Boondocks for Bloggers

Getting through the no joke zone

The airport security check is largely what Bruce Schneier calls 'security theater,' just a bunch of invasiveness meant to convince us that there's a pervasive problem and the government's on top of it. This is a bad place for the 'speak truth to power' ethic -- I don't actually like being detained. But, I nearly lost it Friday.

My practice is to carry a second cell phone battery with me so that if I use up my current one and can't get to a charger, I can still operate in the world. Life without a cell phone is an unnavigable data-poor fog that I can really only tolerate if I'm strapped into a seat. So, I carry a charged battery.

Apparently, to the x-ray machine, my cell phone battery looks like a 9 volt battery, which has about twice the width and half the cross section. 9-volt batteries are mandatory bag checks. Why? Apparently, they're both uncommon and frequently used in IEDs. If you haven't served in Iraq, IEDs are what we used to call bombs -- improvised explosive devices. I didn't say

1. So, most of the fake bombs that you miss use 9-volts?
2. Dude, I could totally set off a bomb with that
3. You'd think those terrorists would switch to C-cells

I was good! But, then, after establishing that I had a totally innocent non-flagging type of battery, he swabbed my bag for explosive residue. I did say,

1. So, I shouldn't carry explosives in the same bag I use for my carry-on?

I mean, I'm allowed to carry explosives around town, aren't I? Actually, I don't know any more. But, I think so. How else would people catch fish? There's no need to make jokes, he started, and yammered for a while. This yob, he wants to make it clear, has been given power over me. I didn't say,

1. Don't tase me, bro
2. Look, just cuff me and leave me in a holding room

Do you not acknowledge how good I am? Both lists of things I didn't say, I want to add, occurred to me at the time. I just said,

1. I don't set your priorities

Which he asked me to repeat twice, just to show who was in charge.

added two posts

Apparently, if I start a post and publish it later, it ends up in the same position it would have been if I'd written it all at once. They're ordered by start time, which seems odd. But, I wrote another song, is the link.

Also, I updated a post from earlier today.

Cumulative Tropical Storm Wind Probability through Sunday night back down to 4%

Well, that's certainly going in the right direction.

I'm calling it: Cobb-Edwards-Huckabee

So, we can now say we know with some confidence who the Major Party candidates will be. The Green Party will go with David Cobb -- he got the nomination last time, and the Greens like consistency. David Cobb is a strong organizer, and he's shown the ability to mobilize many people to the Green Party. As he says, we don't expect to win the presidential election until at least 2020, so we're not looking for the best president so much as the best presidential candidate, even more so than the corporatist parties. The campaign is really all we expect him to lead.

Peter Camejo burned too many bridges with his Nader 2004 bid, and I don't think Nader actually wants the responsibility of being the candidate. Maybe he'll run with the Reform Party again. Ralph Nader could take the nomination if he asked for it, but he didn't ask for it last time, and I don't expect he'll do it this time.

I do expect Matt Gonzales to run for the nomination, but I don't expect him to get it. He's nationally recognized, certainly, but I don't think the national party is ready to follow him -- he's still got a youthful stink of self-aggrandizement.

We could dream of a Jello Biafra/Henry Rollins ticket, but I think that would be mostly about the music -- if a celebrity gets the nomination, it'll be Nader, not the punk musicians. The activists who make the party go haven't historically taken them seriously.

Then, yeah, Edwards and Huckabee.

So, suddenly New York CIty is at a 5% chance of being hit with Tropical Storm Force Winds by Noel by 2 PM Saturday

These things turn like a snake. It was supposed to go to Canada! 5 % doesn't sound like too much , but I can't say I care for the trend.

More on Wall Street bonuses

So, the Manhattan real estate price link to Wall Street bonuses makes the latter important. The linked article talks primarily about the Long Island economy's dependence, but adds information about the bonuses.

Companies that have announced layoffs so far include Lehman Brothers, which cut 2,500 mortgage jobs nationally; Citicorp, which eliminated 1,600 New York City positions last spring; and Bear Stearns, which has shed about 900 jobs in its mortgage unit as well as in other areas including stock trading.

