wallet. So not only were patrons forced to tip at least double what they usually did, they also had to spend all the change before leaving thus further improving profits for the club and dancers.

According to Utne since 2001 the practice started in Texas has spread far and wide among strip bars such that the clubs use of them has increased the demand for the two dollar bill from the federal bank by tens of millions of dollars in bills per year. So big was the increase in demand that the Feds actually went off to investigate the source of increased demand. My prediction is we are now inevitably looking a the demise of the venerable $2 bill. Rumors of the bills frequent use in strip bars will spread far and wide, this will lead to a certain puritanical demographic into shunning the $2 bill, refusing to use it or take it as change. "My goodness, I'm not taking that bill, I don't know where its been!", will come the cries (as if we know where any of our currency has been!) Similarly anyone attempting to use the bills will become stigmatized such that they will just not want to spend them and hence accept them any more. Ultimately there will be calls to remove the "stripper bill" from circulation. There will also be spirited support for the bill by its fans - using it will be seen as a form of defiance. Support or lack of for the $2 bill will probably even feature in 2012 presidential debates (if not sooner) as some kind of moral litmus test for candidates. But the government, pandering to its base, will eventually be forced to oblige and remove the now tainted twofer.

If you want more evidence of the rarity of a $2 having interesting applications, just read about how certain Florida shoppers are using them.

Power to the people - but not in my backyard

It kills me that I live in Oakland which has a major Pacific rim port with a lot of wide open flat industrial land and no one is doing something like this wind generator project, in England of all places. Oakland isn't in the Dakotas but we still get plenty of a wind and as the Port of Oakland is a major polluter and had a profit of over $200 million last year I can think of no better way for them to make amends.

Oakland has a really bad rap, and doesn't have much to be proud of. I can think of nothing better to see when driving off the Bay Bridge as you enter the East Bay then some whopping great turbines twirling in the breeze generating power. Since the Port is already knee deep in towering cranes over 300 feet high I can't imagine that a few dozen turbines would hurt anyone and they integrate perfectly into the existing land use, and provide power exactly where its needed. A project like this would really put Oakland on the map - it might even make those crunchy granola types in Berkeley jealous.

Driving ourselves to extinction

I couldn't believe it when I came across the video below. If you watch carefully you'll see someone miss their freeway exit, make a U-turn on the freeway and drive back to the exit in the outside lane, and then make another U-turn to the exit.

I mean WTF? Miraculously no one is killed in the making of this video but really they should have been - the driver of that car should be dead because whether they realized it or not it was effectively attempted suicide and attempted manslaughter all thrown in. They might as well have sat on the freeway bridge and jumped into traffic... If we have become that dumb and that coddled that someone can get away with something so stupid and walk away scott free to drive another day there really is no hope for us.

Once in my youth I remember one of my brothers suggesting that all criminals should just be executed. I'm not sure where that line of thinking sprang from, perhaps he'd been studying the Old Testament too closely, but I seem to recall some debate about the wisdom executing everyone who commits a crime. If you can get past the dubious ethical basis of executing anyone at all (which America seems to have no problem with) then there are still insurmontable problems. Like determining which people broke a law which they had no idea existed (I did this once myself - so I should be dead), and proving they broke a law in the first place - of which America again provides dozens, if not hundreds of examples of failing to do so - sending innocent people to the gas chamber, electric chair and the like.

However, when I see a video like that I really feel that person should not be alive any more regardless of what they are thinking. Yeah, that's a pretty shocking conclusion, but go figure that the other 99 times out of 100 the person would probably have been broadsided by a truck and probably killed several other people. Even more shocking is that with all the technological advancement we have we still allow people to take personal command of several tons of steel and propel it at 60, 70, 80 or more mph down the freeway separated from other people doing the same thing surrounded by nothing more than a few feet of thin air and a strip of paint a few millimeters thick.

It really is time that cars ran on rails and people took the back seat to technology on this one. If necessary the backseat can have a driving simulator so they can pretend they are driving and yacking on the cellphone. Sure technology lets us down but at least that is something we can fix, unlike the 150 or more people killed by human error on US roads every single day. That's better than 1 in a million odds of not making it home each day - orders of magnitude better than winning the lottery. I think the next "fish" religion/darwinism bumper sticker should combine the two concepts - a fish with wheels on a crucifix tombstone.

Chicken or Beef? The Ultimate Answer

I have friends that used to keep a blog called "Chicken or Beef?" but they have moved on to new places now ("Mousebacon" and "This is My Dangerous Career").

It occurred to me today in an Adams inspired moment of silliness (Douglas Adams, not Samuel Adams) that "Chicken or beef?" could have been the ultimate answer. You know the ultimate answer to the ultimate question, the question of life, the universe and what's for dinner?

Fear of falling - up!

Apropos nothing, here is a flying interlude...

I was flying my paraglider at the coast this weekend and cloud base was low, around 700 feet and I was at about 650 feet, moving reasonably slowly into the wind at just a few mph. For once cloud base at the coast was fluffy white cloudlets drifting overhead, not just an opaque blanket of fog (stratus) that you slowly disappear into while the ground (or ocean) melts away into white below you.

So I'm flying around at that height and starting to feel like the cloud is "coming right for me" because its blowing onshore at a reasonable speed and I'm so close to it. Then I notice when I'm looking up at the cloud just over my head and I start to feel a vertigo like dizziness coming on, like I was looking over the side of a tall building at the pavement, even to the point that I actually sensed some fear that I might fall up and hit the cloud... Granted that fear was perhaps well founded - cloud base can be a turbulent place to be where thermals peter out, and air layers mix up often violently - but I have a feeling it's source in this case was less rational and more primal, just like vertigo.

The solution was simple, just look down which when flying holds no ill feeling for me at all. But it was a weird experience and I'm now wondering if there is a name for the phenomenon.