big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Hybrid Air Vehicles
, among others, is updating the blimp for heavy lift transportation.
Add a passenger cabin.
Tethered for power, we could noiselessly float to work above congested traffic.
Like Beijing’s upcoming freeway-straddling bus or building a monorail over existing roads, a signal of the imagination we’ll need to improve commuting and the future of travel.
Snippet at Jon Taplin’s On The Way Forward:
Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: “America is the best country in the world to be poor.” That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe. – Edward Luce
Straddling over the lane while traffic continues beneath, construction of Beijing’s 115 mile, 300 passenger bus line begins this year. That’s an idea! Use rights of way over existing roads.
James K. Galbraith
In fact, the right response to the crisis is to expand, not cut, both Social Security and Medicare.
The reality is, we are never going to make up good new jobs for everyone who has been hit.
Care for the elderly, energy, climate change, the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, our decayed infrastructure, public health—these are real issues. Let’s deal with them.
The ‘long-term budget deficit’ is a phony problem, ginned up by politicians, some economists, and the historic enemies of Social Security and Medicare on Wall Street.
For God’s sake, let’s not sacrifice our most successful social programs to the hysteria we’re hearing from them.
The only concern about government deficit spending should be a whether it generates inflation….
America forgets.
We’re not a contest.
We’re a solution, of course.
America is free, and it’s your job to do it.
A church or a mosque
is not terror, of course.
It’s history, and your job to renew it.
An Executive Director of the World Bank, Mr. Per Kurowski explains our crisis:
… no gigantic financial crisis has ever resulted from excessive lending to those who are perceived as risky
…they have always resulted from excessive lending to those who are perceived as not risky.
:::koff::: subprime :::koff:::
:::koff::: meks me laff
A teacher says,
“Follow your curiosity.”
Einstein adds,
“Follow your curiosity. It’s the only thing that knows where you’re going.”
Debt?!
More than one generation went lookin’ for a loan. The debt of all generations put us here.
And no one does debt better than business.
Wait for it. There’s more
It’s said BP captured 800,000 barrels. At the start of the disaster 62,000 barrels of oil a day were escaping, falling slightly to 53,000 barrels per day, reaching a total of about 4.9 million barrels. Saddam’s war time sabotage was about 5 million barrels.
It seems to me people argue the most about what they know the least about.
Restraining flippant theology, Michael Shermer at Big Questions writes, “I have debated many theologians who make the traditional arguments for God’s existence.”
I don’t know which of these ‘arguments’ is most popular or likely effective, nor would I choose one over the other.
While “sitting around in a cloud of possibilities”, I think we should be far less uppity with our imagination. With no God, why argue? With God, we better not.
tip humorzo
“And where will we hide, when it comes from inside?” — James Taylor
I often wonder if journalism and watchdogs as we know them, and of course our elected in all branches, will ever or can ever blow an alarm or close the gate against marauding and pilfering.
The playing field is a ski run. If there were a Capitol Hill on every hill perhaps we could defend ourselves. Is no government or institution strong against brigades of slavish wit intending to slice our apple?
We will meet and moan in tea parties forever until we solve respect.
Here’s another example pointing out our weakness – standing like corn for combines against banks and usury.
What lies ahead, over the next year and beyond, will require far larger armies of lawyers, economists, finance experts and just plain able bodies and minds to monitor and influence the rulemaking process.
Rumor has it that one bank alone plans to set up 100 teams of employees tasked with particular rule makings. And that is just one bank.
That’s 100 teams clamoring for your pocket. Imagine that? Blackbeard could be so lucky to commandeer boatloads of pirates!
Oh what will we do?
Jonathan Bernstein at Salon:
The media’s real bias: Caring about itself too much.
Among the many real biases of the press (as opposed to the ideological and partisan fantasies of both sides) is a bias in favor of overestimating the importance of press coverage. Not that the press is unimportant, of course … but it isn’t as important as one would think from reading the newspapers and watching the news on TV.
This year’s hypoxic zone, er, dead water, is nearly the size of the state of Massachusetts. The second largest hypoxic zone worldwide is the Gulf of Mexico adjacent to the Mississippi River. Delivering water that can no longer support life, the Big Muddy has become the Big Dead.
The oil spill rightly gets the headlines, but corn is every bit as harmful to the gulf – 120,000 tons of fertilizers washing off Midwestern farm fields last year alone. Oil consuming bacteria will add to the shame by consuming Gulf oxygen as well.
America’s environment is industry.
A. There’s hardly a family in the Gulf region that does not have a member involved in the oil industry. My father was a tugboat captain who handled barges of crude oil for the sprawling refineries, my brother sells oilfield equipment and technology, my nephew captains offshore supply vessels, my great-nephew operates a giant crane currently picking Katrina-smashed equipment from the Gulf floor. Cousins manage oil leases.
B. There’s hardly a family in the Midwest that does not have a member involved in agriculture. My father managed sprawling farmland, my brother sells farm equipment and irrigation, my nephew brokers exports, my great-nephew operates a giant combine harvesting corn across Iowa and Nebraska. Cousins manage feed mills.