In addition to warning about job losses, [New York State Comptroller Thomas] DiNapoli said Wall Street bonuses probably will be smaller this year because third-quarter profits of the seven biggest financial firms based in New York City dropped nearly 65 percent from the year-earlier period. He said the decline might be "modest," however, because earnings for the first half of the year were strong, and bonuses usually drop at a slower rate than profits.

The article usefully points out that the average bonus has only doubled over the course of the bubble, so a 50 % drop might be all we see. However , we had a rather stronger economy in 1997 -- without fake real estate equity making everything go, Wall Street (and, you know, Americans) may be in a world of hurt.

Thanks to the Housing Bubble Blog for the link.

Crap

update: I think sausage is getting treated unfairly here. The fancy yuppie sausage I buy doesn't have any preservatives -- which, given my lifestyle, presents its own dangers -- and shouldn't be any more dangerous than the parts of the red animals you can eat without grinding. But, this is certainly bad news for the pepperoni.

Alcohol consumption is linked to an increased risk of cancer of the mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, breast, colon and liver.

That's a lot of organs. It's a good thing alcohol's heart-healthy. But, there's no rule for how much drinking increases your cancer risk by how much -- I guess it's new data. But, alcohol and red meat are bad? I don't mean to make fun. Quantification's the main thing.

With this following on the heels of the pronouncement that a chicken diet had less climate impact than a vegetarian diet -- and (the hand-waving addendum) that local foods beat vegan -- I'm considering striking the goat, pig, sheep and cow from the diet, and shopping more aggressively for local foods.

But, this is largely a political question. Ask a presidential candidate what people should do with this information in hand, and what the federal government's role should be.

Ceci Snyder, a registered dietitian with the National Pork Board, which represents pork producers, says, "The U.S. Dietary Guidelines include meat and processed meat, and those guidelines are based on a review of the scientific evidence."

It's part of the president's job to break that sort of corrupt deadlock, and as candidates they should be taking a lot of stands that require moral courage. I'd like to hear what they have to say.

Especially (the formerly obese) Huckabee.

Noel to smash harmlessly through Nova Scotia

Well, that's a relief.

Schneier on the War on the Unexpected

As you know, this blog serves a few functions. It's primarily a valve to protect my friends and family members from my musings, but has a number of secondary value offerings. And one of these is to collect pointers to web artifacts that appealed to me.

Security expert Bruce Schneier talks here about the boneheadedness of 'see something, say something,' and mentions my core argument against it: people will already support really suspicious things, and constantly admonishing them to do so just terrorizes them.

The New York Times wonders why Californians burn their houses down.

Charles P. Ewing, a forensic psychologist and law professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo, said the fires were sure to catch the attention of people inclined to arson.

They are likely the ones following the fires very closely, Mr. Ewing said. Then, it’s not uncommon for arsonists to engage in copycat activity or to piggyback on a naturally occurring fire.

Arson experts said juveniles, who are believed to be behind about half of intentional fires, are often curious about fire but do not intend to cause cataclysmic harm. Adults’ motivations are more complex.

Sometimes, Mr. Ewing said, arsonists actually derive sexual pleasure from committing the act, while others are seeking attention and may participate in extinguishing the very fires they light.

Hmm. Yeah. Adults. Complex. Oh, right, the New York Times is still pretending that the housing bubble was something they were totally justified in ignoring. But, sexual pleasure? Is it just possible that for every two homeowners who burned down their investment property to get their rocks off, one did it to pay off his mortgage with his insurance?

In Manhattan Specifically

Prudential Douglas Elliman reports that real estate prices in Manhattan have trebled since 1997. So, we should probably wait until they're a third as much before we jump in, don't you agree? I've seen other charts where 4Q2001 was a great time to buy, but not so much here.

As I said, the WSJ thinks the housing bubble peaked in 2005

But, we expect the final house values to end up where they started. In 1997.

