Sampler
HOME
MARTINEZ CA SLIDE SHOW Hover above bottom central of image for controls.
GENEALOGY
Please EMAIL me if any links are broken or if you have comments at GTKYSOR AT YAHOO DOT COM
CONTENTS: Interesting (to me) gems from the blogosphere or anything else that may strike my fancy.
REFERENCES:
TAXABLE INCOME by Larken Rose
MISSING CHILDREN INFO:
Code Amber
NEWS:
AlterNet.org
Citizens for Legitimate Government
ARCHIVES:
FEB 2003
MAR 2003
APR 2003
MAY 2003
JUN 2003
JUL 2003
AUG 2003
SEP 2003
OCT 2003
NOV 2003
DEC 2003
JAN 2004
FEB 2004
MAR 2004
APR 2004
MAY 2004
JUN 2004
JUL 2004
AUG 2004
SEP 2004
OCT 2004
NOV 2004
DEC 2004
JAN 2005
FEB 2005
MAR 2005
APR 2005
MAY 2005
JUN 2005
JUL 2005
AUG 2005
SEP 2005
OCT 2005
NOV 2005
DEC 2005
JAN 2006
FEB 2006
MAR 2006
APR 2006
MAY 2006
JUN 2006
JUL 2006
AUG 2006
SEP 2006
OCT 2006
NOV 2006
DEC 2006
JAN 2007
FEB 2007
MAR 2007
APR 2007
MAY 2007
JUN 2007
JUL 2007
AUG 2007
SEP 2007
OCT 2007
NOV 2007
DEC 2007
JAN 2008
FEB 2008
MAR 2008
APR 2008
MAY 2008
JUN 2008
JUL 2008
AUG 2008
SEP 2008
OCT 2008
NOV 2008
DEC 2008
JAN 2009
FEB 2009
MAR 2009
APR 2009
MAY 2009
JUN 2009
JUL 2009
Monday, November 29, 2004
President Bush, I need some advice regarding God's Laws and how best to follow them
Iraqi Lullaby: 2 Minute Video
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Seth (via Temujin)
Saturday, November 27, 2004
Unconstitutional War [excerpt]
The last time the Congress declared war was on December 8, 1941 (the morning after the Pearl Harbor attack, for those of you worried the Congress will sit around and debate for months while the enemy army overruns our country – they can get things done pretty damn fast if they have to!), and perhaps coincidentally, this was the last war we’ve been involved in over which there is substantial public agreement over its validity. - Vox Libertatis
SunnyK
Kelly
Conscious Robots
Science tells us that 'being human' isn't quite the way it seems. According to the best available evidence, we're not ‘free humans', we're actually machines… slavishly carrying out pre-programmed instructions.
It sounds nonsense, and yet for us to be able to exercise free will, we'd not only have to overturn the laws of physics, but also everything we know about how human beings came into existence.
Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming evidence, our perception of being able 'to do what we like with our lives’ is so powerful that even the most disciplined of scientists is unable to reconcile it with their day-to-day existence. Somehow, it's assumed, free will must exist, and one day we’ll fill the gaps in our scientific knowledge of what it is to be human and show precisely where our understanding of physics and evolution have let us down.
But what if it's not the science that’s let us down… but our perception of our own freedom?
What if we’ve been fooled? Fooled into thinking that we’re in charge of our lives when we’re really just doing precisely what we’re told to do? All day and every day?
Free will is a delusion caused by our failure to appreciate our true motivations
- attributed to Charles Darwin
This blog will show you how to see through the delusion of being able to make your own decisions: it will show you how to think of yourself as a robot. - Conscious Robot
Friday, November 26, 2004
Not a Hate Crime [excerpt]
Now I am under the opinion that a "hate crime" is bordering on the Orwellian idea of a "thoughtcrime", a punishment for one's personal ideas. - JBS
Morphosis
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Wet screen
snake scarf
Snakescarf
hello! i'm back with knitting to share!
i wanted to make something for my hubby, so he picked out the snake scarf from Knitting Pretty for himself. i splurged on Bouton D'Or Tao yarn (80% wool, 20% kid mohair) in lave and ecume (blue and pale gray), and here is what emerged:
i'm quite pleased with him; he is full of harmless snake-cuteness. the yarn is yummy--soft, lustruous, and lofty. that along with the tubular coil of the stockinette stitch makes for a warm and cuddly scarf. his iridescent blue button eyes give him quite a bit of personality (i have a weakness for button eyes, actually, for buttons in general). My current WIP is another scarf, but more on that later... - meow.meow
The ulimate interface to the planet.
Fly from space to your home town. Visit exotic locales such as Maui, Tokyo, Rome and Paris. Satellite imagery makes it real. Explore restaurants,hotels, parks and schools. Think magic carpet ride! No credit card required for a seven-day free trial at Keyhole.
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
The ZoomQuilt
A collaborative art project. [Left click and move right/up to zoom in or left/down to zoom out.] (via J)
How Effective is your Deodorant?
Do you ever wonder if your underarm treatment is effective?
Here is a simple way to find out.
Stop using it on one armpit, but continue using it on the other. Do this for about a week or two.
At the end of the day, take off your shirt and smell under the arms, noticing any differences between the right and left sides.
Record your results on the comments for this post.
# posted by Mary Ellen @ 21:41
Comments-[ 5 comments.]
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Tourist attraction in Iceland.
From Laura DeVries' blog.
World Toilet Day.
Today in Beijing 150 global toilet techies end a week long summit discussing the relationship between toilets and tourism. You may laugh if you haven't travelled much, but there are some strange Loo's in the world. Many have no seats, just pits, and they have handles on the cubicle walls to hold onto to lower yourself. Some have no handles, you just crouch. Then there are Urinals. No standard heights. Ceramic walls with a trough along the bottom leading to a drain at one end. I've seen a half a plastic pipe glued and screwed to a wall leading outside.
Apparently China has the stinkiest public pits in the world which better be wiped clean before the olympics, if they don't want them to be considered crappy. And yet in Paris I could no longer wait in line to use their ultramodern autosanitiser which takes a whole minute to flush out the whole cubicle after each use. There were 40 people in front of me. Doing the math in my head, I ended up looking for a concrete wall nearby and as I sighed relief looked up to see I was peeing on the cornerstone of The Eiffel Tower. Sorry !
And on that note, I'd like someone to confirm for me what I was told by a concierge at a hotel in Luxembourg or Belgium many years ago. I asked him why the toilet was backwards to what I was used to; the flush hole at the front, and a porcelain shelf at the back. Your pooh lands on the shelf and is flushed off. Also I had noticed a jar of long wooden toothpicks on the back of the cistern. The guy told me that they are Not toothpicks but shitpicks, for those who wish to investigate what had come out before they flush. Some people apparently want to check their " receipts" that they got value for their money on last night's dinner. Although it sounded bizarre to my western ears, It seemed somewhat practical if you are that methodical about your health. First law of physics: Shit in = Shit out.
So was that guy for real or was he handing me a load of crap? - Cliff Perry © 2004 [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]
Sunset
Monday, November 22, 2004
Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1 [excerpt]
....At that point, we hear the tanks firing their 240-machine guns into the mosque. There's radio chatter that insurgents inside could be shooting back. The tanks cease-fire and we file through a breach in the outer wall.
We hear gunshots from what seems to be coming from inside the mosque. A Marine from my squad yells, "Are there Marines in here?"
When we arrive at the front entrance, we see that another squad has already entered before us.
The lieutenant asks them, "Are there people inside?"
One of the Marines raises his hand signaling five.
"Did you shoot them," the lieutenant asks?
"Roger that, sir, " the same Marine responds.
"Were they armed?" The Marine just shrugs and we all move inside.
Immediately after going in, I see the same black plastic body bags spread around the mosque. The dead from the day before. But more surprising, I see the same five men that were wounded from Friday as well. It appears that one of them is now dead and three are bleeding to death from new gunshot wounds. The fifth is partially covered by a blanket and is in the same place and condition he was in on Friday, near a column. He has not been shot again. I look closely at both the dead and the wounded. There don't appear to be any weapons anywhere.
"These were the same wounded from yesterday," I say to the lieutenant. He takes a look around and goes outside the mosque with his radio operator to call in the situation to Battalion Forward HQ.
