Life After Ike

Good morning! Electricity is a good thing. Also refrigerated water and other items to drink. I was delighted by the first post-hurricane cottage cheese.

Welcome back Joel! Hope you got to take a nice long hot shower with the loofah and everything. You surely have earned it.

[Take a quick look over the text. I think you picked up some extra verbiage when you copied this article, Joel.]

Welcome home Joel. You did a great job and deserve a nice jacuzzi and a long sleep in your own bed.

Great article Joel. The tone is perfect. Neither maudlin nor exploitive. I love this phrase, which is clearly taken from first-hand experience:

"When there's no running water, life gets dirty fast. Humans in the wild are not an elegant species."

Yeah, RD. That statement succinctly explains why my wife has a camping aversion.

Yes, RD, I quoted that paragraph in the last boodle, how kind of you to pick up on what I thought was outstanding.

That's the reason Mr. T doesn't camp. Sometimes two hot showers a day aren't enough for him.

I just caught this while perusing the web. Commentary on the McCain-Palin health care plan. Under this plan, workers with employer provided insurance would pay taxes on the amount of money your employer spends to insure you and your family. The costs would be offset at the end of the fiscal year by a tax credit of between 2.5 and 5K, depending on your family status. According to this article, up to 20M workers would wither lose benefits, or opt for no insurance at all. Too out of the box for me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/opinion/16herbert.html?ref=opinion

There is nothing quite like the comfort of my own toilet seat. It's what I appreciate most following a camping trip. Next in line - shower, refridgerator, bed, AC, stove. In that order.

jack,
That medical care plan is a classic conservative destroy from within idea. With your brother ill, I would see how you are concerned. Employer paid health insurance is also currently free from FICA taxes. Moving it to the taxable side of the ledger is a huge tax increase to most American.

And since they changed the name to the McCain Palin plan, I assume that rape evidence kits would not be covered. They'd probably make birth control devices illegal as well. Just speculating.

Joel took the mayor's request to heart. He left. Good move. Following the '85 hurricane at Cedar Key, the governor and press were allowed into town while returning residents were barricaded at the bridges and prevented from returning to their homes and businesses. Local resentment fueled a vow to never again evacuate - and it has taken twenty years of hurricanes, culminating in the death toll from Katrina, for many of them to elect good sense over resentment.

Good morning, you all.

Welcome back, JA, after reading your front pager this morning, I am reminded that it's all about sewage now & polution of the bay & how sad it is for those who left the island and now have nothing to come back to. They were the wise ones, tho.

Waving back at RD from yesterday (do you work near us, maybe in Reston/Herndon?)

Read E. Robinson this morning, trying to explain the unexplainable Mrs. Palin. He did as good a job as we can expect.

Dave? Where do you live? Near the gulf coast? Sorry I cannot get everybody straight in the boodle, you were here long before me, I know that.

Great editorial decision for Joel Achenbach to cover this event. Brilliant reporting. Lucid and compelling. Like Mark Twain's reporting maybe.

The same German lady is pulling her hair on the frontpage of the NYT and WaPo's web editions. Weird.

Amazing how much one can miss when one's Dawn Patrol transportation is idling at the Monocacy River. *SIGH*

jack, your help will be most assuredly appreciated, I'm sure.

JA, glad you're back safe. Too bad the comment crew (not you, Brag) seems to have left their humanity at the door.

Sneaks, innit great the Sox returned the Rays' favor and won at the Trop? And Beckett's going tonight! *happy dances*

*holding-down-the-fort-while-the-bosses-are-out-but-pretty-sure-I'll-find-time-to-Boodle Grover waves* :-)

Padouk, thanks for the alert, fixed it. I added a couple of photos and some captions for all three pix. Sneaks, I agree on the Jacuzzi ... But just a basic hot shower is so nice!

I got home a little after 2 a.m. and my excellent youngest child Shane Achenbach had taped for me the Monday Night Football game. I watched it for about an hour or so -- lots of crazy stuff, great fun -- and ate chips and salsa, had a Sierra Nevada, read the paper (hadn't seen a newspaper in days -- what a neat invention!) and was pretty much the happiest man in this hemisphere. Home sweet home.

Clarification: The comment crew on JA's home page piece, not here!!!!

JA - Outdoor survival guide 101

Section 32b

For showers fill a garbage bag with water. Allow sun to heat through the day and cool over night. Will be nice and hot come morning. Hang from a tree or other overhead area. Poke hole in bag and enjoy. DO NOT shower in the evening if the water has been in the sun all day as it can cause severe burns.

bc, I'm sure Brag and Don know what a "flat spin" is, tho' I hope your analogy is wrong, because a flat spin is usually (but not always, depending on the type of aircraft) not recoverable. (For you non-aviator types, both Tom Cruise in "Top Gun" and Sam Shepherd as Chuck Yeager in "The Right Stuff" got into unrecoverable flat spins. In real life, so did the late Willie McCool, who died aboard the Columbia, while testing a plane at Pax River. He was the first out of 14 previous spins to successfully recover; the other 14 all went down. Some aircraft notoriously prone to flat spins were the P-39 Aircobra, the famous WWII Corsair, early, improperly loaded Mustangs, and the famous F-14 Tomcat ("Top Gun") which was highly resistant to spinning, but if once caught was basically unrecoverable. Maj. Tom McGuire, the guy who shot down Yamamoto, died in a dogfight when he went into a flat spin, due to failure to first drop his fuel tanks on his P-38 Lightning before engaging a Japanese fighter (the same problem with Mustangs: ya can't dogfight with wing tanks).

You may now return to your regularly scheduled lives.

CP! CP! Please check your gmail now!

(Why does that sound wirty?)

Your daughter taped a football game for you? I think you owe her a pony.

VL - No I do not work in Reston, but I often have to go to afternoon meetings in that area. And since I live in Fairfax, Hunter Mill Road is my route of choice to get home. It's a very pretty drive.

Wonder who the "len" is who commented here on Joel's story at 9:00. Could it be...?

If so, Hi, len. Nice to see you again. Please come back often.

Shriek, front page of the G&M had the same pictures as well.

Joel I am sure your family are thrilled to have you back safe and sound. Great articles on the storm, like the others the paragraph about the human species jumped right out at me, as did the women's comment in one of the articles stating that God might be telling her to get out next time.

g'morning boodle. Mudge made mention of Barton Gellman in the last boodle and I must second his praise. Here's the latest in his series on the dark one, from his forthcoming book on Cheney-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/15/AR2008091502704.html
If you didn't catch him last night on the Daily Show it's worth seeing in tonight's repeat.

Flat spin or no, you have to wonder what people were thinking before the Great Depression. By spring 1930 the stock market had bounced back from Black Tuesday to early 1929 levels, though not as high as the days leading up to the crash. Always believers in the fundamental soundness of the American economy, Mr. F and I have saved and invested since we were 14. Ups and downs of the market never bothered before, downs were just buying opportunities and ups made us feel like we had things figured out at least a little. Losses on paper hurt no more than gains on paper excited, but when losses dig into money I actually had to work for I get pi$$ed off. Now I wonder, what were the harbingers of world-wide and deep depression that people missed? Are we missing them now?

Morning all. Glad to have you back, JA.

TBG -- check your email; I forwarded an exceptionally good message that I got from a friend in California. You got on my forwarding list.

Glad to hear you are home, boss. I feel for the people left stranded homeless, and without.

Great work all the way through, Joel, just seriously fine.

Bear Grylls should do a show on how to survive in a city destroyed by a hurricane

These people are all complaining of no water and food. If they knew how to forage and collect water from the air, they wouldn't be in such a bad situation

or at least thats how Bear would make it appear.

VintageLady,
I'm a denizen of Indian River County, where the grapefruits come from.

Gustav and Ike are further reminders of how great it was to have an undamaged house AND electricity within a couple of days after each of the storms in 2004.

Just as pleasantly, the local supermarkets and hardware stores reopened quickly. I recall going into Publix, where employees were clearing the dairy case because of a partial power failure. I managed to snatch that cottage cheese before it went back into the big fridge.

Tdebris from the first storm (Frances) were ordinary stuff--leaves, small branches and whatnot. But it all came down at once. An entire winter's worth of tree droppings, plus bonus branches. Five days of cleanup, some 50 big contractor bags. Air conditioning and showers and cool drinks were wonderful.

Our local problems were perhaps comparable to Sugar Land, the affluent Houston suburb where many of the stores seem to be open. Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula are far worse situations.

Here's a curious story about an odd ant species
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/09/16/bizarre-ant-from-mars-offers-clues-to-insect-evolution/

There are days the Boodle is a better way to reach someone than a beeper.

I'd like to see that show on survival--I can cook on the grill, but collecting water? No idea how to do it in a hurry.

Course there are enough tomatoes that I wouldn't die of thirst. For lunch, I'll see CP's ratatouille and raise her some grilled brats (previously marinated in beer and onions, then parboiled in the beer).

LeCroy's comment about the "riffraff" seems to have stirred up the hoi polloi, those people that Bulwer-Lytton called the "great unwashed," in the comments section of Joel's story instant.

Come to think of it, using the phrase "those people" may appear elitist to the easily offended. I suppose if there was not enough good food and "gourmet wine" for the masses, LeCroy could have said "Let them eat cake." Anything to keep the tumbrils rolling.

OK. Have added more photos and text. Now will mow yard.

http://www.waterpureinternational.com/

This company's slogan is: "Water from air...it's always there."

I have been under the impression that the widespread increase in 401K plans in the nineties and now, were a fundamental new thing in the economy. (My very untrained impression was that all that money flowing into investments should keep interest rates low by itself.) I wish someone more knowledgable could explain whether 401Ks have made a big difference, what effects it has had, and how that relates.

Incidentally, the voice I thought Palin's reminds me of is the voice of Rachel Ray, TV cook. Not that that means much.

Hey everybody, front page alert. I think Joel's ready for them. He's got the photos and stories, that's for sure.

Ruminants are showing a somewhat frightening propensity for appearing in front of JA's camera lately...

Jumper-Palin's voice is very much like Sue Scott of Prairie Home Companion when she is doing her way over the top Minnesota nagging/whine/scold accent. Hadn't thought of Rachel Ray, but you have something there.

Please don't tell me some moron is upset about the "riffraff" quote. It was clearly ironic and humorous, meant to contrast to the "gourmet" food and wine they were consuming.

Jeezey-peezey. They shouldn't evacuate the humor-impaired in these situations.

Great story by Lindsey Wise of the Houston Chronicle. She captured the spirit of Elizabeth Madson perfectly.

Oooh, a brahman cow wandering the streets after a deluge. This could be India during the monsoon.

I like the first picture, puts me in mind of a bat in blue for some reason.

Interesting pictures, and your bathtub welcomes you back along with the boodle.

If Joel doesn't make it back from his lawn I volunteer for the search party.

Frosti, here's an analysis that makes sense to the English major:

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/408/story/195519.html

Interesting that the take on the Great Depression is that regulators didn't act and that made everything worse. Here's to hoping that the Fed stays on the tightrope and pulls us through.

My memory tells me you are on to something, frostbitten. I'm gonna find an audio clip now and see.

I learned how to get water from air back in junior high (or maybe elementary) school, although I have never had to make use of this knowledge. I learned it from one of those exciting plucky-boys-survive-peril adventure novels. Get a piece of light-colored fabric and suspend it from the corners with a weight (like a rock) in the middle. Put a cup under the low point. Over night, the fabric will capture condensation from the moisture in the air, which runs downhill and drips from the low point. In the book, the protagonists had been shipwrecked (or maybe plane-wrecked) and assembled this contraption on the beach of their tropical island, where they dug into the sand a little ways. This allowed seawater to evaporate and recondense as drinkable water, albeit flavorless distilled water.

I would imagine that the wonderful-sounding water-from-air machine condenses water vapor on the cold side of a heat pump. This requires electricity and does not seem like a terribly efficient procedure. At least it does not require the power to vaporize water, which you would need in order to distill your own water. You might be able to run this thing from photovoltaic panels. A good thing to have at your wilderness camp, if you have the photovoltaics.

"I told God if I make it through this one, we aren't doing this again."

I've tried cutting a few deals with God in my lifetime also. Hope I promised my soul to the right dude.

All this talk about post-storm behavior reminds me of what we always say before a snowstorm... "better get down to the store and buy lots of milk before the hoarders get to it!"

Black helicopters and other sundry tasks have kept the ol' schnozola to the grindstone, so her is some serious back boodling:

CP, as already noted, your whole life policy is solid. When I sold life insurance, folks were being seduced by the "buy term and invest the difference" swan song. Now, it bites them in the butt. You, and the other hand, were most wise. Would anybody listen to me when I preached that? Nooooo. Nobody listens to ol' Don. (Except the boodle :-) )

kbert: be wary of madly dashing foxes, like the one that crossed your path. If he was rabid, you'd be in a world of hurt.

bc, on flat spins: Yeah, been there, done that. In a Citabria Belanca. You mean people don't come out of 'em? *now* you tell me......

Boss, BZ on your work in Tx. I *still* think you were crazy to do it, though. Just hope somebody besides the boodle appreciates it as much. One nice thing about being at sea in any kind of rotten weather like this, there is no mud to clean up.

If the climate-forecasters are even sorta right, there will be increasing opportunities for this kind of hurricane-coverage story over the next century, as the climate warms. The WaPo ought to get ahead now, by preparing to support its reporters in the field so that they can cover these stories for extended periods. Just think, if Joel had access to a good-sized boat, he could have stayed positioned off Galveston for weeks, coming ashore to interview the populace, returning to his vessel to recover, file his story, blog, and drink champagne from the private wine-cellar. But wait, you say -- wouldn't a boat be a bad choice during a hurricane? Only at the surface. Dive down a ways, and things get pretty calm. The WaPo needs its own specially-designed sub. Sell or lease duplicate vessels to competing news organizations. I think it's the way to go.