Cool housing price change tool in WSJ

I logged out of WSJ Online and it still worked for me, so it should work for you. It shows deliquencies and median house prices by quarter from 1Q2005 to 2Q2007. Seattle, Portland and Salt Lake City are over their 4Q2005 medians, although the WSJ considers that the peak of the bubble. The New York-Wayne-White Plains MSA is nearly the same, but there's a lot of structure. Manhattan is being propped up by desperate hedge fund managers, enough to change the average for the MSA as a whole. That's not going to last.

Real Estate Operations

So, now I'm looking for a national property manager to invest in. All Property Management points to Kravetz Realty Group, but I don't think they're publicly traded, and they don't manage single family homes. The link is to e*trade's list of real estate operations companies, but many of them seem pretty exposed to losses in their real estate holdings.

I guess it makes sense that if you were making money managing other people's property, you'd eventually start buying it. But, I'm looking for a pure play. Ideas?

OK, I'm now in BWX

Let's see how this does against, say, a 5.1 % CD. It took until now -- 9 days -- to get money available in my eTrade account. They promise me this'll happen faster in the future.

Snap Crackle Pop

Continuing to indulge in my new hobby of coopting corporate jingles, I've turned to my favorite jingle, the Rice Krispies madrigal -- there's a tension between the integrity of the doggerel and the content of the message, but the original had the lyric 'beets pickle,' so it's a hard problem.

Snap, hey those traps abound!
The military broken, too much ground to pound
Torture flap, no time to nap
all o'er the map, raise the age cap
Snap is going to bring us down

The ice floes crackle and bears are drowned
Katrina left New Orleans in a dirty mound
Caps fickle, Papers trickle, UN stickle, Coal pickle
Crackle is going to bring us down

For the housing bubble, Pop's the sound
That lets us know we're economically unsound
Loose lending chop, housing starts stop, the dollar flops, we all push mops
Pop is going to bring us down

(now sing all the verses at once. You can't do it alone.)

I wrote a song

Three hundred million people
No two are quite the same
each doing things their own way
each plays a different game
but most agree on one thing
well, all agree, let's say
That America must get out of Iraq
And George Bush is to blame

Oh, yes, American must get out of Iraq
And George Bush is to blame
He lied us in to a war of choice
And ruined our good name
Whether for oil or votes or to feather the nests
of his friends it's all the same
America must get out of Iraq
And George Bush is to blame!

Urban Astronomers

So, OK, shooting stars tonight and through Friday, but no hope of seeing them in New York, even if it weren't cloudy. But, what I love about this story is this:

"Orionid meteors are normally dim and not well seen from urban locations," said meteor expert Robert Lunsford, adding, ". . . it is highly suggested that you find a safe rural location to see the best Orionid activity."

A safe rural location. "I don't like leaving the city any more than you, but if you want to see meteors, you have to take some risks. Watch out for goats -- they can be ornery."

New Interruptor Sweeping the Nation

We have always known, said Pooh, that heedless self-interest was bad morals.

SPDR Lehman International Treasury Bond ETF

The top story at the Motley Fool today is that Lehman created a fund to facilitate the panicked flight from the Dollar that I myself seek to engage in. It opened October 5th, and it looks like there was a brief surge and a pullout, but what the heck? I've opened an e*trade account.

In case you missed it? We had an unnamed tropical cyclone

Fifteen didn't make it. And, as the hurricane season only has six weeks left, there probably won't be any more storms*.

* -- this in response to criticism that I seemed to be rooting for the hurricanes.

Census in trouble

Let’s be clear. This is not a hearing about a potential problem or a threat but real, actual damage to the 2010 Census. The ability of the career professionals at the Census Bureau to carry out the Census and provide the country with the most accurate numbers has already been adversely affected. Without an immediate exception to get funding to the census, the accuracy of the 2010 Census will suffer even more dramatically.

Did Visa eliminate its PR department?

What an odd line:

Visa, currently in a quiet period following a global restructuring, would not comment on the issues....

A quiet period following a global restructuring? Like the reorg left them all talked out? Maybe they've taken a page from the administration and realized that not providing information is easier than spinning it.

