What George Washington Would Say

Let them build their Mosque

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.

George Washington's Letter to the

Jews of Newport, Rhode Island (1790)

Prissy Little Bastards

I always buy my beer supplies from a little brew store here in the 'Couv.  It is a nice little place and I have been going to it for years now.  I really only have one trouble with the place, it is run by fundamentalists.

Now, when I say fundamentalist, I am thinking about a mindset, not any particular theory or belief system. But a stern and tightly held belief that they are right.  The guys in the beer store are beer fundamentalists.  Beer has to be brewed this way.  No variation in methodology, Alles In Ordenung.

I go in and ask for their opinion on things.  Truth be told, I get some pretty sheen ideas from them.   But when I tell them my lackadaisical approach to beer-making, the silence gets cold and the sneers come out to trot.  That is too simple, the process needs X and Y and then you have to do this and then you need to get this.  You can't do that.  

I listen to their grave concerns.  They are usually dead serious and concerned with my immortal beer-making soul.  I don't know how to tell them that the making beer is not a remarkably difficult process.  There are Babylonian Tablets circa 4300 BC that outline the process.  They look suitably aghast and pitying at the same time.

You see, these folks have a shrine set up in their basements.  It is a monument to stainless steel and welding.  It is concrete and solid and made of high-tech materials and it worships the god of consistency.  You must know the nature of the output.  You must control all aspects of the process.

Biologicals like beer don't really work this way.  Yes, you can do this in some cases, but the results you get are pretty weak.  Consider Budweiser.  I will give it that you can drink a Budweiser today and it will take just like a can that opened with a church key back in 1972.  

You see, that is the nature of fundamentalists.  They need to be certain of the results.  They need to be in control of the process.  But you really can't do it and taste the richness and variability of life.  You can't fail and learn, you become stagnant.

I have blue ribbons up on my wall.  I have poured cases of beer down the drain.  Both of these are important to being a true human.

Non-Standard Life

The boys and I hung around yesterday.  I went and got some peaches to freeze down and the eldest is going to make a cobbler for dinner.  Sorta cleaned the house and started to look at the living arrangements in a serious manner.  I think that things have to change.

We don't even live all that fancy.  But the price of this place has crept up over the past seven years, and it is looking to be leaving my price point soon.  So I spent this morning thinking about what it will take in terms of material goods to provide a non-standard life.

The answer is:  Not much

So much of my life is reflected in the odd doo-dads that fill up space.   But what they reflect is not good times or bad times, but rather, times of thoughtlessness and sloppiness.  Why do I have two or three chess sets?  My rubbermaid fetish has already been documented.  Why the hell do I need all the dishes that I have.   And don't even get me started about the clothes that I don't use.

I think that it is a time for a garage sale.  But the real issue is a commitment to not filling up the imaginary holes in my life with crap.

Get Rid of the Damn Thing (reprise)

OK...Not everyone disagrees with me.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38646066/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/

and the Rice Farmer too


Now, Read this one.

Anyway, onto one of the basics.  The boys and I always sneak out to the back to piss on the compost heap.    I just consider it smart, phosphorus and nitrogen and good stuff galore, in a nice water matrix, all of which makes the compost heap quite happy.  I do get a lot of good stuff out of this,

The neighbors don't need to know, it doesn't smell and when you add in the ashes from the winter fireplace, you have muy bueno fertilizer in the spring

A Tale of Two Graphs (Part Two)

So, Since I haven't gotten too much in the way of corrections, I am going to continue with the thoughts that I have concerning this graph.

I was never interested in buying property.  Never had a mortgage.  Never will.  The thought of being bonded in place, paying for a 1/4 acre chunk of an old pasture in suburbia always made me nearly physically ill.

But there were plenty of folks out there wanting to live the dream.

Now, lately we have been telling everyone who will listen what a bunch of fuckers the banks were.  We were right about this.  But let's not forget for a moment the stupid friggin' pukes on the other side of the bargain.   They all knew that they didn't have the money.  They just thought that they had to have the dream.  So they went out and bought too much.

So basically we have liars selling to thieves and both sides screaming about "moral hazard".

A Tale of Two Graphs (Part One)

OK:  Let's get this out up front, I may be wrong in my approach here, if anyone can pick holes in it, please have at this, I am trying to make sense out of data provided by the government, who seems to be going out of it's way to make the data opaque.   If I am wrong, point it out and I will retract in a front page way, no pg 8 retractions here

There have been a couple of great articles over at Jesse's Cafe Americain and the Automatic Earth (sounds kinda like a rock band when you phrase it like that).  concerning the nature of mortgage debt and other such bad juju heading our way.