I see an old man in a red kaffiyeh lying against the back wall. Another is face down next to him, his hand on the old man's lap -- as if he were trying to take cover. I squat beside them, inches away and begin to videotape them. Then I notice that the blood coming from the old man's nose is bubbling. A sign he is still breathing. So is the man next to him.
While I continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying against the same back wall.
Then I hear him say this about one of the men:
"He's fucking faking he's dead -- he's faking he's fucking dead."
Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging.
However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.
Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.
"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.
I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns away and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.
But then two other marines in the room raise their weapons as the man tries to talk.
For a moment, I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here.
At that point the Marine who fired the shot became aware that I was in the room. He came up to me and said, "I didn't know sir-I didn't know." The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread.
The wounded man then tries again to talk to me in Arabic.
He says, "Yesterday I was shot... please... yesterday I was shot over there -- and talked to all of you on camera -- I am one of the guys from this whole group. I gave you information. Do you speak Arabic? I want to give you information." (This man has since reportedly been located by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service which is handling the case.)
In the aftermath, the first question that came to mind was why had these wounded men been left in the mosque?
It was answered by staff judge advocate Lieutenant Colonel Bob Miller -- who interviewed the Marines involved following the incident. After being treated for their wounds on Friday by Navy Corpsman (I personally saw their bandages) the insurgents were going to be transported to the rear when time and circumstances allowed.
The area, however, was still hot. And there were American casualties to be moved first.
Also, the squad that entered the mosque on Saturday was different than the one that had led the attack on Friday.
It's reasonable to presume they may not have known that these insurgents had already been engaged and subdued a day earlier.
Yet when this new squad engaged the wounded insurgents on Saturday, perhaps really believing they had been fighting or somehow posed a threat -- those Marines inside knew from their training to check the insurgents for weapons and explosives after disabling them, instead of leaving them where they were and waiting outside the mosque for the squad I was following to arrive.
During the course of these events, there was plenty of mitigating circumstances like the ones just mentioned and which I reported in my story. The Marine who fired the shot had reportedly been shot in the face himself the day before.
I'm also well aware from many years as a war reporter that there have been times, especially in this conflict, when dead and wounded insurgents have been booby-trapped, even supposedly including an incident that happened just a block away from the mosque in which one Marine was killed and five others wounded. Again, a detail that was clearly stated in my television report.
No one, especially someone like me who has lived in a war zone with you, would deny that a solider or Marine could legitimately err on the side of caution under those circumstances. War is about killing your enemy before he kills you.
In the particular circumstance I was reporting, it bothered me that the Marine didn't seem to consider the other insurgents a threat -- the one very obviously moving under the blanket, or even the two next to me that were still breathing.
I can't know what was in the mind of that Marine. He is the only one who does.
But observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances -- it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. According to Lt. Col Bob Miller, the rules of engagement in Falluja required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all.
Making sure you know the basis for my choices after the incident is as important to me as knowing how the incident went down. I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation.... - Kevin Sites
JFK Reloaded
.................................DALLAS, TEXAS....................................
12:30 pm. November 22nd, 1963.
The Dallas School Depository, sixth floor.
The weather is fine.
You have a rifle.
[Now see whether or not Oswald could have shot JFK.]
Live Cam at Dealey Plaza.
Stochastica
Spraying splaying flaying praying deigning to frey or to the fray dan rather not careerist viacommingled hack wanting desperately to believe in some kind of integrity forceful delusions abound pick your poison your emetic your yore days of lore, establishing a continuum of unabashed gore let us accept our barbarian roots and accept also the brutality of the world without any softening of our rhetoric, in effect, without lying; if we want to build empires and destroy lesser nations, so be it. But let's leave beyond all the rubricizing, the ruses, the veil of "democracy" and all those other meaningless shiboleths, those abstractions of dusty ossified philosophy and dismal science hacks, shills, whores, shuffling the kings contents in their brains to come up with rationalization for existence, theirs and by extension everyone else's. Let us flop about like fish on dry land, flipping in vein, flipping burgers, scientific discs of dead cow; let us not be dubbed "whimps" or even smirking chimps; no, let us plunder the world, kill and rape and committ a variety of atrocities and call ourselves "civilized." science and it's pracitioners are the greatest of all whores, not in terms of lubricity, but in terms of scale, by the effects of their fuckups and their kneeling down before the state and taking it like the bottom feeders they are. people are perhaps right to be wary and supercilious about "science." and thus have you probably the massive anti-intellectualism and dumbing down of a mere reek car. and corrolarying we can then see the distrust and even the outright animosity towards anything "secular." so then we witness the full retreat into that "good old time religion" it's good enough for them, for people who want to sleep, shielded from reality. - norelpref
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Hijacking Catastrophe is powerful, understated, straightforward and educational. In a single meticulously organized hour of evidence and analysis, viewers are treated to a thoughtful explanation of modern American empire, neo-conservatism as a driving force for the current Bush administration.
Friday, November 19, 2004
Faith in the System
Born and raised on a New England dirt farm, this young man went on to become the greatest stock trader ever - and one of the most despised men of his time.
He lived through two of America's most horrible stock crashes - making millions in a single day, as others jumped from windows to escape financial ruin. At times, he controlled the entire American economy from his posh New York office. He was blamed for the great crash of 1929. He survived death threats and kidnapping plots - on several occasions.
His name was Jesse Livermore. And in 1940, he killed himself with a .32 caliber pistol in a New York City hotel.
In 1891, at the age of 14, Livermore arrived in Boston on the back of a horse-drawn wagon. He had nothing to his name except a five-dollar bill that his mother had slipped him - against the will of his father, who argued that the boy should stay put and work the plow.
But his father never understood his son's knack for numbers ... a God-given gift that would be the source of his fortune. As luck would have it, the wagon stopped in front of the Paine Webber office. Livermore marched in and asked for a job. It just so happened that one of the chalkboard boys (who posted the results of the ticker on giant blackboards) didn't show up for work that day. Livermore got a job immediately.
Suddenly immersed in the wild action of trading stocks, Livermore gradually began to realize that the market had a life of its own. And he was bent on trying to figure it out.
Night after night, after a grueling day at work, he went back to his dingy boarding-house room. He would furiously enter notes and trends in a diary...trying to decipher the market's patterns. During those lonely years, two realizations formed his entire trading philosophy ... and would make him one of world's richest men.
The first realization was that he had to become a student of the market. He had to commit himself to an ongoing education ... not only of the market dynamics, but also of the personality flaws that caused people to make fatal trading errors. The other realization was that he needed a system - a set of self-imposed rules that would govern his life as a trader.
His belief in a system arose from his detailed observations that the stock market had an inherent logic ... and that it was only through logic that a trader could beat it - and make a real killing.
Two years into his self-education, Livermore felt confident enough to test his trading theories. The problem was he didn't have a stake - a wad of cash that he could use to start trading. Like other poor men at the time who sought their riches in the stock market, Livermore headed straight for the notorious bucket shops of Boston.
Operated by gangsters, bucket shops attracted stock gamblers like moths to a flame. That was because guys who were broke and desperate could open accounts and trade for a slim margin - usually ten cents on the dollar. So with fifty cents you could invest five dollars. And if you lost, the bucket shop kept the proceeds. With house odds of 95-to-1, most men met financial ruin. Except for Livermore.
Armed with his system, Livermore knew he could beat the house. And that's exactly what he did. Time after time, Livermore bet on stocks and won. In fact he won so often he was banned by the bucket shops in Boston. Shut out, he decided to put his skills to the ultimate test. He went to Wall Street.
In New York, he quickly made a fortune...but lost it when he strayed from his system. He was forced to return to the buck shops to rebuild his stake. Since he was banned in Boston, he went to St. Louis and then New Haven. Finally, he was ready to return to Wall Street to make another killing.
In the summer of 1929, Livermore's extensive analysis of the market pointed to a disastrous downturn. He just didn't know exactly when it would happen. He started shorting the market, his positions growing increasingly larger as Wall Street collapsed around him. The results were amazing...
While millions of people waited in soup-kitchen lines, he made a staggering $100 million during the Great Crash of `29.