Getting water from air is kinda what my whole career is based on. Mostly using mechanical refrigeration. Occasionally using regenerative desiccants. You have to remove that pesky latent heat of vaporization somehow.

Add a deck-stowed gyrocopter, and you have access to inland regions with poor road access.

Sci.Tim: I did an economic analysis of the Waterpur "water-from-air machine" for home use, including capital cost (two year guarantee period), filter costs and energy costs. I concluded that buying bottled water is more economical at the RDA for human consumption. The only downside is the environmental impact of the plastic bottles, that I recycle. For office, school or military use it may make more economic sense.

I will be happy to accept a contract from the WaPo as a technical consultant. Yellojkt can contribute on climate-control, heat-exchange, and water-distillation/purification systems. Mudge has the naval architecture expertise (admittedly, a little reading may be required to prepare for submarine engineering). RD and Don can help with the gyrocopters (not black, however, if you please), and frostbitten can train the pilot corps. bc and mo can provide on-board networking and communications expertise. I am certain that I am missing many other important contributors -- and as we now know, certainty is what it is all about, leadershipwise.

Sorry, Scottynuke, no nuclear power systems. I think we'll need to stick with photovoltaics and biofuels.

C'mon, kids! Let's build a submarine!

And yello will want it to be a "Yellow Submarine." (toon cootie)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIjZtgyPhS0

I think yellow would be a fine color for a journalistic submarine. High visibility is important when you surface among Coast Guard vessels at a disaster site. Perhaps with violet-colored pinstriping, so it can represent yellow journalism and purple prose.

And, after watching the 'toon characters, it would make an excellent bunker relocation site.

SciTim;

Yellow and purple is NOT the combo you want for a non-nuclear wessel...

*L*

I did some Googling and one brand of these is an Air2Water generator. While they have a lot of mumbo jumbo involving air filters and RO processing, it is a very small air conditioner that catches the dripping condensation. To make 38 liters a day, you are talking about a one-quarter ton capacity unit (residential window units range from 1/2 ton to 2 ton size).

This unit is also probably putting out a lot of heat to the room that also needs to be air-conditioned, thus wasting more energy. I can't imagine this being cheaper or more efficient that other filter/purification systems.

Don't forgot ScienceTim that both bc and Mudge have some limited experience in waste methane conversion as a fuel source. Wouldn't want it to be the main supply, but it never hurts to have a backup.

Howdy y'all. Joel, thank you for the excellent reporting. Also, thank you for the Kit pictures and extras. This is why the Boodle feels so special - after all, anyone can read the Wapo but you give us just that little bit more. I particularly appreciate the ruminant.

I'll provide legal advice associated with the building and use of the submarine. I can also record a nice wake-up song for replay while our journonauts are on duty.

I enjoyed the Chronicle story on Elizabeth Madson, who ceratinly did look fabulous. I glanced down at the first comment and was bemused by the claim that her "children and fools" quote was not in the Bible because it was found in Psalms. Psalms is in my Bible. I guess that person only counts the New Testament.

I dunno, Tim...expensing a U-boat on one's expense account is pretty ballsy.

One might note that a number of South American drug cartels have been building their own "amateur" submarines for drug smuggling purposes (I'm not making this up!), and that anti-drug naval forces are gearing up for anti-sub detection. Of course, there appears to be a pretty high loss rate for these subs, although no one is keeping good records.

Perhaps someone has been watching too many episodes of "Lost" (not me; I only tape the parts that have Evangeline Lilly in them).

As it happens, though, I have considerable expertise in submarine design, although it pretty much is restricted to WWI and earlier. Electric Boat Company (which built almost all our nukes) is/was the sister company of the Elco Company, of which I am the chief historian, and there was lots of overlap in subject matter. I'm about "fair" on WWII, and "not so much" on the post-WWII nukes. Tho' I've seen "The Hunt for Red October" five or six times if that helps (Sarah Palin told me that qualifies as expertise).

Um...Tim, photovoltaics don't work so good under water. I think you'll need to switch to Plan B on that one. I know, I know...in "The Little Mermaid" and "Finding Nemo" it always seems like there's plenty of daylight down there. It's all CGI. Sorry.

Here's my initial proposal:

We want a 1,000 ton chiller, a 2 MW generator, 800 square feet of 8-row finned copper coil and a really big bucket. That should let us "create" about 100,000 gallons of water a day. (Unless I've missed a decimal place, which I often do). We'll add the 1 meg-ohm DI purification system with the RO polisher later.

Boko, too good:

"I've reason to call it rime."

I *could* design one, including a turbo-electric power train, though. Just let me know how many torpedo tubes and deck guns you want. Trouble is, if I *did* design one on behalf of the Boodle, before you know it the damn thing would be all cluttered up with doilies, macassars, anti-macassars, Lladro, and a big Kinkade showing a cottage by moonlight in the wardroom. And there'd be women's lingerie hanging from the periscope, I just know it. Just like the upstairs bathroom at home. And a couple of Mountain Spring air fresheners stuck to the ballast tanks.

Oh, it'd be a nightmare, a nightmare.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLgc2q4LCuE
Dazzle 'em. "Razzle" dazzle camouflage.

http://www.worldwater.com/

For larger volumes, Anon., I would consider WorldWater & Solar Technologies Corp.

I do have experience in sub maintenance and repair. Welded copper-nickel piping and all. Mind you the steels involved were WWII vintage but it's better than nuttin'. One important tip for mudge and yellojkt: do not include in the design a part that is larger than the biggest hatch if said part needs regular maintenance on-shore. I'm just saying.

And flower boxes. There'd be *^%$#&^%flower boxes hanging from the conning tower, filled with delphiniums. Every time you'd try to submerge somebody'd be yelling, "Oh, wait, wait, don't forget to bring in the flower boxes!"

Deck chairs. It would take 20 minutes just to round up and stow the deck chairs, sun louges, chaises, beach towels, sandals, umbrellas, yarn and knitting needles (yes, you, CP!), tubs of coco butter, ice chests, beach bags full of Norah Lofts novels, sunglasses...and that's just the foredeck in front of the 3-inch deck gun.

Somebody would want a little shower stall on deck to rinse off before we crash-dived, so they didn't track sand into the sonar room.

A horror. Nothing short of a horror. It'd be like if Captain Nemo was replaced by Richard Simmons.

http://www.worldwater.com/maxpure/

This system would be useful in Galveston right now.

The Mariners Museum in Newport News has a most excellent exhibit on dazzle camouflage and models that were used to train sailors in enemy/friendly ship ID. They don't seem to have pictures of this exhibit on the web site, but they do have a special "Talk Like A Pirate Day" online class for teachers to use in the classroom.
http://www.mariner.org/educationalad/teachers/elec_classroom.php

Must really take my short attention span away from the boodle and all the places you guys send me off to. No willpower, aarr.

Mudge Couldn't we rig it in a similar fashion to the way the old diesels used to run? Only instead of surfacing to release exhaust, we'd surface to allow the photovoltiacs to charge the batteries that run the motors?

And you've already named our poor little yellow submarine.

Operation Petticoat

;P

McMudge's Navy?

Here are a few diving commands

Tauchen --Dive
Sehror tiefe --persicope depth
Volle fahrt voraus--full speed ahead
Neue tiefe zwei und dreizig meters--new depth thirty-two meters.
Rohr einz, loss --tube one, fire

Vweshlugendesheine Amie shiff gesichted.
(censored) American ship sighted.

Hey, hey, there'll be no volle fahrting aboard *my* sub when we're underwater!

It seems that the front page link goes, not to Joel's article, but to the boodle. Or is that just me?

Brag;

How'd you get Vweshlugendesheine past the Wirty Dird Filter?

:-)

Usually subs that surface to recharge their batteries do so at night, Kerric. Of course, that's wartime conditions. I'm sure the Boodle would want to surface during the afternoon to catch some rays, water the plants, stroll around the deck, play volleyball, etc.

Of course, we'd need to remain surfaced for a couple hundred days to get enough power to run for three or four hours underwater, photovoltaics being what they are.

Rule of thumb: photovoltaics are fine for things that don't move. If they move, you need to go to Plan B. The energy differential between getting something to move and powering something that just sits there like a teenager is tremendous.

Time for an energetic, creative nap (been up since 0400).

zzzzzzzzzzzzz

Ahhh but that's where the biowaste methane powered generator comes into play, Mudge. No volle fahrting, but there would be some kind required.

Fanny bubbles....

Make sure to include the screen door. No submarine is complete without one.

You'd need a WHOLE lotta voles for that, Kerric...

Hey Kerric.... you know.. the golfing is still fine down here in early October... you coming to the Mega BPH?

Sigh

SCC

My 1:14 was supposed to read

Insert poop deck joke here

Carry on

I love it when you guys talk all nautical, and stuff. Makes me feel all squishy inside.

Clearly, I need to do a little shoring up on my reputation. My intention, always and only, was to deploy and employ photovoltaics only during surface operations. Primarily, this will just allow for water purification, ventilation, cooling the wine cellar, powering the network, and operating the stereo. Very slow motoring and station-keeping at the surface also should be possible. Slow motoring will help the crew with trawling for the evening's menu. More power-consumptive operations will require the use of some chemical fuel -- fuel cells, burning biodiesel, what have you. Not my department -- I'm a big-picture guy.

I favor a design rather like the WWII subs, glorified boats with a waterproof roof. Submersible operations for this vehicle will primarily be as a safety measure during rough weather. Most of the news stories will be on the surface.

You had the buffet again, didn't you, Don?

This will be the only submarine in history with windchimes and a hummingbird feeder. I can feel it in my bones.

I wish, TBG but I can't afford a flight. Moreover I haven't bothered to get my passport yet, and it wouldn't arrive in time if I were to get set up for it today. :(

I will come out sometime next year though for sure. Barring the end of the universe, naturally.

mudge,
Not to mention a Llardo display case.

Or antimacassars, Mudge.

Is it morally reprehensible to be happy some people won't vote for Palin because they think this is a bad time for her to seek the VP job, because of her mom obligations at this time? I disagree with the reasoning, but any vote that doesn't go to McCain/Palin is normally something I would rejoice about. I ask because a caller on Talk of the Nation just said that was why she wouldn't vote for Palin. Drat, just when I was feeling pretty comfortable with unrelenting loathing I find myself almost rising in defense.

Apologies if this was covered in a previous boodle-
Idiots Guides Celebrate 15 Years With Publication of "Complete Idiots Guide to the Vice Presidency"
INDIANAPOLIS, Sept. 3 -- Since 1993 millions of "idiots" have
learned how to operate a PC, speak conversational Japanese, gamble like a pro,
understand Islam, make homemade ice cream, install solar power, meditate, play
the harmonica and have amazing s3x. Those subjects, along with the 450 current
titles, comprise The Complete Idiot's Guides line of books, now celebrating
its 15th anniversary and announcing the newest title-the Complete Idiots Guide to the Vice Presidency of the United States.

Ok, I made that hed and the last line up, but I bet there is such a thing and at least some McCain operatives are calling it just that.

Well, there is a complete idiot's guide american gonvernment, and american history, and leadership...etc.

My favorite is 'The Complete Idiot's Guide to the PC'

It's the thinnest of all the guides. It has no table of contents. No index. In fact, between the covers is a single page with eight words: Do not be an Idiot! Buy a Mac.

We were taking pictures of our executive editor for some marketing stuff (we publish investment newsletters) and realized halfway through that there was a copy of "Investing for Dummies" sitting on his desk in clear view in the pictures.

It was one of many books sent to us for review and at some point he'd just thrown it on his desk and forgotten about it.

Today's Borowitz Report...

McCain Attacks Washington, Republicans, Old White Men with White Hair
Most Ironic Speech to Date, Experts Say

In what some political observers are calling his most ironic speech of the 2008 campaign, GOP presidential nominee John McCain today lashed out at Washington, the Republican Party and a group of insiders he called "old white men with white hair."

"It's time to take our country back," Sen. McCain told his audience in Dayton, Ohio. "It's time to send a message to those in power - those Republicans in Washington, those old white men with their combed-over white hair."

Sen. McCain went on to attack the power elite on Wall Street, calling them "wealthy plutocrats with private jets and too many houses to keep track of."

"The time has come to say enough is enough to those rich old white men," he said. "And the same goes to their zombie-like trophy wives who plaster their makeup on like trollops."

Responding to the nation's economic turmoil, Sen. McCain said that as President he would create millions of jobs "by putting Americans to work making negative ads."

"We no longer lead the world in manufacturing cars, steel, or computers," Sen. McCain said. "But our negative ad industry is second to none."

Ah, the sweet dulcet sounds of the German language. Actually, one of my favorite Deutsch terms can be used to describe not only the current (such as it is) administration but also the Republican wannabes this year: *aufgestelte mausdreck*. Just makes me giggle all over. You know?

And now, if Ivansmom *really* wants to know ('cause I don't have to translate for her), I'm gonna plunge back into a study of laches. As in: if you wait too long to do something about it, you're SOL. And, I don't mean the test in Virginia, either. You know.

Frosti: To balance the wrong reason to not vote for Palin with a counterpoint, I spent two hours on the phone yesterday with a lady friend in Cedar Key giving me all the reasons she would vote for McCain/Palin.

My friend is an airhead blond who looks something like Cindy McCain (although she is closer to John McCain's age, but well maintained) She recited all the usual campaign rhetoric as if she was reading from a brochure. It sounded suspiciously canned, she's not usually that articulate.

I countered each item with the truth and my friend began to change her tune by explaining why she would not vote for Obama, ranging from no military service to no management experience, etc.. I countered those arguments as well, until she finally said in exasperation: "Well, there's no way I could vote for a black man." I was stunned by what was clearly her real reason for supporting the Republican ticket.

I told her that bigotry was the wrong reason to vote for McCain/Palin, but she was adamant. So I suggested she vote for Ralph Nader, the other white man in the campaign. I was quietly very angry.

