You wanna see something REALLY scary?
You really have to watch “Asteroid Impact” in HD over on YouTube – it’ll be so much better than with the teeny player below. Hard to think of a clearer argument for developing space capabilities right damn now, either.
A tall order
Bob Herbert says Stop Being Stupid:
….(Bernie) Madoff summed up his activities with devastating simplicity. He is said to have told the F.B.I. that he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there.”
Somehow, over the past few decades, that has become the American way: to pay for things — from wars to Wall Street bonuses to flat-screen TVs to video games — with money that wasn’t there.
Something for nothing became the order of the day. You want to invade Iraq? Convince yourself that oil revenues out of Baghdad will pay for it. (Meanwhile, carve out another deficit channel in the federal budget.) You want to pump up profits in the financial sector? End the oversight and let the lunatics in the asylum run wild.
For those who wanted a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood, there were mortgages with absurdly easy terms. Credit-card offers came in the mail like confetti, and we used them like there was no tomorrow. For students stunned by the skyrocketing cost of tuition, there were college loans that could last a lifetime.
Money that wasn’t there.
The other day upon the stair, I spent some money that wasn’t there … then I woke up to find it really wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t. Now all of us – even the ones who managed their money well – have to spend even more money that isn’t there. Herbert says we have tremendous choices as to how we use that debt and thinks:
We should use it to invest in the U.S. — in a world-class infrastructure (in its broadest sense) to serve as the platform for a world-class, 21st-century economy, and in a system of education that actually prepares American youngsters to deal successfully with the real world they will be encountering.
I think he’s right.
The photo is Leonard and Ova years later by anyjazz65, whose immensely entertaining account begins:
Leonard had emptied that case of Michelob he’d carefully hidden in the lawnmower shack at the corner of the back garden. Now while lying in his driveway counting stars and got fascinated by the light bulb at the top of the flag pole in his front yard. He became convinced it was an alien space ship and that he was about to be abducted and experimented on in ways he mostly wouldn’t like.
Leonard jumped up (always a mistake) and ran for his life. In just three strides he ran full face into the steel garage door which he’d left rolled half open. (Or half closed, depending on your point of view.) Leonard’s face stopped running while the rest of Leonard continued on toward the Studebaker.
When Leonard came around again, he stood up catching the top of his head on the garage door, which understandably was still there. He reeled and tumbled again this time striking the back of his head on the Studebaker’s back bumper.
I think you need your head examined if you don’t read the the rest, check out other pics & stories in the Talking Pictures set (slideshow) and (most important) over at Lost Gallery.
Accidental Theatre presents Elite Snowstorm of Lies III: Attack of Pyramid Squad
Somehow I ended up watching How The Elite Control Politics on YouTube. While I was watching it, I was inadvertently playing Snow (Hey yo) by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The result was a pretty mesmerizing 5:50. You could try it by clicking those links … if you want.
If not, how about this?
Control-Alt-America
In Time to Reboot America, Thomas L Friedman remarks that (according to Fortune) General Motors “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.” He says we can’t continue to be “dumb as we wanna be” and that:
…our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.
That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.
It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.
The photo is Oval Office reproduction – Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum and Library – Independence, Missouri by Marshall Astor – Food Pornographer. You can see some of that food pornography in his Flickriver, and over on his blog he has a cool video of Earth Kitt, who passed away yesterday.
I picked it because while Friedman sometimes upsets me, I agree wholeheartedly with his assessment that the next few months are critical to the future of our nation. We’ve been stumbling down a golden road for the last decade or so. I think as we start to slip and fall on it we are all beginning to see that the gold is just faded and peeling paint and we haven’t amassed any real riches.
I for one am willing to invest in America, to make financial and lifestyle sacrifices and to really work on the behalf of building a better nation and world.
I sure as hell am not going to give any money to people to develop new instruments of financial deception though.
I hope that the man who sits at that desk in just a few weeks and the team he has assembled feel the same and will make the same effort and inspire others to do so as well. I also hope that they will try and drag our governmental apparati into this century and out of the Truman era.
Tis the season … for the Heifer Project
If the crush of I-wannas and must-haves has you feeling trampled by the holiday season, consider The Heifer Project for those who might feel the same. The premise is simple:
A good dairy cow can produce four gallons of milk a day – enough for a family to drink and share with neighbors. Milk protein transforms sick, malnourished children into healthy boys and girls. The sale of surplus milk earns money for school fees, medicine, clothing and home improvements.
And because a healthy cow can produce a calf every year, every gift will be passed on and eventually help an entire community move from poverty to self reliance. Now that’s a gift worth giving!
You can give a whole cow or just a share, a water buffalo or a goat or stuff a stocking with a flock of chicks. Click over and check it out.
The photo is Close up Cow by mad paul. After a look at his flickriver, I think the mad part is for “mad skillz” – check it out.