The millions of investors who had lost everything complained about Livermore. People started questioning how he made so much money, while they ended up destitute. Even The New York Times blamed him directly for the tragic crash. Death threats came directly to his phone line - and he took them head on, talking his way out of them.
After his $100 million windfall, Livermore lost his passion for trading - and with it his fortune. No one could understand why - not even himself. It wasn't until his legacy had been chronicled that experts understood he had been suffering from clinical depression. But at the time there was only way out for him...a .32 caliber slug to the brain.
It was the same, magnificent brain that had developed one of the most successful trading systems ever.
Like most great concepts, Livermore's incredible system was simplicity itself. It involved market timing (knowing when to get in and out), quickly cutting losses, anticipating trends and optimizing the market's momentum (up or down).
Livermore was the first trader to actually demonstrate that both a commitment to market understanding, and a bona fide trading system were the keys to making millions in the stock market. And although Livermore is dead, his ideas live on to form the cornerstone of modern stock trading principles.
Regards,
Irwin Greenstein
for The Daily Reckoning
ODDBALL INVESTING
It all started with Forrest Berwind "Bill" Tweedy in 1920...
Bill was a strange fellow. No one really knows where he came from or when he was born. And if you saw him today, you would probably laugh.
The man wore suspenders, had a bushy mustache and a good-sized potbelly. He never married or had kids. He ate lunch at the same place at the same time every day. He was an oddball, to put it bluntly. And if you happened to walk past 52 Wall Street, chances are, you would see Tweedy working at his cluttered desk - busy writing letters and looking through company reports.
Tweedy's business was his life. And it was a successful one at that.
He owned a small niche brokerage house that specialized in trading tiny illiquid securities. Day after day, Tweedy scoured the market for publicly traded companies that had between 50 and 150 shareholders on the record. He attended their annual meetings, wrote down all the shareholders' names and sent them personalized letters. His goal was to find out who wanted to sell their shares and who wanted to buy more. From there, Tweedy paired the buyers with the sellers and brokered the deals himself.
It was a brilliant idea.
Bill Tweedy quickly became one of the only small- or micro-cap brokers in New York - the "broker of last resort," as he was called by the many shareholders who couldn't trade their shares anywhere else. And although I don't know how many small-cap stocks there were in 1920 relative to the number of major blue chip stocks, you can bet there were thousands more - just like there are today. That left Tweedy with a real monopoly in the market for brokering small-cap trades.
Tweedy's business was successful throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. Then he got his big break...
In the early 1930s, Tweedy developed a client relationship with Benjamin Graham - the father of value investing. At the time, Graham was a professor at Colombia University and had recently finished writing his now-famous books Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor. If you aren't familiar with Graham, I strongly suggest you read both of these books. They are two of the best primers you'll ever find on investing. But in case you don't have time to read the books right now, I'll give you an abbreviated version of his main points...
Graham (who, among other things, is famous for teaching Warren Buffett the ropes of value investing) proved you could make a fortune investing in companies that were selling for a huge discount to their intrinsic value. In other words, if a company was trading far below what its assets were worth (minus all liabilities - things like debt and accounts payable), Graham was confident that, over time, the company's true worth would be discovered...and anyone who invested while it was cheap would walk away much richer.
Think of it like this...if you went to a flea market and saw a rare three-legged 1937D Buffalo nickel selling for $900, you would buy it - knowing that the real value of the nickel was somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000. In other words, if you sold it later and ONLY got the nickel's fair value, you would still make about 233% to 344% on your investment.
Not a bad deal, right?
Well, that's exactly the philosophy that Graham used to buy shares of a company. He looked for bargains - companies selling for 60% to 70% LESS than they were worth. And it just so happened that many of the small, illiquid companies Tweedy tracked fit Graham's "value" model simply because they received no coverage on Wall Street and were undervalued.
Thanks to their shared investment strategy, Tweedy quickly became Graham's "go-to" broker. And Graham became Tweedy's largest customer - so big that he moved his office right next to Graham's office on 52 Wall Street so they could work together more efficiently.
Over the years, Tweedy's business grew. Howard Browne (who started his career as a runner on Wall Street at the ripe old age of 16) became Tweedy's partner in 1945. And the company slowly grew from a simple brokerage house (with about $88,000 in capital) to a full-fledged investment advisory business...that currently manages over $10 billion in assets.
Although Tweedy, Browne is a large money manager today (not the same small niche broker it was in 1920), one thing has NOT changed in its 84-year history. The company still looks to buy stocks that are trading for huge discounts to their real worth.
Here's how it's done...
One of the surest ways to spot an undervalued stock is to look at its price relative to the value of its assets. If a company is priced LESS than its assets are worth, you want to own the stock. It is undervalued. And you want to stay away from the companies that are selling for a huge premium to their asset value.
So how can you tell if a company is cheap relative to its assets?
The easiest way is to scan the market for companies that have a low price-to-book value. A company's book value is its net asset value minus its intangible assets, current liabilities, long-term debt and equity issues. Divide the market-cap by the book value and you get the price-to-book ratio.
If a company has a P/B value under 1, it is said to be undervalued. And if a company has a P/B value above 1, it is selling for a premium.
You want to own stocks that are undervalued and have room to grow. Historically, these are stocks that provide investors with the highest returns. For instance...
Tweedy, Browne looked at all the stocks trading on the major indexes from 1970 through 1981 that had a market cap of at least $1 million and traded for no more than 140% of book value. They ranked the 7,000 companies into nine groups - ranging from those that were overvalued (trading between 120% and 140% of book value) to those that were undervalued (trading between 0% and 30% of book value). What they found was incredible.
The lower the P/B ratio was, the higher the returns you could expect - without fail.
Stocks that traded between 120% and 140% of book value rose an average of 15.7% in a single year. The stocks that only traded for 80% to 100% of book value rose 18.5%. And the truly undervalued stocks, those trading between 30% and 0% of book value, rose an average of 30% a year.
That's pretty impressive when you consider the S&P 500 only returns you about 8.5% a year. And in dollar terms the numbers are equally impressive.
If you had invested $1,000 in all the companies trading for 30% of book value or less in 1970 (and rolled that money over each year into the next group of stocks that were trading for 30% of book value or less) it would have been worth $23,298 by 1982. That same $1,000 invested in the S&P 500 would have grown to $2,662. In other words...
By investing in undervalued stocks (those trading for 30% of book value or less), you can expect to make about nine times more money than simply investing in the S&P 500.
Who said investing was hard?
Best regards,
James Boric
for The Daily Reckoning
P.S. James Boric is the editor of Penny Stock Fortunes, in which he seeks out solid penny stocks at a great value. A natural math whiz, James spent years studying the strategies of investors like John Templeton and Warren Buffett... and refined them into what he calls the CXS Money Multiplier System. Using his proprietary method, James has lead his readers to substanstial gains in a surprisingly short amount of time - the trademark of penny stocks.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Worldometers (via Steve Bass' cousin Judy)
X-Cleaner
Free online scan (& removal) for spyware. If the X-Cleaner scan was not interrupted, then no spyware was found. (via Steve Bass)
Video Instroduction of Chen Style Tai-Chi [Scroll down to the November 16 post.]
Monday, November 15, 2004
Pilgrim's progress
We Have Now Become The Nation Our Founders Escaped From
FAMILY PHOTOS
The Parrot : I can tell several stories but this one is the best
Those of you, who have followed that aspect of our life, know that the parrot has a bad
attitude; she's mean and nasty and full of the devil. What I haven't mentioned is her
vocabulary which as awful and not fit for polite company. Now she had this before Lita
bought her. Almost every word out of her beaky bird's mouth is rude, obnoxious and
laced with profanity.
Lita has tried and tried to change the bird's attitude by consistently saying
only polite words, saying "no", playing soft music, singing, stroking, etc, and anything
else she could think of to "clean up" the bird's vocabulary.
Finally, last week after a particularly rude comment in front of some very religious friends, Lita got fed up and she yelled at the parrot. The parrot yelled back. Lita shook the parrot and the parrot got angrier and even ruder. Lita, as much as said, O.K., I'll fix you and she put the parrot in the freezer.
For a few minutes the parrot squawked and kicked and screamed. Then suddenly
there was total quiet. Not a peep was heard for over a minute.