I told another friend about it this morning, I was still seething, and she said: "Im surprised you didn't already know that that airhead is a prejudiced bltch. And that most of the people in Cedar Key agree with her."

I guess it takes an election like this one to find out how your friends really think.

Only time for drive-by Boodling today.

Great piece today, Joel (And nice to see our old WaPo radio buddy len in here: Hey, Len, I hope you're relaxing and enjoying some of the good life. You deserve it.). Reminds me of the time we had a tornado in the old neighborhood back in '99, and lost power for a week. Had to eat all of the steaks and things from our neighbors' freezers (what we couldn't pack into my freezers - yes, I was running off of a generator, thanks). No a/c, but filet mignon every night. Alas, Babylon.

I'm game for running a sub, but you know me - why go through all the trouble of building one when navies around the world have decommissioned 'em by the dozens? From old boomers to attack subs to little surveillance boats and spy subs and even those used by drug runners to slip into the southern US are all cheap and available these days.

Pick the hull you want, and we can develop a power plant to match. Want to run one on biodiesel? Can do! Will Art Arfons' estate get upset if we call it the "Green Monster?"

bc

One last thing - and please excuse me if soneone mentioned this before - but it looks to me like they've taken a direct photo of a gas-giant planet orbiting another star (taken from one of the scopes in Mauna Kea, of course):

http://www.gemini.edu/node/11126

A picture of a planet 500 light years away.
Astonishing.

bc

I originally thought we'd need a boomer for a sub, but I don't think we do.

Captian Mudge-o's organ takes up far less room than you might think. Just need to make sure the bulkhead doors are shut tight when he decides to solo - and you do *not* want to be in there when he's playing it.

"Twenty Thousand Words Under the Sea," perhaps?

bc

I can think of a certain sports venue that would object strenuously, bc. :-)

And more in bc's wheelhouse (as it were):

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/autos/0809/gallery.gm_volt_reveal/index.html?cnn=yes

:-)

I have forwarded that Gemini press release to interested parties...

Scottynuke, I don't think they started calling that big old wall at Fenway the Green Monster until after Arfons started using that name in the early 50s.

I could be wrong though.

bc

Forget the biodiesel option, bc. I'm not getting on a submarine that smells like a french fry. I have enough food issues and weight management problems as it is.

FTB, as I'm sure you and Ivansmom know, laches is a form of estoppel -- one of my all-time favorite words and one I've been dying for MONTHS to work into a coherent sentence. The chance doesn't come along very often, yanno. And as we usded to say back in the 1300s, "Vigilantibus non dormientibus æquitas subvenit." Told that to Henry IV one time, and he told me, "Mudge, go stuff a sock in it."

Henry had issues.

Uh, bc, I kinda thought...um...well... the size of my organ and how well I play it solo were topics off limits for the Boodle, yanno? Jeez, gimme a break here, will ya?

Cripes, Evangeline Lilly's *never* gonna return my phone calls now.

I would recommend locking the door whenever playing your organ solo. Parents just don't knock like they should.

And that planet is mighty bright for something about 1/20th of an inch in diameter. Or is this the set design for the next Spinal Tap tour?

Once again, beaten to a better punchline by 'mudge.

God loves us so much more than we can imagine through Him that died for all, Jesus Christ.

Afternoon, friends. I read the kit, and looked at the pictures, and it's all, excellent, JA. And the story of the lady with the heels and strapless dress is funny, warm, and like a breath of fresh air considering the situation. I guess she said just because the weather is bad doesn't mean one has to dress that way. I love that bag she's carrying. And, as always your pictures really do tell the story. Great kit, and glad you're back home.

Loomis, glad you made it back safe and sound. I hope your neighbors in Texas can get back to their lives real soon. And as always I will keep all in my prayers.

My feelings are a little tender this morning. I know Christ will work it out for me, so I'm hanging on to that. The lady that helps me with the after school program came by, and we got the books together. We should be ready Thursday.

My daughter came by, and she told me the g-girl was so tired yesterday, she fell asleep at the table during the evening meal. She also told me that the teacher says the only problem she has with the g-girl is talking. And you will never guess why she's talking. She trying to show the kids next to her how to do their work. What the colors are and all that. I told my daughter, she's been hanging around me too long.

My daughter-in-law and my grandsons are suppose to come this weekend. This will be a first. I'm truly puzzled by this announcement, but hope she does come, as well as my grandsons.

Martooni, Slyness, Scotty, Mudge, and all, I hope the day is good for all of you. It is gray and cloudy here, and a tad chilly, but I think that is great.

Got to go check on my dad.

Right-o, Cap'n!

Aye, mum's the word.

Oh, and *Tim, glad to oblige ye!

(Warming up for Talk Like a Pirate Day.)

bc

You can see what time slot I'm in, still talking "morning".

Jack, meant to say I hope you and your brother beat whatever is trying to keep you down. I hope his outcome is good, as well as yours. You're a good brother. I'll say a prayer.

I hope someone steered Ms. Madson over to Mr. Lopez at some point.

I mean, who wouldn't want to enjoy a dinner of steak and fine red wine with a lady of such style and spirit?

bc

I am writing to you gentlemen (and ladies) regarding your ambitious yet, in my humble view, completely attainable, goal of constructing a sub-surfacial-traveling powered ship, rumours of which have been circulating in the pubs back of J. street since Thursday last.

Mr. Fulton of the Colonies in particular has been noted to enthuse over your plans quite openly, although I have reproached him privately as I have some reason to believe your Party has taken some pains to keep this matter privy. Be that as it may, I found myself unable to stop thinking about your astounding Conceptions, and in a moment of great lucidity last evening a great Idea, relating to the work to which I have been dedicated since devouring both the works of Mr. Franklin and certain sensational and lurid broadsheets of unknown author but rumoured to be of Maltese origin, which I hastily sought out at the home of M. and read last week, and the events I shall recount to you below, struck me with great forcefulness.

As I am sure you have been following the tale of Mr. Fulton's ruination and the splintering of the hull timbers and consequent sinking of his experimental vesssel due to the Unsustainable weight of the Watt engine (and I find it a great Disaster, although I cannot help but note that I have been recorded as warning him of this very hazard and that it will ever be an Impossibility for the Watt device ever being of use at Sea, needing a Stone foundation for anchorage on Land).

For I have of late found what I reckon to be, (and I hurry to assure you I have been performing the most controlled experiments in my laboratory, outfitted by a certain Gentlemen B. of the Royal Society who wish to remain uninvolved at this time, for reasons I will make clear forthwith,) a great source of rotary Power.

If you follow the proceedings of the Society I am sure you recall the mention of the Device to Alert the Living of the Revivification of the Thought-to-have Passed. Humility indicates you might not have connected this modest invention with myself, but I am indeed its Inventor. In any case, it is but a simple thing to affix a strike bar in the coffin and a bell and ringer above ground. I was observing the Groundkeepers at Stridingmore Cemetary last Monday evening a fortnight ago, ensuring their proper training, and whilst lecturing the two heard an unusual whirring noise emerging from one of the coffins awaiting burial the following morning. To my chagrin, the actual bell-alarum was not affected, but in our excitement, we flung open the coffin and stood stupified as we witnessed the recently departed, a Mr. Barry Morris Goldwater, spinning rapidly an inch above the bottom of the coffin!

While I have yet to account for this phenomenon, I transported the fellow's remains to my laboratory and with a series of leather belts and sheaves have driven an Archimedes pump uninterrupted for the last 12 days, producing the amount of 7.2 Horse Power. With proper formalin on hand, a Leyden Jar, and the weight of both the poor deceased Mr. Goldwater and the apparatus attached not exceeding the weight of just over twenty stone, I think I have found The Engine which your Company seeks.

Yr. Humble Servant,
Dr. Prichard Mitford
Umper ST. LONDON

frostbitten: //Is it morally reprehensible to be happy some people won't vote for Palin because they think this is a bad time for her to seek the VP job, because of her mom obligations at this time?//

Rejoice. The end result is the same, you can't legislate how people think!

frostbitten: //Is it morally reprehensible to be happy some people won't vote for Palin because they think this is a bad time for her to seek the VP job, because of her mom obligations at this time?//

Rejoice. The end result is the same, you can't legislate how people think!

That was me. Twice.

ROTFLMAO.

I love this place.

Shiloh... I guess none of us can help our friends who are bigots. That hurts. I hope we can get past this. I believe with all my heart that the man who will serve our country best right now is Barack Obama and never gave any thought as to what color or shade he is.

At least your friend (should I just say acquaintance?) was honest enough with you to keep you from thinking you could try to change her mind. Too bad, too, since you say the town you live in has set aside racism enough to elect a black mayor time and again.

For those of us who think we may have a chance to talk someone out of voting for McCain/Palin, here something a friend sent me today. I forwarded it on only to find it's making the rounds right now. Sorry it's so long, but here it is; I love it...

===============

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.....

* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."

* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience..

* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.

* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

* If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

* If , while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America 's.

* If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA , your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now.

===============

Reminds me of my college days reading "The Oyster."

TBG -- I knew you'd post it here. Good for you.

*holding nose (not in regard to anyone (mostly) in my boodle-family) and going back under.* *glub* *glub*

If I only had an agent. If only I'd do my editing BEFORE I posted...

TBG, ftb, that's good. I hadn't seen that yet. Also love Andy Borowitz.

I ran across a bit of a Palin biography while channel surfing over the weekend, and it turns out that the first college she attended was in Hawaii. Thought that was interesting, as I'm a bit curious about how much of the US she's visited. Also an interesting intersection with Obama's background. Wikipedia says the college was Hawaii Pacific U, with 9000 students - bigger than Wasilla.

Water Missions International

These folks get water recovery systems of their own design to disaster areas. From right here in Charleston, SC.

http://www.watermissions.org/

DLD

Hey Boss, great story. And no, being in post-hurrican Galveston isn't like camping at all. When you're camping you can go into the woods to, you know, "number two." It's a big difference, believe you me!

And, by the way, the post by "Doctor Prichard Mitford" was brilliant. Bravo!

Doctor Pritchard Mitford, upon receiving word of your grand invention from a M. Igor in charge of ship-building, I hastened to pen this suggestion that you also address a missive about your newly found rotary power source to some conservative columnists extant in America. You may learn much to your advantage about maintaining the aforedescribed power source.

Yours truly,
WILBROD

Founding (and only) member of the International Society of Gnomes.

Yes, I liked that missive a lot as well.

Doctor Prichard Mitford (ahem)-

I am of great excitement at hearing of your discovery and subsquent experimentation.

Might I enquire as to exactly how you are taking the rotary drive off of the Deceased to your experimental apparatus? One would imagine the most efficient manner would be from a splined crankshaft driven up along the centerline of the axis of rotation.

However, the installation of such a cranksaft would pose a curious yet unsavory challenge, requiring a steady hand.

And, possibly, a sledgehammer.

Yrs,
Wily Hands, Esg.

* If , while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

Yes. You are responsible. Directly responsible.

Check this out, it's pretty funny (ripped off from Gene's chat today). The Sara Palin Baby Name Generator: http://personal-space.com/script/script.php

My name is Mangle Blue Palin. Alohaspouse is Spackle Camshaft Palin.

Try this out, it's pretty funny. The Sara Palin Baby Name Generator: http://personal-space.com/script/script.php

My name would be Mangle Blue Palin.

Har! Never mind italics, we need a font that includes the long s (effential for 18th-century typefetting). Wonderful, Dr. Pritchard Mitford!

I am a strong advocate of early, and comprehensive, sex education. However, the implication that Bristol is pregnant because she didn't have adequate knowledge about sex and contraception, or access to contraception, is probably a bunch of moose hockey. The single greatest predictor of teen pregnancy is the level of educational aspiration in the teen girl. Girls who are goal directed toward higher ed and a career delay fecundity-regardless of ethnicity, income level, or even the country in which they live. Encouraging all girls to go to college is no substitute for contraceptive access, but without it the contraceptives often go unused. So, if you have to look at Palin's background for reasons her daughter is unwed and pregnant at 17 it's probably more her own lackluster education and the first dude's not attending college that did the trick, helped along with an assist from the anti-sex ed position.

Joel got a nice mention in Gene W's chat:

Los Angeles, Calif.: Why is your friend Joel Achenbach reporting on Hurricane Ike in Texas? He's doing a great job, but it seems a bit out of his usual job description.

washingtonpost.com: After Ike, a Test of Endurance, (Post, Sept. 16)

Gene Weingarten: Secret fact, unknown to many: Joel is a great reporter. Parachute him into a situation, he produces magnificent things on deadline.

Doctor Mitford

I am most intrigued by the rotary power source described in your missive. I have but two thoughts on this grand acheivement. The initial thought was brilliant! The latter came upon pondering this device further, was, 'What does one do to disguise the scent?'

Awaiting reply towards my latter thought.

Cappy Malodorant.

Doctor Mitford

I am most intrigued by the rotary power source described in your missive. I have but two thoughts on this grand acheivement. The initial thought was brilliant! The latter came upon pondering this device further, was, 'What does one do to disguise the scent?'

Awaiting reply towards my latter thought.

Cappy Malodorant.

Alas, a great calamity has ensued since I penned my missive. Pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep! Pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep!! The poor fellow began emitting a faint vapor. I began fingering delicately my row of glistening valves. “Give me a dram of whale oil!” I snapped to Igor. But it was too late. The leathern belts alike began to ignite, and the Archimedes pump, off centered, began to moan as well in mechanical distress.

Suffice it to say the ensuing fire engulfed my laboratory, I am ruined, Igor has left my employ, and the entire affair has come off disastrously. I have repaired to the Sloth and Pennywhistle to lick my wounds, and have acquired passage to Alaska. I leave at dawn.
Regretfully,and respectfully,
Mitford

I have apparently, while employing my neo-victorian terminology, and stealing ever so little from my Master, Mr, James Thurber, a bit of rare wordplay, caused the comment-bot to go into an unrecoverable loop in another window. We will see, comment-bot, we will see.