Ask the Internet presents: Is this a problem?
On a road that I walk on – which is a private road by the way but I know people on it and along with many others, have walked on it all my life and so I guess feel entitled – the above “situation” has developed.
To me, it looks like a great place to die in a snowstorm or rainstorm, but about all I now about electricity is that it scares the crap out of me when in power line form.
Dear internets: am I right to be concerned about this situation or is it yet another intrusion of busy-bodies into the rights of property owners?
Boss Farmer: Michael Pollan and the Department of Food
Food writer Michael Pollan has a letter to the next Farmer in Chief in the NT Times. Pollan – a writer who has been floated as a dark horse candidate for Secretary of Agriculture – says that food policy will be a major (if unforeseen) focus for the Obama Administration, not only for for soaring food prices contributing to shortage and hunger but also due to the impact of our food policy on our energy policy:
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.
I was hoping for Bill McKibben as Energy secretary, but maybe Pollan will bring some “next wave” visionary cred to the cabinet (though after watching the video below, I’m thinking maybe not). 
Here’s Michael Pollan’s web site, his blog at the NYT and The omnivore’s next dilemma video talk at TED.org.
The Washington Post lists a few safer candidates that are not at all exciting to me. Bill Kristoff isn’t too excited either. He suggests that with just 2% of people engaged in farming, we focus on the 100% that are engaged in eating and rename it the Department of Food. He links over to fooddemocracynow.org where you can see 6 more interesting candidates and sign a petition to encourage the President-elect to think outside of the bigbox.
The photo is Striations by Nicholas_T. Be sure to view it bigger and/or in his New Jersey Skylands slideshow.
Michigan is burning
In Senate to Middle Class: Drop Dead, Michael Moore says that the Senate could have given a bailout tied to reducing greenhouse emissions, increasing fuel efficiency or just for the simple fact of keeping a few million people working in this difficult time.
But instead, the Senate said, we’ll give you the loan only if the factory workers take a $20 an hour cut in wages, pension, and health care. That’s right. After giving BILLIONS to Wall Street hucksters and criminal investment bankers—billions with no strings attached and, as we have since learned, no oversight whatsoever—the Senate decided it is more important to break a union, more important to throw middle class wage earners into the ranks of the working poor than to prevent the total collapse of industrial America.
We have a little more than a month to go of this madness. As I sit here in Michigan today, tens of thousands of hard working, honest, decent Americans do not believe they can make it to January 20th. The malaise here is astounding. Why must they suffer because of the mistakes of every CEO from Roger Smith to Rick Wagoner? Make management and the boards of directors and the shareholders pay for this.
I understand objections to bailing out the Big Three. What I can’t understand is how there is no alternative plan offered by the luminous body of elected pulchritude that is the US Senate. What is Plan B, Senators?
Michigan has been sputtering for years … it’s burning now.
The Elephant and the Blind Men
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.
The above is the beginning of The Blind Men and the Elephant, an ancient Indian tale translated in 1873 by John Godfrey Saxe. Please go read this if it’s an unfamiliar tale … or read it anyway, as it’s stood the test of time.
The story came to me as I was pondering an assortment of modern calamities. It made me think about how our work on these problems is so remarkably compartmentalized.
We’ll spend $800,000,000,000.00 (or so) bailing out people who have been playing Games With Money: Other People’s Version. We’ll wonder if we should spend 5% of that staggering sum on three companies that are responsible for the jobs of 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 people (depending on who you ask) and the pension and retirement of many more. We’ll say that Social Security has a $10,400,000,000,000 shortfall looming (actually, the Bush Administration said that in 2005). We’ll lament at the fall of lake levels and the rise of seas and the melting of the Arctic and the death of species.
We’ll do everything, it seems, but sit down and take a good look at the whole picture, to see that we can no longer borrow from a future if we can’t figure out how to repay the debt.
The photo is Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa by exfordy* and can be enjoyed in their South Africa, 1999 slideshow (set). He writes:
This bull walked right by the car. If I had kept the window open I could have touched it. We had been told that if we stayed in our car we would be OK. A Japanese tourist had got out of his car the previous week and had been killed by an elephant.
*exfordy as in “Ex Ford Employee” – what are the odds that Michigan-crazy me I would find and choose this photo from the vasty herd of elephant photos under Creative Commons license on Flickr?????
making a list … putting this on it
NPR has a “first listen” of the new CD Sugar Mountain from Neil Young and say:
Neil Young was just a few days shy of his 23rd birthday when he took the stage at the Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Mich., for what would become a legendary performance. It was 1968, and Young was about to release his self-titled debut solo album. His old band, Buffalo Springfield, had split up six months earlier, and few people even knew who Young was. But to his own surprise, and to the surprise of the Canterbury House, Young drew a sold-out audience.
Image courtesy Neil’s Garage.