Fearing that she'd hurt the parrot, Lita quickly opened the door to the
freezer. The parrot calmly stepped out onto her outstretched arm and said in effect:
"I believe I may have offended you with my rude language and actions. I'm sincerely
remorseful for my inappropriate transgressions and I fully intend to do
everything I can to correct my rude and unforgivable behavior."
We were all stunned at the change in the bird's attitude.
As Lita was about to ask the parrot what had made such a dramatic change in her
behavior, the bird continued:
"May I ask what the turkey did?"
HAPPY AMERICAN THANKSGIVING!
Gotcha, didn't I?????
- Brian and Lita (GalloPinto Group, message 16394),
Residencias Los Jardines
a question, Thai, tv, boobs, linking, the refractory period, music [excerpt]
My roommate Brian and I always ask thought-provoking yet completely absurd questions of each other (see 8/24). It's sort of a psychological exercise in which we can jump right into the core of each other's beings, hopefully without wearing any pants and having "forgotten" condoms.
Last night I was feeling a bit wishy-washy about love. I occasionally get a little wishy-washy, as I am a Cancer, so I guess that means I'm emotional. I also have trouble not pissing myself when I do coke; whether or not this has to do with being a Cancer, I'm not sure.
But mostly I was emotional last night because another holiday season is quickly approaching and that means one thing for me: masturbating in front of the mirror with a Santa hat on.
[Man, today would be a really bad day for my parents to start reading this. Gay sex with my roommate, doing coke, and watching myself jerk off. My god, I'm sorry.]
Anyway, the question was, "Brian, would you give up everything for a woman?" Brian, who at the time was smoking a cigarette, took a deep drag, looked off into the distance, and finally said, "Well, it depends on how much I have."
Very true.
For example, right now I don't have much going on. Sure, I have a good job. However, I don't have any money. I blame this not on my terrible spending habits ("Even though mine works perfectly fine, I think I'm going to buy a new iPod, since it's only $400") but on the fact that NYC is entirely too expensive. Also, I'm addicted to alcohol.
I don't have many friends, and I don't especially like the ones that I do have. I'm pretty sure my friend Greg tried to poison me three weeks ago (because of current legal issues, I can't get into the details at this time).
My family, which for years has thought that I have potential, is getting impatient waiting for me to capitalize on this potential (I don't know how - starting a business? running for office? starting some sort of espionage syndicate?). But they are learning each day that this "potential" was really just laziness well-concealed by constant self-aggrandizement. Therefore, they are turning against me. Although not entirely positive, I'm pretty sure my mom tried to push me down a flight of stairs last time I was home. Also, my dad stabbed me in the shoulder. Three times. Well, twice in the shoulder, once in the upper arm.
Other than that, what else do I have? I'm going to school, but "going to school" is the best way to describe it, since all I'm really doing is showing up, sitting there, leaving, and then not thinking about it again until the next class. I have this website, which is nice and good and all and gets me the occasional booby picture (thanks again Kevin), but it has made me both undatable and unhirable, once I get canned when my employer finds this.
So yes, I would give all this up for a woman. And it doesn't even have to be a particularly attractive women. I would prefer a woman who isn't a paraplegic, but if not available, I'll make due. - © Jason Mulgrew (via Faith) [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]
Sunday, November 14, 2004
SNOW!!!! [excerpt]
so yea last night was a boring one, nuttin was going on at all. and it was snowing, so i didn't really feel like going out. so i just chilled at my house and drank a few beers,i finaly got my car back with 2 new front tires, shit pimpin!!!!!!!! and tonight is my grand ma's 75th birthday i think, i'm not really that good with remembering ages - John
Interesting things go through my head...
Hawk has mentioned that he would like me to eventually move to the farm. With him, and his wife. (Have I mentioned her before? I can't recall... She is semi-sub, can't handle pain, or the sexual side of being submissive... We are pretty good friends, as per Hawk's "request") Anyway... Being in a D/s relationship must be easier without children. I have a 6 year old son that prevents me from moving in with them. I don't want him raised that way, or exposed to the three-way relationship... Or even to see me living with someone I am not married to... So that must mean I am ashamed of it, somewhere inside, doesn't it?
I think it's just the fact that he's still married... Even though it doesn't bother his wife in the slightest, even after 3 1/2 years, it still bothers me, I guess.... Hawk tells me to "forget your archaic Methodist upbringing" and just go with how you really feel... But that is easier said than done.
Do I sound like I am making excuses? I lay awake in bed telling myself I am crazy for staying in such a relationship, one with so many things that make it so hard... When I know plenty of really nice men, and I could have a nice easy "normal" relationship with a SINGLE man...Why do I fight so hard for this relationship??? Life is hard enough already....
And yet, when I am with someone else, there is always something missing... Hawk has it all... Except accessibility, and the chance for permanency.... - Amethyst Hawke
Reed's hummingbird tatto
Navajo symbol for the hummingbird.
People are always going to criticize a tattoo, but when you find a good one the opinions of other people become unimportant. I have wanted a tattoo for years. In fact, my mom said I could get one when I asked her one day...when I was sixteen. It's not as easy as just wanting one, however, and it took me 2 years to find one that was right. Recently, I have been struggling with school and what my future is going to look like. In times like these I tend to think of my grandma who passed away in over a year ago. I didn't really get anything to remember my grandma by when she died, so I thought a tattoo would be the perfect memorial. I thought about getting the numbers 327 over my heart, but I got discouraged because it's kind of contrived and plain. My sister kept saying over and over, "Get a hummingbird. Get a hummingbird." because my grandma loved hummingbirds. But I was like "Naw, I ain't no bitch. I ain't gonna get no girly hummingbird!" and then I slapped her...ok, maybe not. Anyway, I decided maybe I would get a symbol of determination, passion, or perseverance because my grandma really instilled these values in me. I started looking for Greek and roman and any symbol to represent the three, but I couldn't find any. My mom, who loves the small Cree Indian heritage we have, suggested looking up Native American symbols. I was looking through a page of symbols, when one caught my eye. I clicked on the link to see what it represented and I punched my mom in the face I was so excited...ok, ok, I'm lying again. I read the caption and it said something along the lines of, "This is the Navajo symbol for the hummingbird." HMMM..."The hummingbird is particularly valued in Native American tribes for its determination and perseverance. It represents being able to roll with the punches and being stronger than meets the eye." It was love at first sight. It's over my heart for life. - Reed
kvedja Disin
Saturday, November 13, 2004
WAR MOVIE
PhotoStory3
Generous Bill is offering the free PhotoStory3 to to all those who have an authentic XP OS. I've found that not only can I do cool things with photos, but now I can use PhotoStory3 to pan scanned documents as an alternative to PDF.
Friday, November 12, 2004
The MEGA FIX
Editor's note: In his extraordinary new DVD documentary, "Mega Fix," Emmy-award-winning filmmaker Jack Cashill traces the roots of Sept. 11 to the political exploitation of terror investigations by the Clinton White House in the desperate 1995-1996 election cycle. This eight part series, which began in Oklahoma City, culminates at the 9-11 commission hearings. To arrange a showing in your city, contact Jack Cashill.
The "Mega Fix" DVD is available now at WorldNetDaily's online store.
'MEGA FIX' preview: Part 1., 2., 3., 4., 5., 6., 7., 8.
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]
MSNBC Vote Fraud Video (via What Really Happened)
The collapse of the WTC
The following letter was sent today by Kevin Ryan of Underwriters Laboratories to Frank Gayle of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Underwriters Laboratories is the company that certified the steel componets used in the constuction of the World Trade Center towers. The information in this letter is of great importance.
Dr. Gayle,
Having recently reviewed your team's report of 10/19/04, I felt the need to contact you directly.
As I'm sure you know, the company I work for certified the steel components used in the construction of the WTC buildings. In requesting information from both our CEO and Fire Protection business manager last year, I learned that they did not agree on the essential aspects of the story, except for one thing - that the samples we certified met all requirements. They suggested we all be patient and understand that UL was working with your team, and that tests would continue through this year. I'm aware of UL's attempts to help, including performing tests on models of the floor assemblies. But the results of these tests appear to indicate that the buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by pools of burning jet fuel.