Bears are coming back. So be nice to them.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/16/grizzly.bears.montana.ap/index.html

"Wesson Scalper Palin"

That could work.

I dunno, RDP, those vegetable oil bottles aren't that hard to scalp...

And jeeeeeeeeeeeeeezypeezy do I need these laughs tonight.

:-)

Hehehehe. Smoke Strapon.

Of course, a friend sent me a generator last week, and I was (wait for it):

Booby Pottysprinkles

Charcoal Sniper Palin

My Palin baby name is most appropriate, when read as verbs it describes what I'm sometimes driven to contemplate-
Spear Slap

I'm curious... do we know Palin's kids' middle names?

Froth Moonshine...

Which is really funny, come to think of it.

:-)

AZBlueHen... if you see this, will you please email me at boodler [at] mac [dot] com?

THANKS!

Tatsuya Ishida has gone too far this time
http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=2933

... I hope nobody asked Gene what would happen if they forgot the parachute for Joel.

Over 1/5 of the fresh water in the world is in the Great Lakes-- and polluted.

http://wcco.com/local/obama.trust.great.2.818783.html

Great link Wilbrod, as someome born and raised on the shores of one of the great lakes I can only say it is needed. The lakes are an incredible resource to both nations in a multitude of ways.

We need to start doing more on this side of the border as well, the Great Lakes Cities Initiative is working this area as well.

http://www.glslcities.org/

Tonight is my late night; lots of sit around and wait.

Did y'all see this Richard Cohen piece called "The Ugly New McCain" ?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/15/AR2008091502406.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

A cousin who never forwards anything sent me a chain e-mail connected with this effort
http://womenagainstsarahpalin.blogspot.com/
Add your own comments via e-mail to
womensaynopalin at gmail dot com

I gotta copy that comparison you posted this afternoon, TBG. I also have to quit looking at polls, it just drives me crazy.

Frosti, the women of America will be the ones who defeat McCain/Palin.

I see the Times of London has blogged about the Palin name generator. At least the Brits have a sense of humor (humour).

Miracle at Lehman Brothers

http://cgi.ebay.com/Lehman-Brothers-Bear-Stearns-Initials-on-my-TOAST-F-B_W0QQitemZ180289859578QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item180289859578&_trkparms=72%3A1163%7C39%3A1%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C240%3A1318&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14

Dilbert creator Scott Adams asked 500 economists which presidential candidate would be better for our economy. The results aren't very surprising, but interesting nonetheless...

http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/dilbert_survey_of_economists/

Question for bc and any other motorheads among the Boodle:

When new two years ago, my wife's car got about 25, 26 mpg. About six months ago, she switched to Gas Station X -- and discovered over a few weeks that her mileage dropped to about 22 mpg. Two weeks ago she switched to Gas Station Y, and her mileage went back up to 25 or 26 mpg.

So here's the question: could there be a differential in the gas between the two stations? (Both 87 octane, according to the labeling.)

Mudge-my first guess would be that since her brand switching coincides with the spring/fall seasons she may have been getting different seasonal formulations at the two stations. Not sure what the winter blend is like in the DC area, but my guess is that it is at least a little different from summer and the addition of butanol is creating the decrease in mileage. BTW octane shouldn't have any affect on mileage.

Well mudge, gasoline is a funny fuel. It's a wide spectrum product that is notoriously difficult to regulate efficiently. I had once had a (carburated)a car with a strong dislike of the dominating gas distributor in Quebec city(only refinery within a 200km radius). I had to go with "imported" gas unless I wanted the car to stall at the most ackward moment. One frequent cause of low fuel efficiency, in the US at least, is that the high vapour pressure components, such as propane, butane and the like are allowed in too high quantity in the gasoline delivered to the gas station but don't make it to the injection point. The light fractions evaporates in hot weather. The volume sold is not temperature corrected in the US so it is advantageous to sell a product at 78F that was bought at 60F, despite the vapour loss.
Or it's just your wife's car, just like my dear departed 78 Dodge Aspen couldn't satnd the golden eagle gas, can't stomach the gas from X.

Check to see if Gas Station X has ethanol in its blend, Mudge. bc will have to weigh in, but I think it has less energy than 100 gasoline.

Listening to Barton Gellman on Fresh Air, it's available online here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13

SCC 100% gasoline.

In the work-up to Talking-Like-a-Pirate day, here's a real pirate story. I just wish more pirate reached for their weapons.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4765041.ece

Mudge, short answer: Yes, there can be significant differences in gasoline quality that can affect performance and economy.

A friend of mine used to work in the dyno rooms of one of the big 3, and they used to test gasoline samples from all over the country all the time so they could develop electronic engine controls able to compensate for varying gasoline quality availble to consumers.

And they found that the name brand gas stations had higher quality fuels of all grades and octane levels and were of that quality consistently across the country as compared to independent operators. With gasoline, as with anything else, you get what you pay for.

BTW, they also found that name brand high octane fuel was usually worth the extra money over time in increased fuel mileage and reduced repair and mantenance (due to less contamination from debris and other impurities).

OK, not so brief, but there it is.

bc

All gasoline has ethanol in it, hence the big corn rush. Winter gas has more butane and propane in it as permitted by local regs. If the temperaturature is going up too much that stuff evaporates. The other thing is thermal expansion. US federal law allows sale at uncorrected delivery temperature. In the summer, gasoline delivered from the truck's cargo tank at 58-60F could be sold a few days later at 78-80F, after significant expansion without any penalty. And gasoline's thermal coefficient's of expansion is pretty high. Evaporation of light fractions is more of a problem for us Northerners. The very light fractions are not permitted in Southern gas.
Ethanol, schmethanol, it burns as well as the rest. No impact on octane rating but to raise it.

That's quite a story, shrieking! Thanks for linking.

Did you see this Times blog link on that page?

"Sarah Palin and the man who wanted Robert Kennedy dead"

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/09/when-sarah-pali.html

Boy you're fast TBG. Glad I refreshed before posting. Who is vetting the speeches?

Maybe she'll quote Pat Buchanan next.

It's either madness in the method, or method to the madness.

Thanks for all of the well wishes. My bro is home and beginning to recover. He's been walking about since yesterday evening, and will be back to a normal physical regimen in about a month. The pathology report will follow late this week, along with a preliminary protocol to put his condition, hopefully, into remission. My sister is coming to stay with him for the balance of the week. Right now, life is good.

Hi, all. TBG, I saw that RFK article in Huffington this morning, and the Times story fills it out a little. The thing is (hate defending her) I thought we were informed that Palin didn't write her own speech? She should have vetted it a little, though.

Looking up a little above I noticed Mudge's wife's car mileage - could it be the A/C? I get much worse mileage when I run the air conditioner. I see a LOT more people with open windows this summer, too.

Yes, I do think it's a non-issue, although I am sure RFK Jr. has extremely strong feelings about the said author being quoted in a flattering light.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline
Gasoline being a "hot" topic, recommend verification of numbers. Mid-article, there is a section on camparative energies. Ethanol is low power, low mileage fuel.

I'm just a linkin' fool tonight, ain't I? Here's a good column from Chicago today (oops... yesterday).

Damn that liberal media for pointing out nasty things like cheating...

=====

Let the record show McCain's cheating past
Voters entitled to know the good, bad and ugly

BY MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times Columnist

Suppose Barack Obama had dumped a crippled wife and married a beer heiress one month after the divorce.

Do you really think he wouldn't have been tripped up by such a scandalous past?

The Republicans would have had a field day mocking his character.

But John McCain's tawdry personal history is rarely mentioned...

http://www.suntimes.com/news/mitchell/1165574,CST-NWS-mitch16.article

But TBG, don't you know? John McCain spent 5.5 years without any heiresses at all. Is that justice?

I have no sympathy for Palin on the quotation issue, and I don't forgive her because she didn't write her own speech. A potential President should be good enough at speaking off the cuff that speech-writers should be a mere convenience. As to the quotation itself -- her argument for the benefits of a small-town person, with small-town values, is proof by authority ("I say it, therefore it is true"). She quotes this fellow on the subject of Truman to bolster her claim, wrapping herself in some of the authority that comes from the applicability of a shopworn phrase. It turns out that she has claimed some of the authority of a scumbag. She wanted that authority when she thought it was positive -- she should have to take what she gets when it turns out otherwise.

Does anyone else think the guy in the top picture of this Kit looks like he's hailing a cab?

Almost time to go home. Just putting the newsletter to bed. About time for me to head there, too.

Frostbitten,
Accordion suits McCain who is b(el)lowing a lot of hot air these days...and yagottadmit, it terminally uncool. I think you'll have to fold on this one.
*ducking*
http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=2933
http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=831

Backboodling was extra fun today; thanks!

Strange, I thought Frostbitten was objecting to Barackstar.... call me crazy. But maybe it was the insult to the noble accordion that has Frostbitten all umbraged.

I'm up with a sore throat.

USGS has post-Ike oblique aerial photography for the coast, findable via NWS-Houston. The photos are inserted into Google Earth.

I was pleased to see lots of green trees in Galveston. Today's Houston Chronicle report from Galveston is terribly discouraging and there's severe flood damage, but assuming people had flood insurance (a bad assumption), I bet restoration will go pretty well. Must be a huge opportunity for drywall and kitchen cabinet suppliers.

Bonjour le Boodle!

Early take off this morn.
Amid economic chaos, watching the Boodle's six o'clock.

As the 22 or more NATO ambassadors meet in Georgia, Ukraine government collapses. What a haha moment for Moscow.

Mornin' everybody...

Stupid Ike found his way to Ohio Sunday and thought it would be fun to blow our trees and power lines down. Sustained winds in the 40mph range, gusts up to 70mph. Four dead. Two million without electricity.

We expect the occasional tornado here, but hurricanes? What's next? A typhoon imported from China? A waterspout in a cornfield?

Power was out at our place for about 24 hours and internet access just came back on sometime in the middle of last night (if you ever want to drive an information junkie nuts...). Still quite a few people around here without power and many won't have it until Sunday. They're still clearing fallen trees trying to get all the roads reopened.

I guess we were lucky here at The House of "M". A few small downed branches, but no damage to speak of.

Anyway... I'm *very* glad to be back online and have the world at my fingertips again. Another day or two and I would have had to be institutionalized.

Now to get another mug of wake up and attempt to catch up with the world...

Peace out :-)

It's maddening that the photos on this blog are all overexposed or undersaturated. The technical description of the problem sadly eludes me. The writing is obviously sharp as hell, but I feel like I have RP when I look at the haloes around bright objects. Perhaps the "kit" could include a lens upgrade?

Good morning, you all.

Dave, take zinc, my husband is using Cold-ease for his sore throat, he thinks it helps. Yes, we all know the marvelous grapefruit from your area. I think you must be the #1 green person on the boodle.

RD, I knew you were in Fairfax, just wondered ifyou were working closeby. Has your Mama taken her wonderful trip, yet?

Martooni, hope you were able to find hot coffee somewhere during your power outage/outrage. A morning without coffee is rough.

Will go back to editorials, now. For some reason the one on Ike was inaccessible past the lead sentence for my laptop.

SCC: whole sentence!! Should be:

For some reason, the one on Ike was inaccessible for my laptop. (less is more)

I believe Mudge mentioned drug carrying submarines yesterday, this is one of the first headlines to catch my eyes this morning.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080917.wsubdrugs0917/BNStory/International/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20080917.wsubdrugs0917

Forgot to say morning all, now I have this ueless bit of fun,

The S.S. Minnow lives - apparently now a cruise boat in BC

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080917.wvgilligan0917/VideoStory/VideoLineup/News

Sorry for the tune cootie and any really bad typos don't have my glasses on at the momemnt

Morning all;

A wonderful brisk start to the day! Too bad it includes work... *SIGH*

*par-for-the-course Grover waves* :-)

Hi VL! Yes indeed. They are back now and had a great time. Now my mom's challenge is creating the Ultimate Vacation Photo-Album.

Ever wonder what the current crop of presidential aspirants would look like as Damon Runyon characters? Me neither. But a throw-away line in Maureen Dowd's column today had me up late last night photoshopping away.

http://dowdreport.blogspot.com/2008/09/maureen-among-moose.html

I think they all came out good, but Hillary looks particularly sunny as Miss Adelaide. Not that Palin as Sergeant Sarah Brown is bad either.

Here is a video clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A1HWEub0hg

Maureen went to Alaska to interview Wal-Mart moms and coffee shop managers in Wasilla as well as a few religious zealots.

The column comes off a tad condescending but pack a brutal punch.

Nice column on Wall Street by Samuelson.

He wrote the book, ya know.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/16/AR2008091602877.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Big article in WaPo today on the new head of the Smithsonian who came from some podunk college with an insect for a mascot.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/16/AR2008091603637.html

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=%7B500B803E%2D11D1%2D4584%2D8D66%2D85E26BC9EA66%7D&siteid=rss

This is for CP and other AIG policyholders.

Morning, all. I missed dawn patrol altogether, dunno why I overslept so long. Maybe I'm missing the early morning light of summer.

RD, I read Samuelson first thing. I like how he makes financial issues understandable for English majors. BofA's purchase of Merrill Lynch will make for interesting times in this town. The husband of a former colleague was laid off by BofA earlier in the summer. Last I heard, he hadn't found another job. I think he was in investment banking. It makes me wonder.

Yello, you're being silly. That's okay, though.

How to prepare moose nose - and other tips for adventurous diners.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/dining/17moose.html

'Morning, Boodle. Yes, I missed morning muster, too. #3dottir overslept, had to be schlepped to the bus, etc.

dmd, I wasn't kidding about those drug submarines. Don and I have been following those stories for a while. I'm not normally very bloody-minded, but I'm not sure I wouldn't want to adopt a "sink on sight" policy in international waters, and never mind arresting anybody inside. 37 bales of cocaine worth $187 million. Jeez.