Here is the chart that caused all the ruckus.

I can't really argue their logic when faced with this data.  What I questioned was the data that led into it.  I went over and tried to find the original data sets used in the graph.  The FHFA doesn't make this too easy to do.  But, the best that I could sort out is that the property values (shown in the above chart as the red line) is all residential property in the US.

So, with the tried and true method of eyeballing the chart above and plugging my eyeball estimates into a spreadsheet I got a graph looking pretty much like the one above.

Now the real point to this is that the mortgaged property should be compared to the value of the property mortgaged, not the entire housing stock.  So when you type in "Percentage of homes in the US with no mortgage" you get this.

So 30% of the homes are out of the mix.  Now since I am not laying claim to a huge helping of precision here, I figure that you oughta multiply the numbers from the chart above by 0.70.  So, in go the numbers and you get a new chart that looks like this.

You will notice here that the blue and yellow line look pretty similar,  But check out the red line showing the value of the "mortgaged" property.

Guv'mint jobs

I am kinda hopin' that mine may last for a bit, though I certainly am not thinking that it will be the case.

Right now, we are sitting at an unemployment rate of around 15-20% in the real world.  Even the guv'mint says it is above 10%.   All of those unemployed are not spending any money.  The economy is heading into worse territory because of that lack.  Tax revenues are down.  Government borrowing is up.

So, now the states and the local governments, not having the convenience of their own printing press, are looking at cuts.  Needless to say, these will be at the worker level.  I seriously doubt that the program directors will ever get cut, they will just cut the hell out the budget, lay off all the state employees that actually do something, and leave the politically connected bosses in place to keep the facade of the organization.

But a lot of those state and local workers are going to be out of work soon.  Another hit to the employment parade.  The loss of all these state programs is going to cause probably an equal number of jobs in the contracting and provision areas.  Ouch...gonna leave a mark there.  But those job losses will add to the decline in money moving through the system.  So things get a bit tighter.  I alway laugh at the morons who want to tear apart government now.  Oh, it will make the books better, but lets say we lay off half the guvmint workers right now.   There is a total of around 155 million worker bees here in the good old USA.  When you look at non-doctored figures, best I can tell, one in five of us is unemployed or so crappily employed as to make the definition a joke.  That make's the number of folks livin' crappy at 30 or so million.  Add another eleven million to the unemployed list and you are at around 27% unemployed.  Oops.

I am wondering where it will stabilize?  I am not getting the feeling that the end is in sight.  I think that there is too much fraud and waste and stupidity that has yet to be uncovered to think so.  I think that right now we are just getting into the thick of the process.

So, my little minion job at the vaspa will keep going for a bit.  I will manage to get by on the less that is my salary, and I will truly try to be grateful for the blessing that this offers.  My small amount of debt will continue to decrease.  I will learn to live with less.  If I can hold on for another 14 months, I will achieve the exalted status of "permanent" and when I couple it with actual good job performance, I may well be able to die peacefully at work in fifteen years.

Get Rid of the Damn Thing

This is a statement from a reactionary curmudgeon.

Get rid of your cell phones.  Look, the world will not stop if you are not instantly available.  What people don't realize is that being in instant touch with someone and being instantly available to everyone makes you little more than a slave.

I have a cell phone.  The damn thing stays turned off, battery out, in a ziploc in my man-purse.  If I need to get in touch with someone, I can reassemble it, make the call.  If I leave the damn thing on, everyone seems to want to spend my money jabbering about inconsequential shit.

Also, please remember that the folks who run these companies track your whereabouts.  Hell, apple even sends your whereabouts to other companies so that they can better sell you shit.  Piss on that noise.

The most pathetic sight in the world is a hen-pecked middle aged man, standing in the middle of a Safeway with a cell phone glued to his ear, getting firm directions from someone on what size bag of cheeze-doodles to buy.  The second most pathetic sight is a middle class uber-mom from the faux-burgs in her underwater SUV with the phone plastered to her ear delivering children (who, by the way, are capable of walking) to their sports rituals.  The third is the sad little teenager, texting away, with a blank look and sadly limited scope of social life revolving around a tiny screen with a $0.05 charge per message.

I am making a straight statement.  More than any other technology, the cell phone is a tool to make us willing servants.  We react to the things as masters.  We allow disembodied someones elsewhere to order us around and run our lives.  It atomizes our society.