Annals of wacky allopathy: Polio Vaccine causes Polio

Did you even know this could happen?

In 2000, the United States switched to injected vaccine made from killed virus, which cannot mutate. But oral drops with the live, weakened version of the virus are still used in most poor countries, including those where the disease has never been eliminated: Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This vaccine, invented by Albert Sabin, is easier to give, offers much stronger protection and can beneficially “infect” other family members or neighbors, protecting them too.

But in rare cases, it can mutate into something resembling wild polio virus, which can paralyze or kill.

And aid workers wonder why people don't trust them. The former lieutenant governor of Viriginia mentioned in the story (he reputedly got polio after his elder son Jack got the Sabin vaccine) is Jenna Bush's prospective father-in-law, by the way; that he wasn't mentioned by name does suggest the New York Times has rather a grudge against the President.

New York Times today

Oh, fun interactive tool in the New York Times today. Subprime mortgage percentages by census tract. It also gives whiteness -- apparently Darien, CT, is 6 % - 8 % non-white, which is a different town than I grew up in.

I'm not super-clear about the focus on sub-prime. Isn't it the interest-only loans that create the huge default rate? Maybe they were securitized together, but the problem wasn't pricing risk properly, it was tricking poor people into taking on the poor investment decisions of wealthier people. Maybe interest-only loans were largely subprime -- and liar loans, which are also a problem, definitely were -- but I fear that if we start talking about the housing bubble collapse as coming from a problem in the subprime markets, the solution will be to stop extending credit to the poor, which will reinforce economic stratification.

Also in the Times today, another Krugman cultural reference, now to an FDR quote (from his second inaugural address,) which I wanted to capture as I thought it was cool: “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals. We know now that it is bad economics.”

Conspiracy Theory XKCD

So, this post is why some conspiracy theories -- ones that get countered with "Nobody would do that" instead of "That couldn't happen" -- are good and some bad.

It's looking very much like we'll have an unnamed tropical cyclone

Ah, tropical depression 15, we hardly knew ye.

Will Noel go East?

2005 saw Delta in Morocco and Vince in Spain. Noel may be going that way.

Somewhere on the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me

OK, last xkcd for the day.

Maybe the tyranny of Murphy is the penalty for hubris

Helping to identify losers

Ah ... I just applied to run the London Marathon on April 13th. It's a £32 fee, which is about $67. They don't give it back if you don't give in, they 'give it to charity,' which charity is presumably the London Marathon itself.

This is all well and good. However! They also give you a jacket. I'm mystified by this.

"Hey, nice jacket!"

"Yes, I applied for the London Marathon and didn't get in."

"I've always wanted to be rejected from that! Oh, how I envy you!"

Advantage: Huckabee

Maybe I should put money on Mike Huckabee's getting the GOP Nomination. Dan Bartlett, "who ... has been described as the President's alter ego*," savaged the field of Republican Presidential hopefuls, and only leaves Giuliani and Huckabee standing. And whenever you look too closely at Giuliani, you see all these problems.

* -- You know, I'm the President's alter ego. Hey! I've been described as the President's alter ego!

Another investment tip

Now, we're seeing homebuilders undercutting people they sold to last year by hundreds of thousands of dollars, either straight up or at auction. But, often their spokespeople will say, "This is really the lowest price we can afford to sell at."

Banks are also taking over a lot of homes that they don't feel they can afford to sell. Banks traditionally get houses off their balance sheets pretty quickly, but I think the losses will be too shocking to accept. My expectation is that banks are going to end up holding on to a lot of residential real property.

But, really? Empty homes are a problem. Hobos move in, pipes burst, nobody notices leaks and displaced windows. Everything inside was designed to persist at temperatures and humidities comfortable to humans, whereas it'll be experience conditions ripe for black mold. You can't leave a house unoccupied until inflation recovers the value you bought it at and expect it to be OK.

I expect builders and banks both to start reaching out to management companies to rent all of these condos and houses that are starting to sit around. I don't know if there even are any national players, but that seems like a business that's going to seriously take off.