There continues to be a number of "experts" making public claims about how the WTC buildings fell. One such person, Dr. Hyman Brown from the WTC construction crew, claims that the buildings collapsed due to fires at 2000F melting the steel (1). He states "What caused the building to collapse is the airplane fuel…burning at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The steel in that five-floor area melts." Additionally, the newspaper that quotes him says "Just-released preliminary findings from a National Institute of Standards and Technology study of the World Trade Center collapse support Brown’s theory."
We know that the steel components were certified to ASTM E119. The time temperature curves for this standard require the samples to be exposed to temperatures around 2000F for several hours. And as we all agree, the steel applied met those specifications. Additionally, I think we can all agree that even un-fireproofed steel will not melt until reaching red-hot temperatures of nearly 3000F (2). Why Dr. Brown would imply that 2000F would melt the high-grade steel used in those buildings makes no sense at all.
The results of your recently published metallurgical tests seem to clear things up (3), and support your team's August 2003 update as detailed by the Associated Press (4), in which you were ready to "rule out weak steel as a contributing factor in the collapse." The evaluation of paint deformation and spheroidization seem very straightforward, and you noted that the samples available were adequate for the investigation. Your comments suggest that the steel was probably exposed to temperatures of only about 500F (250C), which is what one might expect from a thermodynamic analysis of the situation.
However the summary of the new NIST report seems to ignore your findings, as it suggests that these low temperatures caused exposed bits of the building’s steel core to "soften and buckle." (5) Additionally this summary states that the perimeter columns softened, yet your findings make clear that "most perimeter panels (157 of 160) saw no temperature above 250C." To soften steel for the purposes of forging, normally temperatures need to be above 1100C (6). However, this new summary report suggests that much lower temperatures were be able to not only soften the steel in a matter of minutes, but lead to rapid structural collapse.
This story just does not add up. If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I’m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans. Alternatively, the contention that this steel did fail at temperatures around 250C suggests that the majority of deaths on 9/11 were due to a safety-related failure. That suggestion should be of great concern to my company.
There is no question that the events of 9/11 are the emotional driving force behind the War on Terror. And the issue of the WTC collapse is at the crux of the story of 9/11. My feeling is that your metallurgical tests are at the crux of the crux of the crux. Either you can make sense of what really happened to those buildings, and communicate this quickly, or we all face the same destruction and despair that come from global decisions based on disinformation and “chatter”.
Thanks for your efforts to determine what happened on that day. You may know that there are a number of other current and former government employees that have risked a great deal to help us to know the truth. I've copied one of these people on this message as a sign of respect and support. I believe your work could also be a nucleus of fact around which the truth, and thereby global peace and justice, can grow again. Please do what you can to quickly eliminate the confusion regarding the ability of jet fuel fires to soften or melt structural steel.
1. http://www.boulderweekly.com/archive/102104/coverstory.html 2. CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 61st edition, pg D-187 3. http://wtc.nist.gov/media/P3MechanicalandMetAnalysisofSteel.pdf 4. http://www.voicesofsept11.org/archive/911ic/082703.php 5. http://wtc.nist.gov/media/NCSTACWTCStatusFINAL101904WEB2.pdf (pg 11) 6. http://www.forging.org/FIERF/pdf/ffaaMacSleyne.pdf
- Kevin Ryan
Site Manager Environmental Health Laboratories, A Division of Underwriters Laboratories. (via What Really Happened)
Iraq: The Unthinkable Becomes Normal
Edward S. Herman's landmark essay, "The Banality of Evil," has never seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on 'normalisation'," wrote Herman. "There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public."
On Radio 4's Today (6 November), a BBC reporter in Baghdad referred to the coming attack on the city of Fallujah as "dangerous" and "very dangerous" for the Americans. When asked about civilians, he said, reassuringly, that the US marines were "going about with a Tannoy" telling people to get out. He omitted to say that tens of thousands of people would be left in the city. He mentioned in passing the "most intense bombing" of the city with no suggestion of what that meant for people beneath the bombs.
As for the defenders, those Iraqis who resist in a city that heroically defied Saddam Hussein; they were merely "insurgents holed up in the city," as if they were an alien body, a lesser form of life to be "flushed out" (the Guardian): a suitable quarry for "rat-catchers," which is the term another BBC reporter told us the Black Watch use. According to a senior British officer, the Americans view Iraqis as Untermenschen, a term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as sub-humans. This is how the Nazi army laid siege to Russian cities, slaughtering combatants and non-combatants alike.
Normalising colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism, linking our imagination to "the other." The thrust of the reporting is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners of the kind that behead people: for example, by Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian said to be al-Qaeda's "top operative" in Iraq. This is what the Americans say; it is also Blair's latest lie to parliament. Count the times it is parroted at a camera, at us. No irony is noted that the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American and, by all indications, loathed. These indications come from apparently credible polling organisations, one of which estimates that of 2,700 attacks every month by the resistance, six can be credited to the infamous al-Zarqawi.
In a letter sent on 14 October to Kofi Annan, the Fallujah Shura Council, which administers the city, said: "In Fallujah, [the Americans] have created a new vague target: al-Zarqawi. Almost a year has elapsed since they created this new pretext and whenever they destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill children and women, they said: 'We have launched a successful operation against al-Zarqawi.' The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he exists, is not in Fallujah . . . and we have no links to any groups supporting such inhuman behaviour. We appeal to you to urge the UN [to prevent] the new massacre which the Americans and the puppet government are planning to start soon in Fallujah, as well as many parts of the country."
Not a word of this was reported in the mainstream media in Britain and America.
"What does it take to shock them out of their baffling silence?" asked the playwright Ronan Bennett in April after the US marines, in an act of collective vengeance for the killing of four American mercenaries, killed more than 600 people in Fallujah, a figure that was never denied. Then, as now, they used the ferocious firepower of AC-130 gunships and F-16 fighter-bombers and 500lb bombs against slums. They incinerate children; their snipers boast of killing anyone, as snipers did in Sarajevo.
Bennett was referring to the legion of silent Labour backbenchers, with honourable exceptions, and lobotomised junior ministers (remember Chris Mullin?). He might have added those journalists who strain every sinew to protect "our" side, who normalise the unthinkable by not even gesturing at the demonstrable immorality and criminality. Of course, to be shocked by what "we" do is dangerous, because this can lead to a wider understanding of why "we" are there in the first place and of the grief "we" bring not only to Iraq, but to so many parts of the world: that the terrorism of al-Qaeda is puny by comparison with ours.
There is nothing illicit about this cover-up; it happens in daylight. The most striking recent example followed the announcement, on 29 October, by the prestigious scientific journal, the Lancet, of a study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. Eighty-four per cent of the deaths were caused by the actions of the Americans and the British, and 95 per cent of these were killed by air attacks and artillery fire, most of whom were women and children.
The editors of the excellent MediaLens observed the rush – no, stampede – to smother this shocking news with "scepticism" and silence. They reported that, by 2 November, the Lancet report had been ignored by the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Star, the Sun and many others. The BBC framed the report in terms of the government's "doubts" and Channel 4 News delivered a hatchet job, based on a Downing Street briefing. With one exception, none of the scientists who compiled this rigorously peer-reviewed report was asked to substantiate their work until ten days later when the pro-war Observer published an interview with the editor of the Lancet, slanted so that it appeared he was "answering his critics." David Edwards, a MediaLens editor, asked the researchers to respond to the media criticism; their meticulous demolition can be viewed on the alert for 2 November. None of this was published in the mainstream. Thus, the unthinkable that "we" had engaged in such a slaughter was suppressed – normalised. It is reminiscent of the suppression of the death of more than a million Iraqis, including half a million infants under five, as a result of the Anglo-American-driven embargo.
In contrast, there is no media questioning of the methodology of the Iraqi Special Tribune, which has announced that mass graves contain 300,000 victims of Saddam Hussein. The Special Tribune, a product of the quisling regime in Baghdad, is run by the Americans; respected scientists want nothing to do with it. There is no questioning of what the BBC calls "Iraq's first democratic elections." There is no reporting of how the Americans have assumed control over the electoral process with two decrees passed in June that allow an "electoral commission" in effect to eliminate parties Washington does not like. Time magazine reports that the CIA is buying its preferred candidates, which is how the agency has fixed elections over the world. When or if the elections take place, we will be doused in clichés about the nobility of voting, as America's puppets are "democratically" chosen.