Please, for the love of God, put them away.

Dog Days

I know that this is a lame excuse, but summer is here and I would rather be doing something than writing about it.  Granted, after waking up at 4:00 AM and working all day, the something sometimes degenerates into a nap.

I am out looking for scrap lumber and/or old pallets for a compost heap.  I think that the easiest possible compost heap will be four pallets that I line with chicken wire on the inside and have my kids paint the outside.  If that isn't possible, I will have to see what I can scare up for scrap wood and make something myself.

Garden is growing slow this year.  Our weather has been cool and funky.  The tomatoes are green and still throwing flowers, the potatoes are happy and cruising along nicely.  Corn and beans were eaten by something.  I am seriously thinking about an anti-squirrel campaign with two boys and a BB gun.

So, when the weather starts going into fall, I will be more aware of writing, and if the muse takes me, you will get stuff when I put it out.  I think that leading a life is vastly more important that writing about it.

Compost.

Sorry bout the posts, making a new, decent compost bin and it is hogging a bit of time.

Summertime

And the livin' is easy.

I guess that I can't work up the necessary bile for a good post.  The sun is out and life is pretty damn good right now.

Have Cajun 16-bean soup with sausages for dinner.  Drinkin' a homebrew. Boys are content.  Hell, I even exercised today.

You know, right now I don't even care that the world is kinda going to hell.

Life is good.

I am going to enjoy it.

Devolution?

The best I can see, the way that countries seem to work when times get bad is that they break up into bits.  I cannot think of a single case, outside of military adventures, where countries responded to hard times by increasing size.

Consider the EU.  It was formed during good times, as a means of better competing with the large blocs.  Can't really say that it's formation was a response to bad, it was trying to better compete economically.  The only other country that I can think of who responded by attempting to grow would be Germany's response to the privations of the great depression in the form of anschluss and drang nach osten.

Most countries break up into smaller parts.  The warring states of ancient China, Europe after Charlemagne, the Soviet Union.  I think that large states take more energy and strength than small states. 

But I think that we will be making a decision about which way we will go soon.  Unlike most struggling states, we have a well-oiled military machine with experience.  This allows us a choice. 

Fever Dream

There have been some remarkable articles around the blogosphere lately.  The PTB must be getting pretty phenomenally irritated at the number of electrons out there in digital-land that are not supporting their line of BS.

There is one trend in these articles that is being hotly debated.  It isn't voiced directly, but it boils down to this.  Can we revive the system of trade and economics that we have so assiduously assembled in the last forty years?  Needless to say, if you have dropped by here more than once, you know my take on this matter.

But, regardless of my take on this, you have to live in the real world with the general populace and their opinions.   I think that the folks out here in the real world are starting to get really nervous.  But the folks in the MSM are blithe-fully ignoring the issue.

But here and there, folks in the 'sphere whom I deeply respect keep printing silly pablum about a "New Golden Age (replete with Part I and Part II)" when the system we have falls apart.  You know, maybe that will happen, but whenever you read the history books, interregnums appear to be dicey things.

It is a peculiar trait of the aging shit-hippie generation to always have a happy ending.  I think that there will be an American Renaissance, but none of use reading this screed will live to see it.    The fewmets will be hitting the fan in our lifetime.  One also has to remember that fewmets are chunky buggers.   The leading edge of the pile that is in the process of hitting the fan splattered on us in the dot-com crash,, 9-11, and the panic of '08.  I really don't think that the main body has hit yet.

So, back to Chuckie.  When he writes stuff like this, he is kinda like an oncologist cheerfully telling a cancer patient, that, once the surgeon chops off the patients balls and one of his legs and a couple of fingers, well, by God, things will just get back to normal and there you go.

I think that this might have to do with Mr. Smith's vocation of part time shill for the contrarian school of the stock market.  I really don't have any issues with him doing this, a guy has to put bread on the table.  But the idea that the current economic theory of interest and investment can be a tool to lead to a bright future is kind of like saying that heroin can also be an effective tool in palliative care when used by responsible people.  The statement may be true, but it can also be sadly misleading and thus false.

So, my point here is that statements about a coming golden age are just sadly false.  But that isn't a call to go out and eat a gun.  I is instead a call to maturity.  Sometimes life is chopping wood and carrying water.  We have led the lives of lotus-eaters for the past generation, to recognize that we will have to get back to work and live simply isn't the call to a new rebirth, but a bell tolling for us to return to the work we laid down to dream instead of Xanadu.