Talking Heads reference in Paul Krugman's column today

Now, as they survey the wreckage of their cause, conservatives may ask themselves: “Well, how did we get here?” They may tell themselves: “This is not my beautiful Right.” They may ask themselves: “My God, what have we done?”

But their movement is the same as it ever was.

Just thought that was cool. Hey, it's my blog. He also writes

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts to equate dissent with treason. But Goldwater ... staunchly supported Joseph McCarthy.

This sounds like an attack on Bush apologists' hypocrisy as they attempt to reform. But, I think actual Bushies might assert that McCarthy wasn't a bad dude. It's not just Ann Coulter -- the poison's everywhere.

Um ....

[Charles Schulz' son Monte] said his mother, Joyce Doty, was very upset at being portrayed [in the Peanuts creator's biography] as an overbearing and shrewish. Reached at her home in Hawaii, she said, “I am not talking to anybody about anything.”

Just going through some old email

This is an email I wrote a friend who was dead set on buying a condo on July 12, 2005.

OK, what's my goal? I want to be sure that you're evaluating your risk correctly. Now, if I pay $18,000 per year in rent, I'm gambling that a real investment would lose at least that. I could afford maybe a $300K house on a 15-year mortgage, so I'm gambling on a 6 % / year decline. But, I think it'll be much faster.
The real estate market is local. However, the mortgage rates are national, the investment capital seeking shelter is national, and the repeatedly disproven investment meme 'safe as houses' is national. Furthermore, the drop in the value of the dollar making real investments attractive to foreigners is national, and the top 6 home builders provide some large share of the market. Moreover, there's a global housing bubble driven by some of these (obviously not the last two) same effects.
Here's another article.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jun2005/nf20050616_5078_db016.htm

The point of which is that between the subprime lending, the investors* and the people who are making their minimum payment (60% of WaMu borrowers who borrowed last year) there are going to be a lot of defaults even if interest rates don't rise, which is inconceivable. Defaults bring housing prices down, which eliminates equity lines of credit, eviscerating consumer spending, reducing business activity and making a whole new slew of people unable to make their monthly payments. When they do rise, the profit takers Fortune speaks of will act, selling in a flurry and bringing prices down. In the third wave, the equity lines of credit will already be gone, but the house price drop will be much faster, shutting down housing starts and leaving us with a gross overinventory of houses, which accounting rules will force on the market, dropping the prices a fourth time. So, that's my thesis. A four-stage drop, with an attendant depression and a massive surge in homelessness. I'm gloomy!
You either have to time the market -- I'd expect mortgage origination to peak when rates start to edge up, but that's when all of the other profit-takers will act -- or hold on to your apartment until it has lost only as much value as you would have paid in rent + excess taxes. Or, you know, lose money.
RFM

* --- this article does not speak of investors, but you know they're out there: more this year than last, twice as many last year as three years before. I believe 16.8% of new mortgage originators are declared investors, and [a mutual friend who had told us she was misrepresenting an investment purchase as a primary residence] explained the rationale not to declare.

So ... I think that's still more or less correct, although then I was predicting the inevitable and now we're living it. I may have had some effects out of order -- my email doesn't mention the five-year balloon payments, because I'd only started blogging on June 2nd, and didn't fully grok that people never follow links; they're what the referenced article is about.

My argument leaves out the home builders' carrying costs and intent to sell, which helps clarify the market in a lot of places. Also, it seems to imply I understood the global housing bubble better then than I do now, which is certainly possible. And we haven't really gotten into the economic contraction-housing deflation cycle. But, while we feel like we have a lot of empty houses, they're to a large part new construction -- I don't imagine that the default rate has really hit its stride -- it's only, what, three times what it was two years ago?

update: In the interest of humility, I did want to point out an error. Home equity lines of credit dried up all at once. They're already gone. It's not going to get worse in depreciation-contraction cycles.

Don't Be Fool! Don't Buy Now! Let Them Pop!

Here's a video to support my assertion that there's a collapsing housing bubble in the same countries that are complaining about higher grain prices.