The model for this was the "coverage" of the American presidential election, a blizzard of platitudes normalising the unthinkable: that what happened on 2 November was not democracy in action. With one exception, no one in the flock of pundits flown from London described the circus of Bush and Kerry as the contrivance of fewer than 1 per cent of the population, the ultra-rich and powerful who control and manage a permanent war economy. That the losers were not only the Democrats, but the vast majority of Americans, regardless of whom they voted for, was unmentionable.
No one reported that John Kerry, by contrasting the "war on terror" with Bush's disastrous attack on Iraq, merely exploited public distrust of the invasion to build support for American dominance throughout the world. "I'm not talking about leaving [Iraq]," said Kerry. "I'm talking about winning!" In this way, both he and Bush shifted the agenda even further to the right, so that millions of anti-war Democrats might be persuaded that the US has "the responsibility to finish the job" lest there be "chaos." The issue in the presidential campaign was neither Bush nor Kerry, but a war economy aimed at conquest abroad and economic division at home. The silence on this was comprehensive, both in America and here.
Bush won by invoking, more skillfully than Kerry, the fear of an ill-defined threat. How was he able to normalise this paranoia? Let's look at the recent past. Following the end of the cold war, the American elite – Republican and Democrat – were having great difficulty convincing the public that the billions of dollars spent on the war economy should not be diverted to a "peace dividend." A majority of Americans refused to believe that there was still a "threat" as potent as the red menace. This did not prevent Bill Clinton sending to Congress the biggest "defence" bill in history in support of a Pentagon strategy called "full-spectrum dominance." On 11 September 2001, the threat was given a name: Islam.
Flying into Philadelphia recently, I spotted the Kean congressional report on 11 September from the 9/11 Commission on sale at the bookstalls. "How many do you sell?" I asked. "One or two," was the reply. "It'll disappear soon." Yet, this modest, blue-covered book is a revelation. Like the Butler report in the UK, which detailed all the incriminating evidence of Blair's massaging of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq, then pulled its punches and concluded nobody was responsible, so the Kean report makes excruciatingly clear what really happened, then fails to draw the conclusions that stare it in the face. It is a supreme act of normalising the unthinkable. This is not surprising, as the conclusions are volcanic.
The most important evidence to the 9/11 Commission came from General Ralph Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad). "Air force jet fighters could have intercepted hijacked airliners roaring towards the World Trade Center and Pentagon," he said, "if only air traffic controllers had asked for help 13 minutes sooner . . . We would have been able to shoot down all three . . . all four of them."
Why did this not happen?
The Kean report makes clear that "the defence of US aerospace on 9/11 was not conducted in accord with pre-existing training and protocols . . . If a hijack was confirmed, procedures called for the hijack coordinator on duty to contact the Pentagon's National Military Command Center (NMCC) . . . The NMCC would then seek approval from the office of the Secretary of Defence to provide military assistance . . . "
Uniquely, this did not happen. The commission was told by the deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Authority that there was no reason the procedure was not operating that morning. "For my 30 years of experience . . ." said Monte Belger, "the NMCC was on the net and hearing everything real-time . . . I can tell you I've lived through dozens of hijackings . . . and they were always listening in with everybody else."
But on this occasion, they were not. The Kean report says the NMCC was never informed. Why? Again, uniquely, all lines of communication failed, the commission was told, to America's top military brass. Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defence, could not be found; and when he finally spoke to Bush an hour and a half later, it was, says the Kean report, "a brief call in which the subject of shoot-down authority was not discussed." As a result, Norad's commanders were "left in the dark about what their mission was."
The report reveals that the only part of a previously fail-safe command system that worked was in the White House where Vice-President Cheney was in effective control that day, and in close touch with the NMCC. Why did he do nothing about the first two hijacked planes? Why was the NMCC, the vital link, silent for the first time in its existence? Kean ostentatiously refuses to address this. Of course, it could be due to the most extraordinary combination of coincidences. Or it could not.
In July 2001, a top secret briefing paper prepared for Bush read: "We [the CIA and FBI] believe that OBL [Osama Bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."
On the afternoon of 11 September, Donald Rumsfeld, having failed to act against those who had just attacked the United States, told his aides to set in motion an attack on Iraq – when the evidence was non-existent. Eighteen months later, the invasion of Iraq, unprovoked and based on lies now documented, took place. This epic crime is the greatest political scandal of our time, the latest chapter in the long 20th-century history of the west's conquests of other lands and their resources. If we allow it to be normalised, if we refuse to question and probe the hidden agendas and unaccountable secret power structures at the heart of "democratic" governments and if we allow the people of Fallujah to be crushed in our name, we surrender both democracy and humanity.
November 12, 2004
John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is published by Jonathan Cape next month. This article was first published in the New Statesman.
© John Pilger 2004 (via Lew Rockwell) [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Jeremiah, the computer face [excerpt]
Works with a single computer with XP OS!Jeremiah's visual system is actually based upon a system developed for visual surveillance, a system which is designed to watch people and vehicles performing their every day tasks. Waiting for something unusual to happen. Jeremiah has literally 'been born of this technology' and is the emotional face or the automated security guard who watches patiently for something to happen. Imagine now if we gave that system feelings. Boredom when nothing is happening, anger when people leave and he cant, sadness, joy and surprise when finally the event happens that he has been waiting for. This is Jeremiah, but his emotions and interest in the world and people make him more like a child than a computer system. - Richard Bowden (via Peter Plantec, message 680, V-Humans Yahoo Group)
Voting [excerpt]
"The odds that your vote will actually matter," said Pierre, a professor at the University of Quebec, "are so slight as to not be worth thinking about. The race would have to be dead even without your vote. And then, of course, your vote would have to be in an electoral state where it mattered. The actual number, that is the real odds that your vote will decide the outcome are something on the order of 8 chances out of 10 raised to the 8000th power. For comparison, the number of seconds since time began is something such as 3 times 10 to the 17th power. In other words you'll be shipwrecked on an island with Paris Hilton and win the lottery every day...before your vote will matter much." - Bill Bonner, The Daily Reckoning (9 Nov 04)
Monday, November 08, 2004
The HondaJet has successfully completed its initial flight test in North Carolina. This experimental compact business jet is the first to be equipped with Honda HF118 engines-a milestone of significance for both the company and the industry. Honda engineers specifically designed the engine to offer superior fuel efficiency and remarkable cabin space. The engine has been positioned on the upper surface of the main wing in a unique configuration to reduce drag at high speeds and increase cruising efficiency. See also the Forbes article. (via TIA DAILY)
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Rules and ruminations from a master inventor
As has been widely noted, inventing is a particularly American trait — it is our birthright, and we do it more consistently, ardently and democratically (men/women/children, all walks of life, all levels of income and education) than anywhere else. This country itself is a great invention. The founding fathers created a place where average people can simply, reliably ‘get things done.’ Through eight changes of power over my lifetime, from Republican to Democratic and back, there has hardly been a moment when getting things done was interrupted, until September 11th, 2001, and even then only briefly…
As a kid I liked reading about the “Rouquayrol Apparatus” in Twenty thousand Leagues Under the Sea” I wanted my name to precede a word like ‘apparatus’! (I tried to call the Steadicam “The Brown Stabilizer” until I was talked out of it by the guy who became my licensee!)
When I was a child in the 1940’s, life still resembled the frontispiece of “The Book of Knowledge” The sky was filled with dirigibles and propeller planes and auto gyros, and the spiral road of man’s progress, from the trudging ‘caveman’ to the ox-drawn plough in the distance, led directly to the skyscrapers and the great ‘Streamliner’ locomotives and sleek racing roadsters and motorcycles in the foreground.
And as late as 1964 — before the computer; before word processing and spell-checking and copiers and faxes; before answering machines and pagers and cell phones and camcorders and walkmans; before CD’s, VCR’s, DVD’s, PDA’s, CNN, GPS, cable, satellite, voicemail, e-mail, and the trillion-celled Internet — when I was already 30 years old, the invention of life as we now experience it had barely begun.