What are we gonna do with the four sub crewmen we arrested? What *should* we do with them? Not only do I not know, I don't even have a serious, satisfactory suggestion.

Keelhauling comes to mind. Or is that out of fashion? With the torture aficionados we have in the DoJ, it's hard to keep up with the trends.

'Mudge, if they're such incompetents that we caught 'em, I say give 'em back and let 'em do it again so we can catch another sub...

:-)

"Invoking extraordinary powers granted after 1929 stock market crash, government seizes control of insurance giant, citing firm's reach."

-David S. Hilzenrath and Glenn Kessler
WaPo front page story lead line.

Invoking 1929 crash does nothing for investor confidence.

Mudge the main problem with a sink on sight policy towards the drug subs as I see it is that it doesn't guarantee the destruction of the illegal goods. They drugs that are being hauled are kept in water tight wrap. There would still be the chance of a salvage of the drugs by the dealers/kingpins.

Life's beginning to come back to some semblance of normal--for us. Cut the front lawn yesterday and cleaned the walkways, gutter and driveway. Got my first chance to yammer with a neighbor in the morning about the storm impacts here. She said the only fallout from Ike was a sprinkle of rain (about .04 inches of rain, from what I can discern from the paper, doing a little math) and a 100-degree day on Saturday since we were obviously on the subsiding-air side of the storm.

Yesterday afternoon, got my broken eyelglasses fixed (a screw was stripped and a lens fell out when I was unpacking my suitcase, perhaps from too much pressure put on the frames when I was trying to sleep across the seats of the plane), then on to Costco for a loooong shopping trip.

Then, when Loomispouse got home, we trimmed trees until sundown, since twice a year the City Of San Antonio offers free curbside brush and large-objects pick-up. Garbage collectors are outside now as I type--although residents were supposed to have been ready with their items on Monday morning, but it takes a while to get to all the many neighborhoods in town.

However, still lots of local coverage on TV and in the local paper about Hurricane Ike and its aftermath. Today, a story about how the evacuees locally were (or are) having great difficulty getting a change of clothes.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/Inability_to_get_clothing_upsets_evacuees.html

A front-page story here included Houston Mayor Bill Write's wrath toward FEMA. Wonder if historian/author Doug Brinkley will be tempted to write a second hurricane book since he teaches at Rice? Evacuees still in many Texas state park campgrounds, some have attempted to head home.

Glad we anticipated the storm and its aftermath and changed our flight plans on Wednesday afternoon from Marriott's Timber Lodge in South Lake Tahoe. We were originally scheduled to fly out of Sacramento on Friday at noon, and tried to get the same noon flight out of Sacramento on Continental on Sunday or Monday. Changing the reservation and flying on either of those days would have cost an additional $177 each. Catching the red-eye at midnight on Sunday was just luck as that put our arrival in Houston to Monday morning, when Bush Intercontinental Airport had just reopened. If we had booked the Sunday flight, we would have been SOL. On Monday morning as we were wandering from the E gates to the C gates, we did see a number of people wearing gear that said "Raleigh North Caroline Search and Rescue" checking in to board a plane for home--those bright yellow jackets a grim reminder of what had taken place not far from the airport.

Good morning, all.

Anonymous, in the financial services industry, there's been talk of 1929 for the past six months.

And discussion of the Reagan Administration's deregulation policies and actions of the 1980s, too.

Personally, I think I could use a sub to recover my 401k and other financial instruments. Actually, I'd probably need to get the Trieste out of mothballs and convert her to a salvage bathyscaphe if I want to assess the debris field of my financial future.

bc

Scotty, I don't think we know if they were incompetent, or if we (our Coast Guard) is that good, or if there was a major element of dumb luck involved. We don't have a good way of assessing the ratio of subs we catch to subs we miss (or if the CG does know, they probably aren't saying).

I don't know very much maritime law, and what little I do know concerns rescuing people and salvaging ships flying national glags, etc. I have no idea whatsoever what int'l maritime law is re: drug smugglers, nor do I have any idea what our own "rules of engagement" are. I know how our CG operates when it searches for and finds various refuggees on rafts trying to escape from Cuba, and that's fine...but this is clearly a much different case.

It is a foreign vessel, but one NOT flying the flag of some other country. So what is it, what is its legal status? It is basically unarmed, so it has no status as any sort of "combat" vessel, and that makes it different from a "pirate" vessel (yes, there are still "pirates" in the world) which by definition has aggressive, violent intent and practice.

Further, there may be no evidence aboard where the sub was headed. Sure, we "assume" it was headed here, but an assumption like that would have no standing in a court of law. Further, if the sub's intent was to offload beyond the 12-mile limit, what then? (Rumrunners did this all the time during Prohibition.)

The twelve-mile limit was made irrelevant quite some time ago. The U.S. policy is for a long time now to reserve the right to board any vessel on the open seas, diplomatic protests are the only thing to stand in the way. In other words, preemption rules the day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSuT5zN2SPI

I recommend that you save this lengthy (31") speech by Obama at the Cooper Union 6 months ago to listen to in your available time.

It clearly shows that Obama has a grasp of our economy that eludes the present administration and McCain's record. It is not a stump speech, but one that defines his view on the economy and the crisis instant. The six principles he iterates are why I have confidence in an OBAMA administration.

I say we use any captured contraband as ballast in the AchenSub. Plus it could serve as fuel for the GTP recon flights.

Jumper wrote "...preemption rules the day."

That encapsulates the essence of the "Bush Doctrine" as understood by most knowledgeable Americans, but not a certain VP candidate.

Yes, I understand that, Jumper, but "right to board" is different from "right to seize." And what charges can/may/should be brought against the crew?

"Right to board" is a respected concept of national self-defense and maritime law, been around a long time. It's what happens afterward that is unclear to me. Presumably, there is/would be no "diplomatic protest," since one assumes the host nation (Columbia, or whatever country of origin it might be) would not claim soverignty over the sub.

What about the nationalities of the crew? Just because the sub itself was built in X country and sailed from there (or maybe to sailed from Y country) doesn't mean the crew were from that country. Suppose they refuse to identify themselves and what nationality they are?

In other words, what is the legal status of an unarmed, unidentified noncombatant person seized in international waters, with no evidence of destination? (And one who, virtually by definition, can*not* be considered a terrorist or other national security risk?)

Here's an even tougher one: suppose we had spotted and stopped such a sub while it was headed southbound (homeward) and was empty? (One assumes a deal of this sort might not be a "cash-and-carry" operation; there's no particular reason to assume the $187 million is/was aboard. Would *you* let four crewmen bring back that kind of money on a sub?)

Suppose we *did* find a large amount of cash, or bearer bonds, or diamonds, or whatever aboard? (And nothing else incriminating or illegal.)

Shiloh - Try reading and watching this for a reason to have serious reservations about Palin. http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/9/13/1538/09770

I have been alerted to the Sports Illustrated Sports Kid of the Year election. Normally not my bag, but for two things:

(1) One of the candidate kids is a fencer.
(2) The ScienceGrandpa is her coach.

So, head off to http://www.sikids.com/sportskid/thankyou.html and vote for KH, the fencer (bottom left). Right now, she stands to be eliminated in the next round, which will only keep the top 6 vote-getters (she is #7). We can't have that! It turns out that you may, in fact, vote as often as you like. An open embrace of rigged elections -- who'd a thunk it?

Financials fall on trio of tribulations; AIG slumps

By Greg Morcroft
Sep 17, 2008 10:11:00 (ET)

(MarketWatch)... And, in another troubling development from the financial crisis, one of the original and largest money market funds has put a seven-day freeze on investor redemptions after the net asset value of its shares fell below $1, in a rare instance in the fund industry of what is called "breaking the buck."

This is from the link that Km2b provided at 10:47:

"From a standpoint of public policy it is significant that Third Wave doctrine teaches that their leaders are raising a generation of youth who will be imparted with supernatural powers and form a conquering Christian army. These youth, often referred to as Joel's Army..."

Is the temporal Joel of the Blog also raising an army?

I'm seizing that cash as, uh, evidence! Yeah, that's the ticket. You fellows are free to go now. Say nothing of this. I suggest you ditch in Mexico and disappear; your bosses won't be happy.

Hey, if Joel's raising an army, can I be the Gladiator dude.

I have the olive oil and the outfit, and I'll make arrangements to strike up a new pair of sandals.

[Hmm. Perhaps not so much an army as a Virtual Village People? The Boodle People? As long as the Gladiator outfit still works, AFAIC]

bc

Katharine got my vote - mostly for that 3.97 GPA, grandpa.

Morning All
Back from walking to a neighbors house to do a little work.a nice day here in west by god,a button buck just walked under my window. He must be eyeing up my morning glories which I had 5 today!!!!

During Isabelle several years ago we lost power for 7 days.I was so ill prepared, I actually only had 6 batteries for 4 flashlights and none in my radio.I was taking the batteries out of the flasklight and putting them in the radio so I could listen to the terps and Ravens games.I normally don't have water in the stream near my house,but I did then.I used that to flush the toilets.I had always kept a 5 gallon container of water for drinking and cooking.i cooked on the grill and used an olde time glass percolator coffee pot for my coffee.

My neighbor and his wife showed up the night before the power came back on and they were thinking about going home,I lent them some candles and one of my oil lamps. The next day he thanked my for the romantic evening he had with his wife.

Well,the buck went right after the morning glories.I chased him away with a rotten tomato(missed him by that much).I better go mark my territory a little better.

Have a Great day everyone!

Here's the transcript of the video Shiloh linked to:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/politics/27text-obama.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

Mudge -

Given that you are talking about drug smugglers, aren't there international treaties that cover the seizure and arrest of these people even in international waters? You know the "War on Drugs" thing.

bc, the current crises may have its roots in the Reagan Administration's deregulation policies and actions of the 1980s, but those policies and actions were perpetuated in the 1990s as well:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/15/AR2008091502337_2.html?sub=AR
Which includes the following: "Some seeds of the current crisis were planted in the late 1990s, when Congress and President Clinton reshaped the financial landscape. They removed Depression-era barriers between commercial banks and investment firms and allowed the creation of financial behemoths where, years later, the risks of underwriting risky subprime mortgages were somewhat hidden."

Also http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/13/AR2008091302638.html

That includes "In March 2000...Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were ascendant, giants of the mortgage finance business and key players in the Clinton administration's drive to expand homeownership..."
"Even Greenspan, who shared the concerns of Treasury officials about the unrestrained growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, refrained for years from using his bully pulpit to urge action. He too wanted a hot housing market."

In other words, there's plenty of blame to go around. We all embraced the concept of expanding home ownership (and our rapidly increasing home equity wasn't so shabby, either). I don't know what the solution is, but am off to read Obama's speech to see if it sounds like he's on the right track.

I have word that he11 has begun to freeze over.

My brother-in-law has been a Republican since he was in high school, and that was back when we really did like Ike. He has many friends of the same stripe.

Yesterday he sent a "short memo attacking Obama" to the friend he admires the most. And promptly received a response saying the friend was going to vote for Obama!

Brother-in-law is bewildered, bothered and sure his friend is bewitched.

If one old f**t can change . . .it is a small freeze, but every vote counts!

It's dead, Jim.

I have word that he11 has begun to freeze over.

My brother-in-law has been a Republican since he was in high school, and that was back when we really did like Ike. He has many friends of the same stripe.

Yesterday he sent a "short memo attacking Obama" to the friend he admires the most. And promptly received a response saying the friend was going to vote for Obama!

Brother-in-law is bewildered, bothered and sure his friend is bewitched.

If one old f**t can change . . .it is a small freeze, but every vote counts!

Does anyone else have the HH47 flying around the Boodle? It may be searching for submarines...

Cap'n Chucky's latest illustration of the next Lucky dog story is up and looking good. http://capnchucky.typepad.com/heartofdogness/

Is is soup yet?

Er, flying around the Kit, to be precise. Also the Movable Type-'bot went haywire for a while..

Whew! I was starting to wonder - and worry - about Moveable Type. We must be wearing it out.

Good news about your brother-in-law's friend, Nellie. Now if we can just get more people to see the light!

I've seen the helicopter. It's not black enough to be one of RD's.

I thought that my IP addressed had been banned because I said that Comic Riffs gets fewer comments than Mark Fisher.

I had dinner with some ultra-conservative friends and mentioned that McCain's health care plan would tax employer provided benefits. That had him all confused.

11:50 was me. Ratzinfratzin Moveable Type.

Movable Type was originally named "Serge" after musician Serge Gainsbourg

Gainsbourg's varied musical style and individuality made him difficult to categorize.

I'd say "erratic" like movable type, as varied as alphabet soup.

I blame my double post on Moveable Tyle. I was no where near the computer.

I won't repeat the posts I attempted during the wipeout, sparing you all from my replies to bc on Joel's Army and to Raysmom on Obama's acknowledgment of both Republican and Democratic failures, except to say that after movable type ate them, I wished it a good case of indigestion.

*faxin' Movable Type a Heimlich to see what else is stuck*

:-)

Wasn't Serge Gainsbourg the dude who did the heavy breathing in the song "J'taime" song by Jane Birkin? I'd include the YouTube link, but then I'd need a cold shower.

Yes, the &^%$#*&^%$ ate a posting of mine, too. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

It's not just the occassional Conserv or old f**t who can change. All during the primary season, my ex was a devout Hillary person, and was one of those seriously bummed out when she lost, didn't like Obama, etc. This morning I got an e-mail from her noting that she has been invited to a "Undecided Jewish Women for Obama" meeting (kosher snacks provided). She's not only going, she says -- she is also hosting an Obama meeting at her house next week some time!

(She also forwarded the original invitation to me as an "honorary" Undecided Jewish Woman for Obama person, just in case I wanted to go. I was all verklempt.)

(I said thanks, but no thanks.)

Mudge,
That group's not anything like Jews for Jesus, is it? Those people are nuts.

Scotty, can you "recall" the faxed Heimlich to Movable Type? Let the sumb1tch die.