Blackwater Comparative Costs

So, everyone's talking about how Blackwater costs considerably more per consultant that a regular Army sergeant. But! You can't compare their salaries! The Army has pensions, it trains you, & c.

I haven't seen mentioned in these discussions that, since Blackwater hires exclusively ex-military, we have already paid to train them, and they typically left before they qualified for their pension. We can drop those costs from the analysis.

Nobody was saying ‘hey, the speculators were bad’ on the way up, when people were selling their homes and making lots more money

I was.

Carol Anne Gotbaum apparently strangled herself

In the famous words of Lixion Avila, I have run out of things to say.

Carol Anne Gotbaum, 45, was arrested Friday at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix after she allegedly became “irate” when gate crews refused to let her board a flight for which she was late, according to US airways officials. She died at the airport.

Gotbaum, 45, of the upper West Side of New York, died less than an hour later, after cops claim she apparently strangled herself while trying to escape from the handcuffs in a holding cell at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

It's nice when the wealthy and powerful fall into the traps lain for the indigent and disempowered, as it's the only way the rules can get changed. They're the stories we hear about. I'm not saying you can't accidentally strangle yourself when handcuffed, but the fact that Mrs. Gotbaum was left unsupervised long enough for it to happen points to a problem with hiring minimum wage workers and leaving the mechanisms of the state in their hands.

Her step-mother in law may run for mayor, and I think the more people who've suffered due to this sort of thing that we have in positions of authority, the better off we are. So, until I find out she actually has unsupportable views, I'm going Betsy Gotbaum 2009!

A request to support orphans in China

(email I received from a friend)
Jenny Bowen, founder of Half the Sky and famous in
the China adoption community for her work supporting children living in China's orphanages, is campaigning to carry the Olympic torch along with 8
children currently living in China's orphanage system. Bringing her work
and the lives of China's orphans to the public eye would be an amazing
benefit to the children living in China without forever families as well as
all children adopted from China. And best of all, it bring would glory and
honor to 8 special children!
Please take a quick minute to vote for Jenny and the kids by clicking on the
title link. We'd appreciate it if you could forward this
link to others as well. Like Jenny says, they need a LOT of votes.

Half the Sky was created in order to enrich the lives and enhance the
prospects for orphaned children in China. We establish and operate infant
nurture and preschool programs, provide personalized learning for older
children and establish loving permanent family care and guidance for
children with disabilities. It is our goal to ensure that every orphaned
child has a caring adult in her life and a chance at a bright future.

Hey! The price of grain went up!

Of course, as it's a global market and the dollar is shrinking, this is expected. What's surprising to me* is that the WSJ mentions the housing bubble, but only to say it's also hurting the economy, not that it wiped out great swaths of farmland.

* -- in the "I find it surprising you failed to take your muddy shoes off before walking across the carpet" sense

Melissa is coming

SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS...ASSOCIATED WITH AN AREA OF LOW PRESSURE JUST SOUTHWEST OF THE CAPE VERDE ISLANDS...HAVE INCREASED IN ORGANIZATION THIS MORNING. GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THIS SYSTEM IS POSSIBLE OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS AS IT MOVES SLOWLY WESTWARD.

This is where the hurricanes that threaten Manhattan tend to start. No mention of adverse shear or other mitigating factor, and every identified tropical cyclone so far has turned into a named storm. So, this may be a problem.

Hillary's enemies turn up the heat

Al Gore is not stepping in to take the Democratic nomination. I think realization of that is seeping in. Obama has reportedly been seeming deflated, Edwards has for some reason been ignored by the media and Richardson, who seems to be large, square-headed and male -- presidential -- is apparently too poorly connected to rate a mention in most headlines about polls. The other Democratic candidates seem too willing to confront the root iniquities that make this country what it is to seem credible.

Hillary's taking the nomination, and the Democrat is taking the White House. She's a juggernaut. Can no one stop her?

One person can. One person can step in to the race in December or even February, take the nomination and win the 2008 presidential election. And the levers of power are being worked to see that this happens.