Personal Inventing
Inventing doesn’t have to be for profit, with patents and manufacturers and all that painful rigamarole, anymore than singing in the shower needs a record deal to be rewarding. Protecting inventions and making money from them can be difficult and troublesome; but understanding the inventing process and practicing it as a private gift and a personal art-form yields immense satisfaction. I realize that I’ve been doing it most of my life, and the results are all around me—one-of-a-kind gadgets, techniques, and skills that are at least as rewarding as some of my more celebrated (and troublesome), inventions!
You may not think of yourself as a potential inventor, but devising your own unique objects, tools, appliances, accessories and methods, can be surprisingly easy. The only useful motive, however, is because something you personally want in life is missing.
Most of us take for granted what exists in life and seldom specifically recognize what does not—yet this insight is arguably the most creative of all the inventing acts. If your motive for inventing is just to get rich, the odds are heavily against you, but when you go after something you really want, at least the problem is worthy of your efforts. Of course a degree of common sense is involved in selecting those challenges. (Many of us have pined for anti-gravity, for example, but we understand why it’s still unavailable—it’s not that bloody easy!)
Success may depend on a degree of luck as much as on your resources, but even if you bat .250 in the inventing game it will give you back a lot of satisfaction; and if you’re clever, your strike-outs won’t be too costly. Over the last 30 years, it has become clear to me that the game is not about brilliance or engineering acumen so much as old-fashioned determination and persistence. You poke around in the mist, scoring little pieces of the puzzle until it shows signs of either working or being hopeless, which, as Edison pointed out, is nearly as useful if you intend to keep trying! The fog, at least for me, can be quite dense. I typically don’t see more than a couple of moves ahead and can seldom visualize the complete assembly without actually seeing at least part of it in my hands. So I make sketches, I put together stupid little models at lunch made of pasta or meat or straws and move them around like a kid playing with his food. (If you’re in an inventing mood, eating alone is recommended, preferably in a booth, and don’t forget to consume your ‘model’ before you leave, and chew up those drawing on the napkin!)
And when you score, two things result: your original desire will be more or less fulfilled and you’ll have a great conversation piece, a unique, one-in-the-world gadget to show off — I have dozens of them — and sometimes the money will follow, because if you really want that particular thing, it’s a good bet that other people will too.
You may spend some money (deductible once you have a track record!), but the acquisition of that unique item may actually cost you less than buying one at retail if somebody else had already invented, licensed, manufactured, advertised distributed and marked it up! Even if you fail to score an actual working gizmo, what you have learned may eventually pay off in some other way, since you are now a more-or-less advanced thinker on that arcane subject.
And sometimes, right in the heart of the puzzle, despite sharing the planet with millions of other inventive souls, you may realize that you are out there all alone, way out there where perhaps where no one has ever gone before; and if the thing you are hunting begins to edge into view, it’s a fantastic feeling.
The ‘Way’ of inventing is deceptively simple. It’s not just about gadgets. It is a way of thinking and problem-solving and the principles can be applied to all kinds of everyday tasks and challenges.
There are seven basic steps. Don’t be misled by the breezy quality of the list — the first item sometimes requires the greatest creative leap, and the difficult-sounding remaining steps can be surprisingly easy and cheap:
Identify some object (or method or technique) you need or want that is missing—even if its absence has long been taken for granted.
Try to imagine all the ways that it might look, feel or operate if it did exist, and make sketches, diagrams or primitive models.
‘Operate’ all the versions, at least in your mind, and select the most promising to try out or build
Deconstruct the winning version on paper, right down to its hypothetically disassembled parts.
Acquire whatever components can be purchased and hire experts to make the parts that are unavailable *
Assemble the thing and give it a try.
Improve it or start over (or celebrate!) as appropriate **
* Having parts made may be easier than you imagine — it’s surprisingly cheap, for example, to get things custom welded at drag-racer shops or made out of metal or plastic at machine shops. If you go in with a sketch, welders and machinists will happily help you, and a couple of relationships like that are good for a lifetime of one-of-a-kind stuff. Of course some parts will have to be remade, perhaps several times, until your invention shows signs of working.
** If it’s still a turkey, put it in the ‘bin of whims’ if a near miss or nail up it on the ‘wall of shame’ if totally ridiculous. Be prepared to ignore benighted mockery and placate fearful significant-others but don’t ever entirely give up if there is even a chance in hell that the thing will work.
Eventually, perhaps early some fine morning, at that hour when the brain does its most mysterious problem-solving, you may think of a better way to go and be inspired to try it again!
Evolution...
There is an anticipatory interval, brief or long, in the course of inventing something desirable, that resembles the pre-coital interval (brief or long) in a sexual relationship. I have learned, over the years, to savor it as one of the more satisfying pure contemplations in life. (“The Joy of Inventing” would be laying it on a bit thick, but the foreplay, at least, can be euphoric.) Though my earliest quest (for a ‘vacuum-silenced housing’ for film cameras, yet) would remain unconsummated, and though, invention-wise, notwithstanding my dalliance with several other notions, I was still practically a virgin, the possibility that I might score, was always ineluctably exciting—like the growing conviction that one may actually make love to a newly desirable acquaintance.
Intrigued by an unsolved problem, a missing something, a ‘gap’ in life, you may or may not have considered trying to ‘invent’ something; but once an idea, a possible solution, a plausible answer beckons, it will flicker at the back of your head, drawing your attention to itself, like a distant match-flame. And from that moment on, so help me, endorphins and peptides analogous to the sexual kind, and pheromones from the Muse herself will bind to the old morphine-receptors in your brain to reward thinking about it. Lying on your back in a pre-dawn alpha state, that flame sometimes edges forward and grows brighter and sometimes dims, but once in a great while it keeps on coming, announcing its magnitude over the horizon like one of those ‘cyclops’ million-candle-power headlights that slash ahead of road-trains in the Australian outback, taking no energy from you, the host, but rather lighting up the means of its own design, spotlighting details that were not even known to be missing, becoming more and more coherent; until you alone on earth seem to hold this complete shimmering vision, this incandescent hologram of lights and colors that, who knows, may change your life, if not the lives of others in the wide world.
It has been suggested that the urge to invent, like the sexual urge, is primal and evolution-driven, and is specifically mandated by our large brains, adept digits, and weak, clawless, fangless bodies. We were designed by nature to innovate, yet surprisingly few of us late-model Cro-Magnons still give this innate ability free rein. We are institutionally lulled into using what’s handed to us and accepting the world as-is, and all too seldom do we shout our dissatisfactions and trust our own ideas for fixing them.
Yet even our coddled, over-stimulated present day world still awaits an infinite number of cool and/or essential devices and ingenious solutions; and neither squid, nor snake nor dolphin are up to the task! It’s up to us... In fact, at this stage of our planet-transforming inventive march, it might be said that squid, snake, and dolphin et al depend on us to inventively save their endangered world!
I have seen that magic light show at its very brightest more than once so far in my life (although, strangely, never for the device that became known as the Steadicam — I got way too excited about an earlier, clumsier, totally different version, imagining that it would change the way movies are made and even win an Oscar, but it turned out to be a turkey, and I could never quite trust the feeling or recover that euphoria when the real thing came along a year later!) The all-time ‘big one’, the Great Mental Comet of 1979, launched the quest for my magnum opus, the so-far-unfinished object referred to around here, in 24 years of relevant paperwork, as “The Walking Machine” — a human-powered transportation device that still swings on its irregular orbit back into my life and burns intensely in my dreams. The discovery of this giant ‘gap’ in our lives occurred during the endless hours on set during The Shining, and though I haven’t entirely given up the quest, I have finally decided to share, later on in this book, all that I know about the Walking Machine and several other seductive inventions-to-be, in the hope that someone in the world may score them in my lifetime. (Why? Because after 25 years I still really want one!)
Copyright 2004 Garrett Brown (via MSNBC) See FAIR USE NOTICE, below.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
THE ERA OF FICTITIOUS CAPITALISM
Perspective.
While doing radio interviews this fall regarding themes in our book, Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving The Soft Depression of the 21st Century, the question invariably arises: "France? Nice place to visit, but why the heck do you live there?"
The short answer is, of course, the wine is cheap and the woman are...um, elegant. The long answer is, we gain perspective. It's the long answer, because it requires an explanation. One could gain perspective from just about anywhere, of course...but why not do it in a place where the wine is cheap and the women pleasing to look at?