No, yello, they are significantly saner. Very few meshuganahs.

Serge and Jane were an item for years. I love Serge's writing, much less his singing. Smoking three packs of Gauloises didn't help in the smoothness department.

I did get the Chinook traversing the screen. I don't know why they advertize them they can't built them fast enough to supply the demand. Canada has had 16 on them on order for a while but they can't finalyse the flipping contract. DND, as usual, is asking for all kind of modifications and this is driving Boeing nuts. With the order book they have now they can't be bothered to engineer changes for a mere 16 airframes.

Speaking of procurement project gone bad, DHS must win the Lucille-Ball-on-the Assembly-Line award.

The War on Tourism is getting expensive.
“A $10 billion program called US VISIT, a computer system designed to record the entry and exit of visitors to the United States at airports and border crossings, is behind schedule and not being managed well”

Being Big Brother is hard.
“A $1.5 billion Boeing program to help secure U.S. borders with electronic sensors and other equipment is being shelved after it was over-budget, late and had technology problems.”

Having the same contractor develop, do and supervise a project rarely works.
“About $351 million was wasted and not properly overseen in the U.S. Coast Guard's Deepwater program after ships were built and then scrapped, according to Homeland Security committee staffers”

The rest of DHS’ procurement woes here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/16/AR2008091603200.html

Have you guys all seen the Telnaes cartoon? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/cartoonsandvideos/telnaes/telnaes_main.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

SCC please insert "a day" at the appropriate location.

And Serge died years ago of course. I love their daughter, Charlotte. Great actress and singer. A good example of what good genes can do if you keep working at it.

Howdy. Thanks for the Sports Illustrated fencing kid tip, PlainTim. I voted and passed it on to the fencing crowd.

Is Moveable Type messing up again? Or is the Boodle dead?

Hello-oh! Anybody here?

Shhhh! The boodle is napping. It's all tired from the hurricane and the submarine and all.

Jews for Jesus really do know their sense of humor. I enjoy their brochures a lot more than any religious pamphlets I've ever read.
It way beats the lies about Catholics I hear from born-again Christians.

It is Moveable Type --- Curmudgeon's earlier statement about it must have been heard, and this was the result. Please, keep your comments nice. "Good, Moveable Type!"

I guess not.

'Mudge is undecided about being an honorary woman? What???

*faxin' Moveable Type a Valium*

:-)

It's the "honorary" part that has me undecided. I'd be a *real* one in a heartbeat. (Pretty much a hardcore lesbian, though. I *do* have my standards.)

"Honorary" things are not always welcome.

Lincoln: “I feel like the man who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. To the man who asked him how he liked it, he said: ‘If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.’”

Good afternoon. For your information, my name under the Palin Name Generator is:

Chalk Revelations Palin

I just love it.

Hey, Chalk. Good to have you back. Please post more often.

D@mn, 4 o'clock can't get here soon enough. How much is the Dow going to lose between now and then?

Slyness: I feel the same way. I keep saying don't panic as my portfolio value goes up in smoke.

Down 453.43. A bloodbath, again.

John Kelley is looking for rabbit recipes. The Boodle should help him out.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/16/AR2008091603336.html

DLD

Have we reached the percent decline of the Great Depression yet? It's not even Black Tuesday in October yet.

Frankly, I prefer a Movable Feast myself.

And, while we're at it, dontcha think a new kit is in order?

And, now, I'm gonna take my leave while JA scratches his head. Except for the question of whether (1) we can convince JA to come to the Mega BPH; or (2) we don't need him there to spoil the party (and so we can all talk about him behind his back).

The is worse than the 9-11 market retraction. In '01 I lost 17% of value in the week following the Saudi attacks. This week I'm down 22% at market closing and my ADRs won't show up until tomorrow. I guess everybody in the stock market should recite the McCain mantra:

"The fundamentals of our economy are strong." (Just follow the yellow brick road.)

Say that 3 times, ask Cindy McCain to click the heels of her ruby slippers, and maybe we'll get out of Oz.

Moveable Type must not have paid their bill... bad news. The good news is neat new blog posts, and still haven't even got around to transferring the Spinning Goldwater story. Soon. In the meantime,
http://jumpersbloghouse.blogspot.com/

Thought I had time to catch up, sadly mistaken. Just want to clarify-it was the slam on accordions that drew the umbrage.

A day around here without Yoki, CP, Kim, TBG, and some others is like a day without...uh...well, sunshine, I guess. Or a mojito.

Running for the bus.

I am never going to be able to retire.

Wow. Our economic fundamentals must be sound. The DJIA has lost nearly 10% since Monday, and Wall Street is holding its collective breath, waiting for the next wave of failures. I'm hoping that ING isn't part of AIG. I don't think it is, based on what I found on ING's home page. My daughter took her road test today and was asked to return to the DMV after the 100' backup caused the car to leave the roadway. We'll have at it again next Wed.

RD, you can use my retirement plan: I'm going to work until I die. Solves everything!

ING is guaranteed. Which is good, because this is where I have all my son's college money. Thankfully.

Yes Fifty, expiring at my desk is increasingly looking like my plan.

It looks like I may have to go back to real work, the kind where they pay you money. I've lost the equivalent of two years of income in the past two weeks.

What alarms me, and I may be wrong about this, is that it seems as though some investors are betting against certain large financial institutions at this point, thus increasing the risk of overall meltdown for short-term financial gain.

I feel for you Shiloh. I would hate to have to rely on the market for current income. All I am losing is the future.

I wonder if anyone can appreciate the irony of Bush's (and McCain's) wish to privatize Social Security. I hear the *flush* of all that money going down the drain.

So far, so good for me. But I'm gonna work till I drop, too. The lottery never hits for me. Just gotta keep on going.

I have a 401K. I went and took it all and invested specifically in "Swiss Army knives" 2 years ago. What they didn't tell me was my investment somehow got forwarded to McMansion builders right back here in the USA. They are informing me of this now. I raised cain about it, but they tell me there's nothing I can do. In effect, the American developers have somehow put their losses on my most specifically NOT HOUSING investment, most specifically NOT MCMANSION fund. "Choice." And every McMansion developer I've met, and I've met a lot of them, still have about a million bucks more than I do today.

It's not like they weren't warned.

http://www.fizbomap.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/20050817-mr_housing_bubble.jpg

Oh Well. Perhaps this is all for the best. Maybe we need a good old-fashioned economic crash to instill some character.

Or not.

I didn't lose a dime on the mess.

Then again, you have to *have* money to *lose* money.

Near-poverty is my hedge. ;-)

The problem, martooni, is that in a generalized economic downturn the amount of money people feel willing to spend on non-essential purchases will decline. You see why this would be bad. It is in the interest of merchants everywhere to have customers who feel flush with cash.

Here in PA, I've been listening to McCain ads on the tv in ever increasing numbers over the past few days. Obama's started yesterday, I think.

When I read the text of Palin attempting to explain what McCain *meant* by saying the economy was basically sound, all I could think of was a student with a tiny bit of knowledge writing an essay exam and praying it's enough.

Silver lining: Obama's polling better over the past 2 days.

dbG: "all I could think of was a student with a tiny bit of knowledge writing an essay exam and praying it's enough"

That's me looking in the mirror every morning.

I've known for five or ten years or more that I'm going to have to work until I'm 67 -- and will probably have to do some sort of work thereafter.

The teaser on NBC News is that they are going to analyze Palin's true and false statements. Hasn't come on yet; Brian Williams is still talking about the AIG bailout. Run to your TV if you can.

Trust me, I know it very well RD.

I was just being a flippant gnome in addition to being a flippin' gnome. ;-)

I can see that ad now. "Basically sound" played nonstop over the latest stock headlines, comments from real Americans out of work, and so forth.

Now I remember why I rarely, if ever, look at whatever passes for my stock holdings...

*SIGH*

The housing "froth" Greenspan talked about a few years ago was spread over a wide area and expected to burst a little at a time. It became a "bubble" as real estate values grew and people began to take their equity out in cash through new mortgages based on the increased value. Those mortgages were sold by local banks and lenders in groups to large mortgage companies that repackaged them as financial instruments to investment houses that then re-repackaged them as derivative bonds and re-sold them to a variety of buyers, including insurance companies, retirement funds, mutual funds, governments and investment trusts.

Then inflated home values began to level off and an elaborate legal and unregulated ponzi scheme began to unravel. Jumper's story is not unique. While your own mortgage may continue to be paid to the nominal bank or mortgage company on paper, the actual owner of the paper value may be 3, 4 or 5 steps removed - each institution at each step, lending or borrowing on the strength of your mortgage. Finding our where your investment money is can be as complex as finding our who really owns your mortgage.

Geez dbG I thought I told you how I felt when I wrote my university exams in confidence! :-)

I am afraid to look at my meager retirement savings - if it still exists at all.

Hope I didn't sound snarky, martooni. I know that this is scary for you as well.

The point is, there is a tendency in some to view Wall Street as a world apart. Something that just affects rich folks and their wicked, wicked money. The truth, of course, is that in one way or another it affects us all.

How the mortgage meltdown affects other stocks also came home to roost this week. One of my investments in a small cap manufacturing company ceased operations yesterday. Why? Because their working capital, the money they need to operate on for the next 6 months, was in short-term investment paper that lost a huge chunk of value over the past two weeks. With their working capital seriously impaired and unable to find a lender in the current crisis market they had no choice but to shut down. The stock in that company went from an average this year of $3 a share - to only 10 cents a share today. Bankruptcy reorganization is the next step - for them and many other manufacturers with bad investments in mortgage backed securities.

Coming late to the party after waiting in a doctor's office for three hours, I've finally caught up on the back boodle, and I may have an answer on the submarine seizure. My brother, who's an expert on everything, especially drug interdiction stuff, tells me that those guys will be charged and tried in American courts.

As for my precious money, it's all in pension funds that are invested in all sorts of lately-stupid things, and I have no control of it. But I may have to 'check out' much sooner than I anticipated. And I've been feeling so much better lately!

Maggie - I sympathize. My nephew asked me what my losses meant and I said "It means I may have to die sooner than I had planned and that the money in my will that you were going to get is gone." He seemed more upset by the second point than the first.

America lost about one trillion dollars in the last three days. One trillion. And on Hardball with CM, there was a McCain ad where McC says America is in economic crisis. This is the same guy who said our economy was "fundamentally sound" just a few days ago -- and whose former chief economic advisor, Phil Gramm, was the guy who actually wrote all those deregulation laws in the 80s.

McC takes "cognitive dissonance" to heights previously never attained. He is the Chuck Yeager, the Sir Edmund Hillary of cognitive dissonance. He has broken the sound barrier of reason.

But there was also good news: Obama jumped 7 points in the NYT poll, from -2 to +5. He is deadlocked in Florida (that's good!) and leading by a couple points in Ohio. NC was -1 or less, too close to call. Leading in Wisconsin.

My operating income is a defined benefit pension that comes from investments on a grand scale. I just hope that they all don't go down the tubes. I'm not sure I could get another job, and I certainly don't want to have to try.

Definitely scary times. I just want to see a couple of short, pithy ads by Obama pounding McCain's support for Grandma and Grandpa and Joe Schmoe to be on their own, negotiating the ups and downs of the stock market with their "ownership society" private retirement accounts and his corresponding disdain for Social Security. I'm sure they can find some juicy snippets and just keep on pounding. Grrrrrr....

Crazy busy at work means no boodling. I mean, really! Who do my employers think they are?????

Mudge - what's your unvarnished opinion (is there such thing as a varnished Mudge opinion?) on NBC's analysis of Palin's misleadings, inaccuracies, misspeakings, misinformations, mistakes, shadings, misinterpretations, oversights, etc? Of course, I don't want to use the "L" word. That would be rude. Anyway, I didn't get to see it, so I'm wondering if they candy coated the whole thing or not.

Do I sound as cranky as I think I sound?

A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you are talking some serious money.

As I understand it, the benefit to society of investing is the promotion of real economic growth. But it seems to me as if institutional investors are instead relying on speculation bubbles as a means of making a quick profit.

I don't know exactly why this is, but I do know that many dynamic systems can easily become unstable and begin to experience wild gyrations. The classic example is the original Tacoma Narrows bridge, which shook itself to pieces.

The way out is to damp such a system. Which, in the case of the markets, seems to suggest a need for more economic regulation. Before more things start to shake to pieces.

RD, These are the first two of the 6 principles Obama spoke about last March:

But there are several core principles for reform that I intend to pursue as president.

First, if you can borrow from the government, you should be subject to government oversight and supervision.

Second, there needs to be general reform of the requirements to which all regulated financial institutions are subjected.

Third, we need to streamline a framework of overlapping and competing regulatory agencies.

Fourth, we need to regulate institutions for what they do, not what they are. Over the last few years, commercial banks and thrift institutions were subject to guidelines on subprime mortgages that did not apply to mortgage brokers and companies. Now, it makes no sense for the Fed to tighten mortgage guidelines for banks when two-thirds of subprime mortgages don't originate from banks.

Fifth, we must remain vigilant and crack down on trading activity that crosses the line to market manipulation.

Sixth, we need a process that identifies systemic risks to the financial system.

These six principles should guide the legal reforms needed to establish a 21st-century regulatory system, but the changes we need goes beyond the laws and regulation. We need a shift in the cultures of our financial institutions and our regulatory agencies.
..........................................

I think Obama has a better grasp of the problems and solutions than McCain.

Sorry about the redundancy, but in an age of sound bites, I don't think to many people can sit through a 31 minute speech on economic principle - or read the entire transcript of the speech - without nodding off.

scc: too many people

Thank you for that succinct analysis, Shiloh. Another reason I'm for Obama.

At church tonight, saw an Obama tee-shirt on a teenager - the pastor's daughter. Too bad she's only 16.

Well, I've noted what I *think* is a reversal of field by McCain and the Republicans as well, Mudge. I believe I heard McCain advocating more regulation of Wall Street in the near term, at least.