The USA has become a dead water drain. NOAA’s Hypoxia Research Team is here. National Geographic’s animated map of world rivers is worth a visit.
Focusing on a spill as large as a continent is astounding challenge. Mega-fixes and macro-engineering might restrain industrial impact if implemented across national scale. There’s 50 million educated unemployed in the OECD and we stimulate hi-ways and retail. Geesh.
“I saw at close range the failure of the US war on drugs with its absurd sentences, including 20 years for marijuana, although 42 per cent of Americans have used marijuana and it is the greatest cash crop in California.” – Conrad Black
Sarah Palin is to Barack Obama as The Monkees are to The Beatles.
Cormully caught that from the Department of Painfully Obvious Promotion and knows what we know: “I was an adolescent and cynicism was transparent to me.”
“Who is the better band?”
In 1965, Don Kirshner, music producer extraordinaire, signed onto a project capitalizing on the Beatles’ fabulous success not merely as musicians but as movie stars.
Seeking to exploit that year’s A Hard Day’s Night, aspiring filmmakers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider proposed to Kirshner an American television show approximating the movie.
From a pool of 400 applicants were selected four eminently qualified, talented, perfectly lovely young men.
They were to mature from commercial enterprise to self-propelled artists – whose quality of work is a judgment call – to be pitted against their inspiration.
Do you see?
The fact remains: Obama/The Beatles created themselves.
I owned this car as a teenager. I bought it from a 20 unit Ford lot on a northern highway, true story, for $600. Flush with cash from a timber camp, I flew by, I turned around, I bought it.
Taking it with cash for a new sedan, the dealer did not know it was a Porsche. I said this is a true story. The nameplates had been torn off by blizzard driving and wrapped under the spare tire. Other than unpronounceable type on the papers, I suppose he didn’t much care.
I think I saw this jewel go for $120K not long ago. Made me ill. I found this pic in a NYTimes review of car investing. It’s been tough to find this exact model. I’ve scoured through hundreds of pics at a dozen sites over the years.
Its heater mattered because it wasn’t. I’d wear a full body snow suit under a parka, a half dozen socks, and light a camp heater on the floor just to visit friends. A day in 25-below January I stopped to see a girlfriend and left the car idling in the lot of her apartment. We smooched a bit too long. Sub-zero weather didn’t prevent its neglected pistons from melting like sugar. The only VW mechanic that knew how to import parts for a Porsche was 200 miles away. I just towed the car to his garage and gave him the title.
I could not roll this car. I’d flipped cars into snowbanks and down a ditch, but this thing was flat like your palm on a butt. My Canada had not much more black top than just one highway and our one mile Main Street. Ice and gravel is what this Porsche could do and that’s all I knew about driving. You can bet I could fishtail this baby as well as I could steer it.
I often wonder why that car was abandoned so north in the boonies. I’m guessing a wealthy or professional adventurer wanted to ‘do’ the Alaska Highway but did not know what 1300 miles of gravel would ‘do’ to an adventure.
The Porsche I loved wasn’t branded 356 C as this pic of a USA model. Confusing me for years, I learned that the 12 or so imported to Canada were ‘1600 Super Cabriolet’ – maybe 20″ longer than 1600s and Super Cs – with rear flip up seats to earn a 2×2 classification needed under import rules.
The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tennessee.
The 50 most popular websites are 40% of the Web. You’re enjoying that, an audience applauding. Are you nuts America? The top 50 sites are inserting 3,180 tracking files into one computer.
Fix it. You gave them your economy and now you’re stoned at their parade. Privacy has long been a priority for billionaires. Turn that around. Your forefathers could.
Stop being vulnerable America. Ponder. Pull up your pants. Power is the use of means and you let that go on and on. Turn that around by insisting your marketplace is better than free and unregulated but is also level and fair.
Faking Reagan’s tan for the popular vote, candidates skew issues against rule making. The result is pilfered pockets and phooey on your future. We’re vulnerable enough under media’s wrap. Stop secret data-mining.
Who puts the lie to Republican pretense?
No no and no. That’s the wrong answer.
Republicans… the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy.
Depredations: plundering and pillaging and marauding. Who said Republicans are ‘robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes‘? Reagan’s keynote Budget Director, David Stockman.
While reading his piece at the NYTimes, I think he’s trumpeting. He sells raw fix, a kitchen table simplicity he’s sold throughout his career. Perhaps not more wise but deeply disappointed. And oh so very much blame.
Stockman is gunslinging debt reduction by pricking Wall Street with 0.15% transaction taxes, perhaps to sell the grail of a universal flat tax.
I’ll stay with my opinion that tweaking rates along with ascetic retrenching merely satisfies zealots of balanced books, a loud reply to the sting of exploitation but narrow, and no more able to unwind our errors than the sloppy triumph of Reagan, our Robin Hood in reverse.