An English reader, who also lives in France, recently passed on an interesting article written by a Chinese bureaucrat, published on a non-profit website hosted in Italy, sponsored by the government of Singapore. The aim of the site is to increase amicable relations between Asia and Europe in a U.S.-centric world. The purpose of the article: A strategic recommendation on how China ought to position itself while the United States and Europe - as the major players in the two-bloc international system the author predicts will eventually emerge - gear up for eventual war.
If we were writing our daily missives from our offices in Baltimore, would such a site, and such an article, be interesting? Probably. But we'd likely judge the origin of the site through Murdoch's lens at Fox News, like so many TV-addled minds do, and dismiss it out of hand. Away from influence, living as foreigners, in a country where they don't pronounce words as they are spelled, we take to the extraordinary like gnats to a sugar bowl. We are addicted to the taste and go there often to get a buzz going. But we are under no illusions that it has nutritional value.
What could possibly interest us about a Chinese bureaucrat's white paper on impending global war? First of all, his conclusion: "In the last century," writes Wang Jian, "American people were pioneers of system and technology innovation. However, the interests of a few American financial monopolies now lead this country to war. This is such a tragedy for the American people.
"Clouds of war are gathering. Right now, the most important things to do for China are:
1.) Remain neutral between two military groups while insisting on an anti-war attitude. 2.) Stock up in strategic reserves 3.) Get ready for a short supply of oil 4.) Strengthen armament power 5.) Speed up economic integration with Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan..."
It's a rather unsettling idea. China as the neutral power in a war between the United States and a united Europe. How did Wang get there? That's the subject of the second part of the article, which we find intriguing...and even more unnerving. Wang's view is disturbingly similar to our own understanding of the way the global economy works.
"War is the extension of politics and politics is the extension of economic interests," Wang asserts. "America's wars abroad have always had a clear goal, however, such goals were never made obvious to the public. We need to see through the surface and reach the essence of the matters. In other words, we need to figure out what the fundamental economic interests of America are. Missing this point, we would be misled by American government's shows and feints."
Wang's argument in a nutshell: By the mid 1970s, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and other major capitalist countries had completed the industrialization process now underway in China. In 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window, the Bretton Woods system collapsed, and the dollar - the last major currency to be tethered to gold - came unstuck. Economic growth as measured by GDP was no longer restricted by the growth of material goods production. Toss in a few financial innovations, like derivatives, and the "fictitious" economy assumed the central role in the global monetary system.
"Money transactions related to material goods production," writes Wang, "counted 80% of the total [global] transactions until 1970. However, only five years after the collapse of the Bretton Woods, the ratio turned upside down - only 20% of money transactions were related material goods production and circulation. The ratio dropped to .7% in 1997."
As we note in our book, since Greenspan assumed the central role at the most powerful central bank in the world, he has expanded the money supply more than all other Fed chairmen combined. From 1985-2000, production of material goods in the United States has increased only 50%, while the money supply has grown by a factor 3. Money has been growing more than six times as fast as the rate of goods production. The results? Wang's research reveals that in 1997, before the blow-off in the U.S. stock market, mind you, global "money" transactions totaled $600 trillion. Goods production was a mere 1% of that.
"People seem to take it for granted that financial values can be created endlessly out of nowhere and pile up to the moon," our friend Robert Prechter writes in his book, Conquer the Crash. "Turn the direction around and mention that financial values can disappear in into nowhere and they insist that it isn't possible. 'The money has to go somewhere...It just moves from stocks to bonds to money funds...it never goes away...For every buyer, there is a seller, so the money just changes hands.' That is true of money, just as it was all the way up, but it's not true of values, which changed all the way up."
In the fictitious economy, the values for paper assets are only derived from the perceptions of the buyer and seller. A man may believe he is worth a million dollars, because he holds stocks or bonds generally agreed in the market to hold that value. When he presents his net worth to a lender, a mortgage banker for example, and wishes to use the financial assets as collateral for a loan, his million dollars is now miraculously worth two. If the market drops, the lender, now nervous about his own assets, calls in the note...the borrower once thought to be worth two million discovers he is broke.
"The dynamics of value expansion and contraction explain why a bear market can bankrupt millions of people," Prechter explains. "When the market turns down, [value expansion] goes into reverse. Only a very few owners of a collapsing financial asset trade it for money at 90 percent of peak value. Some others may get out at 80 percent, 50 percent or 30 percent of peak value. In each case, sellers are simply transforming the remaining future value losses to someone else."
As we saw in the 2000-2002 bear market, in such situations, most investors act as if they were deer being approached by a speeding truck at night. They do nothing. And get stuck holding financial assets at lower - or worse, non-existent - values. Anyone suffering glances at their pension statements over the past few years knows their prior "value" was a figment of their imagination.
Back to Wang: "In the era of fictitious capitalism, a fictitious capital transaction itself can increase the 'book value' of monetary capital; therefore monetary capital no longer has to go through material goods production before it returns to more monetary capital. Capitalists no longer need to do the 'painful' thing - material goods production."
Real-life owners of stocks, bonds, foreign currency and real estate have increasingly taken advantage of historically low rates and applied for mortgages backed by the value of these financial assets. Especially since the rally began 8 months ago, they then turn around and trade the new capital on the markets. "During this process," writes Wang, "the demand of money no longer comes from the expansion of material goods production, and instead it comes from the inflation of capital price. The process repeats itself."
Derivative instruments, themselves a form of fictitious capital, help investors bet on the direction of capital prices. And central banks, unfettered by the tedious foundation set by the gold standard, can print as much money as is required by the demands of the fictitious economy. You can, of course, trade the marginal values of these fictitious instruments and do quite well for yourself.
But Wang sees a darker side to the equation. "Fictitious capital is no more than a piece of paper, or an electric signal in a computer disk. Theoretically, such capital cannot feed anyone no matter how much its value increases in the marketplace. So why is it so enthusiastically pursued by the major capitalist countries?"
The reason, at least until recently, is that the "major capitalist countries" have been using their fictitious capital to finance consumption of "other countries'" material goods. Thus far, the most major of the capitalist countries, the United States, has been able to profit from the system because since the establishment of the Bretton Woods system, and increasingly since its demise, the world has balanced its accounts in dollars.
"Until now," writes Wang, "U.S. dollars [have counted] for 60-70% in settlement transactions and currency reserves. However, before the 'fictitious capital' era, more exactly, before the fictitious economy began inflating insanely in the 1990s, America could not possibly capture surplus products from other countries on such a large scale simply by taking advantage of the dollar's special status in the world...Lured by the concept of the 'new economy', international capital flew into the American securities market and purchased American capital, thus resulting in the great performance of U.S. dollar and abnormal exuberance in the American security market."
And here we arrive at the crux of Wang's argument that a war is brewing. "While [fictitious capital] has been bringing to America economic prosperity and hegemonic power over money," he suggests, "it has its own inborn weakness. In order to sustain such prosperity and hegemonic power, America has to keep unilateral inflow of international capital to the American market...If America loses its hegemonic power over money, its domestic consumption level will plunge 30-40%. Such an outcome would be devastating for the US economy. It could be more harmful to the economy than the Great Depression of 1929 to 1933."
Japan's example suggests, as your editors have oft reminded you, that a collapse in asset values in a fictitious economy can adversely affect the real economy for a long time.
In the era of fictitious capital, Wang surmises, America must keep its hegemonic power over money in order to keep feeding the enormous yaw in its consumerist belly. Hegemonic power over money requires that international capital keep flowing into the market from all participating economies. Should the financial market collapse, the economy would sink into depression.
America's reigning financial monopolies, he believes, (whoever they may be), would not stand for it. - Addison Wiggin, The Daily Reckoning
Editor's note: Addison Wiggin is the editorial director of the Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Bill Bonner, of the New York Times Business best-seller Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving The Soft Depression of the 21st Century, (John Wiley & Sons). For more, see: The Best Investment Book I've Ever Read!
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Belated Halloween Stuff
Drunk Pumpkin
2004's Scariest Halloween Costumes are Here (via Lex Alexander)
Fair Use Notice: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available in an effort to advance awareness and understanding of issues relating to civil rights, economics, individual rights, international affairs, liberty, science & technology, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
RSS feed address: http://kysor.blogspot.com/atom.xml