Anonymous, you're right - several Congresses and Administrations took the Depression-era walls down, brick by brick over the past half century. Now, we're going to have to put some new walls up, and probably not along the Rio Grande, either.

RD, bringing the Tacoma Narrows bridge and damping systems into the conversation is interesting, but I don't think of it that way. Ideally, bridges are relatively static and have a limited amount of capacity, both in flow rate and weight.

What I think of as good capitalism allows for development of new components and new products all the time, and the entire economic system can grow and change based on what works at any given time and what doesn't. Innovation and change and risk are important aspects of that.

However, when we get to trading finanical products based on how many angels are going to dance in the pin at the tip of a unicorn's horn, this is where we get into trouble.

On the other hand, even Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and cost accounting strike hardheaded ol' me as a little, er, I won't say ficticious, but perhaps idealistic.

I certainly can't balance my checkbook that way using those principles...

bc

Shiloh, thanks for the Obama summary. His weakness seems to be not talking in sound bites. And I have to disagree with Carly Fiorina - I bet Obama would make a great CEO. And I suppose you have to give McCain credit for not picking her for VP.

Heavy traffic gave me a longer window to listen to the news this evening on the way home.

Does anyone else share my surprise at how thoroughly the talking points of McCain-Palin toe the traditional Democratic line? The race may be close in the polls, but the rhetoric says clear Democratic party win.

I first noticed this in the speech introducing Palin (emphasis on her working class roots and husband's union membership). Just today McCain's supporting more government oversight and regulation over the financial industry. Wow.

I propose the campaign slogan, "Accept no substitutes. Vote for the real thing."

Incidentally, if McCain had chosen Carleton S. Fiorina as his VP nominee, the Anne Kilkenny letters would have poured in from employees of Hewlett-Packard (yes, I'm using the pre-Carly name here) and Lucent.

The cascade of fear and real business failures makes me think over and over about this root Latin word:

credere

Credit and creed, through credo, come from this root, which means

trust, faith.

Fifty brings up something that's been nagging at me. Perhaps someone with more boodle wisdom can explain to me why Carly Fiorina has such a visible role in the McCain campaign when she was fired from HP then received the old golden parachute to the tune of 21 million dollars. Incensed stockholders sued. Not to mention she was a frequent hobnobber with the Hollywood ilk.

Even more inexplicable is how a woman of her level of achievement in the business world can praise Sarah Palin's "qualifications" for VP with a straight face.

Faith based capital, CP, and faith based business management, according to Peter Drucker, are sure recipes for failure.

Render under mammon (Caesar), etc. is the premise of both religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and the safety in government regulation of credit markets.

Carly was probably in line for a position in a McCain administration, until she was sidelined for being a maverick.

Knitting up briefly from RD's comment on the wobbly-ness of our economy and Bc's mention of growth and development, I would like to see us question the (false) sanctity of economic growth, growth, growth. Development might be more deliberate, allowing for human-scale institutions and capacity for human endeavor.

Dare I say it, a steady state, developed economy?

We have only been so uber-growth focussed since about WWII; there are other components to human economics and culture.

Shiloh, I am not advocating faith-based economic policy. Simply saying the economic life is based on trust, which the root for "credit" captures.

Faith is a bigger word than the religious slant....but you know that.

A unilateral steady-state developed economy would rapidly deteriorate into a third-world country.

"Render under mammon" is a good descriptor for those who tear society to shreds to feed their avarice.

Drucker was not using faith based management on a religious principle, but on trust that the management practice was right.

Thank you CP, I was hoping you'd weigh in with an alternative. Unless we really plan to move to other planets it seems prudent to come up with another model of economic health than constant growth.

My cat "Fides" knows that, CP.

Brief steady state description here:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Steady_state_economy

I think Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding, Bob Costanza, Donella Meadows, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and Frederick Soddy are on to something important. Thanks, Frosti, for the shout-out. I love your small-burg mayoral cred....which is also a kind of trust.

Frosti - I am not taking that bait.

E.F. Schumacher might also say yes to development rather than GROWTH.

Shiloh, many wise people agree with you. But, the fora for ideas is huge. I believe that the view of ecological economics about our human economic system within a biological ecosystem, in turn in a geophysical earth-planet-solar system-universe is worthy and robust.

Here is what Joshua Farley and Herman Daly write in the preface to Ecological Economics:
BEGIN quote
Ecological economics views the economy as a part of a larger finite system. This means that the traditional goal of macroeconomic policy--unlimited economic growth in the physical dimension--is impossible. Thus, in ecological economics, optimal scale replaces growth as a goal, followed by fair distribution and efficient allocation, in that order.

END quote

----
G'nite!

I'm confused. Why would a steady state (dynamic equilibrium, which we're all in, BTW, although some not quite as steady as others..:-) have to deteriorate rapidly? Perhaps steady state in economics means something different than what it means tin biochemistry?

Returning to frosti's question about Fiorina's involvement with the campaign. I have to guess that she raises campaign funds from the business crowd.

Given the nature of her time at HP (including such charmless acts as purchasing a corporate jet while they were laying off people and the whole "pretexting" thing), I doubt Fiorina would fare well in Senate hearings for a high-ranking post.

Heraclitus, defined the only constant as change. A steady-state or steady state (they are different) would grow or deteriorate if it acted in isolation from its agent; economic, social or physical.

Just catching up with today's news. Looks like Fiorina is getting retired as a McCain surrogate. Seems he didn't appreciate it when she clarified her comment about Palin not being qualified to run HP by saying he wouldn't be either (in her defense, she doesn't think Obama or Biden could run a Fortune 500 company either).

Fiorina is an expert on what it takes to be a CEO how?
Rebuked.
Fired.
Ousted.
Ouch!
I'm sure she's a republican - but an example of CEO prowess?
Not so much...

Fiorina, to her credit, speaks truth to power -and got canned for it twice, once by HP and today by McCain.

Shiloh: definitely agree on the McCain campaign, but what was Fiorina's truth to power at HP?

Fiorina's engineering of the merger with Compaq unsettled the powers at both companies and precipitated a board revolt. The fallout lost her her job, but the ultimate benefit to hp has rarely been acknowledged.

OK, to me that looked more like a plain exercise of power rather than speaking truth to power.

You may be right on its benefit to HP, since we don't know what would have happened without the merger. On the other hand, the promised synergy didn't happen in PCs, services, and storage.

It may have cost her the position, but she's got the $21M. Not Richard Grasso money (funny name in Italian!) but I'm sure she'll be fine.

Frankly, Fifty, I have no love of Carly and when she spoke at the RNC I said "blitch" to the screen. I've felt she was a too fast rising star - an opportunist not unlike Palin -but the fact remains that she made good management decisions and her compensation in loss of job was not inconsistent with the wretched excess of the system.

Reconciling the multi-million dollar bonus or golden parachute benefits of capitalism with the average or median income is a task that may challenge the system in ways that are unexpected. And that may be good.

I don't begrudge her whatever contract and termination clauses she negotiated. HP agreed to them after all. I just think with that sort of cushion, it takes less courage to make certain decisions.

In her case, maybe that "compensated courage" payed off for HP. They might have done much worse without the merger.

Trying to catch up on the boodle, but you guys keep making my thought processes take sharp turns...

RD's Tacomoa Narrows made me think of the walls of Jericho (resonance took me to the biblical story, not the head-banger band), which handed me over to CP's traditional definition of faith, which made me think of (of all things) the oft-misunderstood concept of virtue (the way Machiavelli meant it), and then Machiavelli took me to the current economic outlook and political leaders (yipes), which brought me to (here's a leap) Don McLean and Vincent. (I know...this one is a big tougher to follow, but it contains a whole-nother sub-thought process about the absurdity of being sane in a world fraught with insanity), which brought me back to that bridge, and thinking that if we have faith (hi CP) in ourselves, our kind, our *ilk*, and run sorta kinda fast now and avoid a tougher, longer sprint not that far away, we can cross that bridge of RDs before it falls, and find a new place to rest and play.

Speaking of rest, this stack of invoices can wait until tomorrow. (Maybe the fairies will come in the night and make heads or tails out of them for me.)

Goodnight all. And good morning to those of you who are backboodling with a cup of coffee. Forgive me for my mental maze; I really need to buy a new pair of shoes.

Your mental maze sounds interesting, LostinThought.

Ecologically, I suppose we could grow unlimitedly if we used our excess GDP to plant trees, feed birds, and grow tomatoes. Or perhaps to genetically engineer ourselves into stuff like turnips.

We'll bring you back yet, Old Stripey
They said that you were dead as ashes
But we hear your sinister genes roaring
Petri dishes rattling on the shelves
We'll bring you back, Mister Stripey...

Ahem. you have not read or heard that last part; just a hallucination.

Don McLean and Vincent? I have no idea who they are and that kind of lost in thought mind leap is....?

Shiloh, Don McLean had a few hit songs, with "American Pie" being the biggest, and "Vincent," about van Gogh, was another.

Not so sure about following LiT's leaps of thought, however, as she seems to be a MUCH better leaper than I am. :-)

*inching-closer-to-the-weekend-a-little-bit-faster-now-that-the-caffeine-is-flowing-and-the-Dawn-Patrol-transportation-is-rumbling-on-the-tracks Grover waves* :-)

A gaffe is when somebody accidentally tells the truth. Here is Dowd's take:

/// Carly Fiorina, the woman John McCain sent out to defend Sarah Palin and rip anyone who calls her a tabula rasa on foreign policy and the economy, admitted Tuesday that Palin was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.

That’s pretty damning coming from Fiorina, who also was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.

Carly helpfully added that McCain (not to mention Obama and Biden) couldn’t run a major corporation. He couldn’t get his immigration bill passed either, but now he’s promising to eliminate centuries of greed on Wall Street.///

Harsh.

Mornin' everybody...

I've been reading all the analyses from the punditry this morning on the finance meltdown and all I can do is shake my head and think "no sh!t, Sherlock". It took them this long to figure out Wall Street is nothing more than an elaborate shell game backed by an even more elaborate Ponzi scheme?

The remedy (to me) is as much a no-brainer to figure out: quit making "money" and start making "things" again -- and pay the people who actually *make* things enough that they can buy the things they need.

A good house needs a solid foundation and sturdy walls to hold up its roof. Wall Street is nothing more than a bunch of card houses with very large roofs built on a sandbar -- and they're surprised when the damn things collapse on their heads.

But what do I know? I'm just a simpleton who makes things for a living.

Speaking of which... time to get to it.

Peace out...

Obama climbing in the polls. :-)

woofin, dmd, Eleanor Roosevelt's "Do one thing every day that scares you" applies to me going to work every day. I hear you!

btw... I should add that I'm not knocking those who produce "intangible" goods and services as a whole -- just those who do the least and make the most.

'Morning, Boodle.

Most excellent Harold Meyerson column today at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/17/AR2008091702971.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 saying some of the same things I have been ranting about (could it be he's a secret Boodle reader?).

The problem with the "steady-state" theory of economy is that populations grow. Therefore, the economies that support them have to continually grow, too, to support the population. To actually improve the condition of a population, the economy has to not only keep pace, but actually increase slightly.

Which is not to say that a steady-state economy, or even a controlled declining one might not be a good thing; they very likely *are* good things -- but like a lot of other utopian ideas, they will never happen in the real world, because the world is so large, diverse, and set in its (often bad) ways, and no one has ever figured out how to do mass scale social engineering and make it work. The two previous serious attempters were Stalin and Mao, and of course they were working with flawed plans to begin with. But even under complete totalitarian control they ultimately couldn't pull it off. (And let's not even look at the horrible human costs.)

To create a steady-state (or declining) economy, you'd need worldwide population control (and possibly even shrinkage). Someone want to tell me how we're gonna get China and India, much less the Islamic nations, to play along? China actually attempts population control; can I see a show of hands of people who think their methods are either (a) working or (b) even desirable? No, thought not.

How do we convince people just in America to do even the simplest "smart" things, such as buy smaller, more-fuel-efficient cars? How to get them to refrain from buying pointless McMansions? Going fully "green"?

We can't even get a consensus on the stupidity of drilling in ANWR, fer cryin' out loud.

The solutions are necessarily global -- and until the last couple decades mankind has never even lived in a global community and global economy before; we simply don't know how to do it, and haven't got any successful experience with it. We have no track record whatsoever of making anything global really work. And to propose trimming down, scaling back, down-sizing the planet -- while eminently worthwhile -- just ain't gonna happen.

Throughout history the only things that have ever caused substantial societal change have almost always been natural or manmade disasters and cataclysms. The few "positive" ones (and the use of "positive" is itself controversial) such as the Renaissance or Industrial Revolution happened over long periods of time without any overall human direction.

Which is why those otherwise worthwhile plans and ideas are called "utopian."

Thus endeth the sermon.

Fire up those SPADs, ladies and gentlemen. and let's get airborne.

Shiloh, thanks for the link to Obama's economics speech. I did watch it and I printed out the transcript and highlighted it for my ADHD husband. He started reading it this morning and then put it aside and said, "That's afternoon reading, not morning reading." But he is one Nader voter who won't be going "third party" in this election!

Hard to say which is worse--the elaborate precautions/pre-emptions being taken on Palin's behalf re: Troopergate or Troopergate itself. The p/p are certainly a cause for alarm themselves.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-gara/round-2-of-mccain-trooper_b_127101.html

Is it legal for McCain election $ to fund the 2 big-mahoff lawyers being sent to *advise* the lawyer hired by Alaska to defend her?

Martooni, despite recent events, Wall Street is more than a house of cards built on a sandbar. Not every brokerage house/bank bought the fraudulent ratings; there are plenty of people who go into work every day there and work their tails off in an atmosphere where a 50 hour week is considered slacking. Not many of them receive huge bonuses, and many of them are now unemployed, due to no fault of their own.