Voting belief has not been smooth and its era of opinion not very helpful. A gritty fix is upon us, a nifty trick of humanity, “What are the questions?” instead of “These are the answers.”
There might come something to gain from understanding not money’s theory but where the money went.
if yer gonna be a rooster
might as well have some character…
take another look
appreciate the stern eye,
the froth of feathers better than a comb,
and the parchment tail, the pride he tows each day.
Oh the wonderment, he says,
if an orchid makes its own moth.
Or if each the genera of fortunate tease,
the other thing he said.
Thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, who risked much to make the record of the Vietnam War public [a terribly unpopular thing], we learned about the madness that Holbrooke and others were creating. We should be grateful to the whistle-blowers who gave us the Afghanistan war documents for once again letting us in on the sick joke that passes for U.S foreign policy.
What the documents exposed is the depth of chicanery that surrounds the Afghanistan occupation at every turn because we have stumbled into a regional quagmire of such dark and immense proportions that any attempt to connect this failed misadventure with a recognizable U.S. national security interest is doomed.
What is revealed on page after page is that none of the local actors, be they labeled friend or foe, give a whit about our president’s agenda. They are focused on prizes, passions and causes that are obsessively homegrown.
Our fixation on al-Qaida has nothing to do with them.
President Barack Obama’s top national security adviser admitted as much when he said last December that there were fewer than 100 of those foreign fighters left in Afghanistan. Those who do remain in the region are hunkered down in Pakistan, and as the leaked documents reveal, that nation is just toying with us by pretending to cooperate while its intelligence service continues to support our proclaimed enemies. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal made clear in his famous report, the battles in Afghanistan are tribal in nature and the agendas are local—be they about drugs, religion or the economic power of military blackmail.
The documents contain a steady drumbeat of local hustles that are certainly deadly but rise to the level of a national security threat against the U.S. only when we insist on making their history our own.
Ladies and gentlemen, gold is the only investment to safeguard your livelihoods.
This is about gold, currency, the end of the USA. Everybody needs gold. Glenn Beck is an upstanding man for selling us gold. We need it so badly to protect us from Obama, Pelosi, Bernanke and the Trilateral Commission.
click for ginormous chart of deceit
“Obviously all these new boiler room high pressure sales groups that used to be pushing sub-prime financing are now trying to convince the unsophisticated listeners of right wing talk that they better buy gold before the dollar becomes worthless because of Obama’s reckless spending.”
The Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection will investigate the business practices, fraud, deceit and aggressive sales tactics of Goldline International and Fox News’ Glenn Beck (including Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson) to sell overpriced gold coins.
Broadcasting to millions to prey upon nest eggs, how do firms like Goldline make money? The average Goldline markup was 90% above the melt value of the coin. The largest markup was 208% above the melt value. The average markup is 47% higher than competitors.
By selling gold at twice the melt value, the price of gold would need to double for suckers to break even on their so-called ‘investment’.
Requiring reasonable behavior is an interesting task. Milton Friedman assumed we would all learn by trial and error. But under an assault of false choices, not one of us will live long enough to learn how to filter out all the crap. (Can we prove that? See pdf here: “Individual Learning About Consumption”).
Education is good. Con requires restraints.
The top 10%
Mountains of cash.
Hyperactive speculation.
Ponzi finance.
Captured government.
Column B – 90% of us
Anemic spending power.
Huge household debt.
Declining real wages.
Fewer jobs, more hours.
Some say laissez-faire markets are a good thing. It’s the ideology we’re sold and the hype we’ve bought.
Some say the economy is better served through pure competition. Here’s a small example, one of thousands, where leaving the marketplace alone is said to be good for the country. A case of corporate fine-print, a clause on the back of a cruise ship ticket says that if you want to sue, you have to sue in Florida. Of course, this is good for consumers!
Forcing people to sue in Florida deters frivolous lawsuits and lowers costs for the company. It can pass those savings onto consumers. Because if Alpha Cruise Lines doesn’t, then Beta Cruise Lines will.
Unhindered by consumer protection, why didn’t the cruise lines pass those savings onto consumers? Because they put that cash into shareholders’ pockets.
What did people at the top do with their money prize?
People at the top – high net worth individuals, investment funds, pension funds and the like – greatly increased the demand for complex financial products as they searched for ways to store their wealth.
The proliferating billionaires around the world pressured organizations like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan to supply them with complex financial securities.
As long as this external pressure to supply complex financial securities for the super-rich to store their wealth continues, the financial system will remain prone to generate bubbles, followed by crashes.
You’d think we’d have reams of data describing the habits of the top 10%, 1%, .5%, .1%. So what’s the problem? By merely seeking preservation in a frenzy of packaged finance and global leverage, the wealthy and their wealth are significantly under-performing.
Make your own Gulf Gusher.
The glass is rimmed with sand.
The contents are saturated in crude.
The garnish floats belly-up.
1.5 oz blueberry juice
.5 oz Kahlua
.5 oz chocolate liqueur
3 blueberries
sand colored sugar, i.e. raw or demerara
shake over ice, strain, float berries on top.