My point is that unfettered Capitalism is intrinsically unstable, just like an improperly damped bridge in the wind.
There is no true steady state. Under ideal conditions it is metastable at best. Like heavy traffic. Or Ringworld. Without careful monitoring it takes just a little push for things to go terribly awry. History is full of such examples, and the way out has always been more careful regulation. This is just the latest chapter.

Let's hope things settle down.

Good point dbG. It's important not to paint with too broad of a brush. As I am keenly aware, when one starts to characterize everyone in a community or organization as acting together for some evil purpose, good people get smeared.

Now, I need to get back to work on that secret plan for world domination.

Morning, all.

Between the discussion here and the overnight emails from the church committee I'm on, I'm already tired from thinking. Good stuff in both places.

I wonder if we're going to be able to avert a cataclysm, Mudge. Maybe we need a round of Black Death to bring us back down. The human cost scares me.

Fifty, you make an excellent point about how the Republicans are sounding like Democrats these days. That's not surprising, considering the bankruptedness of Repub ideas and talking points.

It's time for a new paradigm in politics and finance. And I don't think McCain/Palin will be able to bring it to birth.

Good morning Boodle.

Flying over wreckage is no fun.

Interesting writings on economy and demographics in Asia Times (Atimes.com). Mudge, you may want to visit Spengler there. Possibly one of the sanest and unbiased comentator on world affairs.

The only good news I have is a KINGMAKER signing event at Borders in Silver Spring on October 18.

RD: //Now, I need to get back to work on that secret plan for world domination.//

I'll get you the financing. Call me. :-)

RDP

For world domination you need a puppet in the White House and control of NATO, easy to do if the 2nd. puppet in a row dances the fandango one day,the tango the next, and boogie-boogies before doing the hoochie-woochie.

OK 'Mudge, I've got my spats all shined, now what were you saying?

:-)

Steady state would be very difficult....we need more study, etc. However that Nature and the Universe are way more powerful than we are is the very ground of our existence. But our hubris is so dangerous that it takes my breath away.

LiT -- your brain is so fabulous and the connect-the-dots makes sense to me. Sprinkling glitter on your invoices so they behave.

dbG... I'm sure they work hard and that more than a few of them are honest. I also realize that Wall Street is necessary to facilitate the creation and growth of companies that produce tangible goods.

My point is that our economy (and Wall Street) is too top-heavy and places too much value on paper wealth and not enough in the tangible goods and resources that are supposed to back that wealth, let alone those who produce those goods and resources.

Wall Street is nothing more than a big casino, taking and placing bets on the work of others with other people's money. Those who work there should know better than anyone that if your livelyhood depends on gambling, sometimes you lose.

Mudge, thanks for clarifying my point about econonmic growth being necessary for a world and a country with population growth in order to avoid collapse.

The Powers that Be are struggling mightly to bring this economy in for a soft landing, even if it's unpowered and nearly deadstick.

Interesting analogy about crossing the Tacoma Narrows bridge, LIT. The best way would be to stay as close to the center of the bridge as possible, close to the roll center of the transverse twisting, though there does not seem much to be done about the longitudinal waves.

Now, a question: Trust in others and faith that they will deliver as promised should debts be called in is what got the economy where it is, didn't it? The Feds are working on doing the exact opposite to get the economy out - putting regulation and checks in that reduce the need for trust and faith.

Also, I don't know that there's a need for a return of the Black Death, slyness. Some suggest that the Earth as a big Globally Warming stew pot containing rapidly increasing population pressures and decreasing land availbility, unknown levels of contiuned food and energy sustenanace, increasing political and economic tensions, technologies that may be advancing faster than our wisdom, and all of it spiced with the availabiltiy of various types of weapons of mass destruction, spell a boilover of some sort. And there would be less in that pot when it was all over.

Personally, I'm not so pessimistic, but it seems that we as humans could be making better choices about where we're spending the resources we *do* have, before we don't have them any more.

And no, I'm not suggesting we eat up the last of the polar bears. They taste awfully gamey, anyway.

bc

I'm going to try to knit together some points made by RD, CP, and martooni.

CP wondered why we focus so heavily on growth. I think Mudge's 6:30 a.m. explains it pretty well: because populations grow, and the economic output has to grow with it; otherwise, a net decline would occur. Also, in a growing economy a "many hands make light work" principle occurs. Because more wealth is being created, government revenues can increase without increasing any one person's tax rate.

RD and martooni explain what's gone wrong with the "growth" mantra. RD: "But it seems to me as if institutional investors are instead relying on speculation bubbles as a means of making a quick profit." Quick profit gives the illusion of fast growth (not to mention dandy bonuses for the Wall Streeters).

And martooni: "The remedy (to me) is as much a no-brainer to figure out: quit making "money" and start making "things" again -- and pay the people who actually *make* things enough that they can buy the things they need." Absolutely! Whenever someone touts the charms of the "service economy" I think of the saying "two guys don't get rich by doing each other's laundry." Growth based on service industries is only possible if someone, somewhere has the wealth to buy those services. And that wealth better not come from speculative bubbles or it's Ruh-Roh time.

bc, I was the Anonymous at 11:50 a.m. describing the origins of this mess we're in. Realized immediately after posting I hadn't put in my name, but stupid Moveable Type kept me from 'fessing up for over an hour.

Sorry this is so long--not my usual style, but I do think about this stuff.

G'morning, everyone. IT's downhill to the weekend. Here's a brief take on how the current administration in Alaska works. Moo.

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/moo/index.html

Shiloh, there's one thing that concerns me about Obama's second principle. He says "Capital requirements should be strengthened, particularly for complex financial instruments like some of the mortgage securities that led to our current crisis." This is an excellent goal in itself, but the implementation must be done very carefully, lest the companies' drive to shore up capital causes the credit markets to constrict too drastically and suddenly. (Not a good thing for people who want borrow to buy a house or provide working capital for their business, for example.)

The reason it concerns me is that we tend to be like newbie ship-drivers. We turn the wheel, nothing happens immediately, so we turn the wheel harder. Oops! Too far in that direction! Turn other way; nothing happens immediately, turn harder. Lather, rinse, repeat until hopefully you get the hang of gentle corrections and waiting for the results. What I'm trying to say is that I hope that, for totally legitimate reasons, officials don't overcorrect and drive us down an opposite, but equally disastrous, alleyway.

I'll shut up now. I promise.

Martooni's comment about what real wealth is and HINT 'tis not a chain of paper "trust" transactions is what Frederick Soddy, economist and Nobel-prize winning chemist worried about long ago.

Soddy's 1926 book title says "virtual" in an astonishing precient vision of our current paper chase of STUFF:

Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt: The Solution to the Economic Paradox.

BEGIN QUOTE
Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics rather than physics. Unlike wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not consumed in the process of living. On the contrary, they grow at so much per cent per annum, by the well-known mathematical laws of simple and compound interest ... It is this underlying confusion between wealth and debt which has made such a tragedy of the scientific era.
END QUOTE

---
ANd, I take and understand and tear up (weep, rather than shred the papers your ideas are writ upon :) ) at each point made about the reasonableness of growth made here and elsewhere. However, remember, I am in the cathedral of ideas, qua the university. 'Tis our job to wonder and wonder and wonder and probe and tease and suggest....so, forgive me my idealism and my deep, deep, deep desperation about this beautiful world and all the people in it and what we face theoretically but what our children and grandchildren will be burdened by.

New kit coming about 10 a.m. just fyi.

In scary times, investors act as if Soddy were an investment angel upon their shoulder.

"Gold, dearest. Gold. REAL estate, dearest o precious one. THINGS are the very thing to keep us safe in the night."

Soddy now sounds like Gollum. Sorry about that.

Off to meet with students about this year's solar decathlon. Shall feel hopeful after spending time with such earnest engineers and architects.

All my wealth is tied up in consumer debt. If all these companies fail, can I quit paying my credit card bill?

CP, one more thing I've noticed about growth, at least in organizations. I've worked in both growing and stagnant companies, and the atmosphere in the growing company is far preferable. The pie is growing, and everyone can get a largers slice if they want. Hence, far fewer political squabbles and territorialism.

For an economy that means (or should) that if people are making more money, they have more to share with others. It's probably that "should" part where it all falls apart.

My brain hurts.

Must an economy grow perpetually to accommodate a growing population, or must the population continue to grow to sustain a growing economy? The way you see it depends on where you sit I suppose. Populations do shrink without draconian government intervention, Italy comes to mind.

Wish I had more background in this area as it just doesn't seem to make sense not to investigate, or perhaps even strive for, a steady state economy or something like it. Was there some grand sweeping legislation, or kingly decree, that immediately brought mercantilism to Europe, or then supplanted it with capitalism? Adam Smith was one persuasive guy, but did things turn on a dime?

Perhaps in this time when we are all worrying about retirement funds we depend on now, or hope to rely on in the fairly near future, taking a view that is generations out seems like folly. What smallish steps, that don't take trampling on individual liberties, should a society take now to aim for a healthy non-growing economy? If they made me economic wizard for a day I'd wave the wand to educate all girls world wide (which I admit would trample on some religious sensibilities). Even if it didn't bring the usual drop in birth rate, I think we'd all be better off.
Just some first cup of coffee musings. I only have time for macro level thinking before 0900.

Would that be Daylight or Standard time, JA? :-)

'morning all. Why is nobody saying McCain has thrown Carly Fiorina under the bus? 3-4 months ago everyone was getting thrown under the bus but now she's put on lock-down or "disappeared". I much prefer the image of Carly thrown under the bus with her golden parachute.

The Canadian federal election is a much tamer affair than your Presidential. However, sometimes there is a gem. Yesterday a NDP candidate resigned after old videos of him smoking dope and taking LSD surfaced. The NDP leadership must have been stunned, blabbergasted even that he had done dope. I mean the guy "had been a co-founder of the B.C. Marijuana Party and the Marijuana Party of Canada. For 10 years, he was editor of Cannabis Culture magazine, and has written a book titled Hairy Pothead and the Marijuana Store."

It's the level of hypocrisy that is rather stunning.

SCC Flabbergasted.
I blame it of past usage of herbaceous relaxants.

I like blabbergasted better, shriek. Brings to mind a bunch of stodgy old white men issuing raspberries (and not the fruit kind).

I guess I work in a company that makes tangible things, like martooni says, but we make things that focus solely on how to play in that Wall Street Ponzi scheme, so I don't know on which side of that issue I fall.

sd-I tried to get the frostfam interested in your election last Friday. For some reason they did not appreciate my Stephane Dion anecdote-As It Happens had some phone in political pundit panelists on the show as I was driving to St. Paul. The woman from Alberta asked the one from Quebec if Dion was as boring and hard to follow in French as he is in English. Her answer was yes. They didn't get it.

SD, I laughed out loud when I heard that. Who the heck was asleep at that wheel?

bc, I hope and pray that you are right. The human cost, that's what staggers me. It comes from being a mother. I want the best for my children, and all other mothers' children.

Thank you for your explanations, Raysmom. Their clarity is helpful. Since I spent my career in local government, all this stuff about derivatives and ponzi schemes pretty much escapes me. Maybe C.S. Lewis was right when he said that our financial arrangements will bring us down, because we ignore the Biblical injunction against usury.

All I know is that my organization is required by state law not to go into deficit, so we didn't and don't. Not ever easy, but the checkbook has to balance on June 30.

Dion is awful in French as well frosti. He can go on and on and on. At least in English he shuts up at one point. He's a bright man, ScienPo doesn't give away its doctorat d'état, but very boring. In his public life anyway; he may be a much lively person in his personal life. I've learned that from another politico, Robert Bourassa, who's now dead. He was famously wonkish and boring in public life yet in "real" life he was a funny, warm absolutely charming man. Go figure.

And now for a random moment of cuteness

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/08/14/funny-pictures-closet-i-can-sleep-wit-u/

frosti, I'm concerned about the levels of control we're talking about here - controls over economic and financial systems to manage wealth, controls to manage population levels... given the way the world has changed over the past few decades, even old-fashioned communist governments aren't able to do that very well anymore (see: China). I suspect you'd need a lot of things to make that work in the long term, a tremendous amount of stability in population makeup and economic factors, like they seem to have in the northern European countries like Sweden and Norway. And even then, I understand those countries hare having to severely restrain the amount of immigration in order to continue to maintain stability.

The US model of population and capitalism was designed (I think) to encourage growth in all sectors as a way to provide stability. The founding fathers considered that they had this giant open country full of seemingly limitless resources and opportunity. Seems to me that the systems they put in place were done so to give opportunites to a dynamic and growing population, and to take advantage of advancing technologies and the growth of interconnected world-wide trade and banking, which was already in place at the time of the Revolution.

Italy is a pretty interesting choice to me as an example of low-intervention/low-impact population and economic management, as it seems to me to be a rather socialist country these days.

Ach, I'm no expert on these things, these are just my opinions.

bc

Martooni: //Wall Street is nothing more than a big casino, taking and placing bets on the work of others with other people's money. Those who work there should know better than anyone that if your livelyhood depends on gambling, sometimes you lose.//

I don't know, Martooni. Isn't making fairy doors a gamble, tangible good or not? Nothing's guaranteed.

Where I work, money is a tangible good.

I don't work in a casino, even though some people gamble. As RD said, regulation is necessary; certainly in this case, where inflated mortgage securities were given high ratings and sold to pension and other retirement funds as safe.

And while we may bemoan our Wall Street losses, there is also potential for great gain. Sure, my portfolio is down. But show me another way I'd still be showing a net profit of approximately 15% a year over the past 7 years I've been here.

Shrieking denizen, we no longer throw people under the bus. We throw them to the wolves, in deference to helping Sarah Palin feel comfortable on the national political scene. Didn't you get the memo?

The memo wasn't stamped with the USPS international rate I guess.
But I like the idea of Carly thrown to the wolves, slowly descending toward the famished canines suspended under her golden parachute.

Here is a Canadian politician I would like to throw to the wolves,

http://www.thestar.com/article/501313

New Kit! (better late than never)