President Pelosi is taking the stage. We're heard a lot of folderol from the Democratic Congress about why they're not pursuing impeachment. The Army's broken, the justice department is in disarray, we have a humiliating failure to address climate change, armed bands are wreaking havoc in our protectorates with and without our sponsorship, the dollar is evaporating, the chicanery underlying our economic expansion is collapsing and this is all due to the fact that Bush 43 has the presidency. Every moment that man gets to call his shuttle Marine One, further disasters befall us. If the Constitutional Congress had foreseen Congress' inaction in this case, they wouldn't have bothered to mention impeachment at all. The Democrats can't do it, though, because they're beholden to the Clintons and the Democratic Leadership Committee ne'er-do-wells, and they don't want to threaten the former first lady's ascension.

Since the Downing Street Memo has apparently been forgotten, a Spanish version was released a few days ago. Here's the press gaggle:

Q If I can change topics, there's a -- about the history of the Iraq war here. There's a transcript in the Spanish newspaper, El País, that was said to be from a meeting between the President and the Spanish Prime Minister back in February 2003, in which, according to the tapes of this transcript of the conversations, Saddam Hussein offered to step down and go into exile one month before the invasion, and the President seemed to think that that was a realistic possibility at that time. Do you believe that this is an accurate transcript?

MS. PERINO: ...[I]f you think back to that time, there were a lot of rumors. There were a lot of people floating ideas around about what may or may not happen.

I was tempted to ellipsate 'If I can change topics,' but I suspect it might become famous as a phrase. That's the exchange. "Can you confirm the validity of this transcript?" "There were a lot of rumors floating around." The headline might read "White House Lets Stand Transcript of President Opting for Occupation of Iraq." The transcript goes on to mention the White House at the time was reassuring Americans that we were still hoping for a peaceful outcome.

Not impeaching Dubya is becoming less and less tenable for this Congress. Congressmen who oppose it are being scandalized and imprisoned. If Hillary doesn't cave to some secret interest's demands and soon, Nancy Pelosi will win this election and probably the next one. She may be President when the constitution is suspended as part of our response to climate change, so it may well be permanent.

We'll have to see.

Success in Iraq: Ruben Bolling with another great idea

Tom the Dancing Bug exhorts citizens, US officials, the media and regular Iraqis to secretly conspire to convince President Bush he succeeded in Iraq and can withdraw. If the President does not read the comic, which is likely, this has a chance of working.

We didn't fail in Iraq. What were our goals?
(1) To help the GOP in the 2002 mid-term elections. Check, with some very good results in 2004 (from a Republican perspecitve) to boot; and
(2) Funnel enormous amounts of public money to corporate interests friendly to the Bush family and its various networks. Double check.

The occupation, judged on its own standard, has been an astounding success. We really should just pat our dear leader on his back and let him know it's time to rest.

Great investment ideas

There probably is a fund that invests in large scale geoengineering climate change projects. I think that's where I should put my money.

"If we can generate 100 ideas, and 97 are bad and we land up with 3 good ones, then the whole thing will have been worthwhile; so I applaud Lovelock and Rapley for thinking along these lines."

If you send an email to 10,000 people and ask them to send you $100, and 9700 people fail to, you still get $30,000.

I guess it's pessimistic of me to not believe in technological fixes, but I don't. I don't think we can deploy them quickly enough to stop permanent changes in our geophysical dynamics, and I believe the ones that will come out on top in any bidding process will be provided by politically connected incompetent engineering companies.

And this is a quote from An Inconvenient Truth on this blog:

Temperature tracks CO2 almost exactly, with a several-decade lag. Those large fluctuations? Those were the six ice ages we've had over the past 600,000 years. CO2 in the atmosphere goes up and so does the temperature, the CO2 trapping the sun's radiation inside our planet, where it heats the Earth.

These huge fluctuations are the difference between ice ages and where we are today. Then Gore shows the most recent trajectory of CO2: straight up, more than doubled.

So, we feel the amount of CO2 now decades from now. And, that'll kill most of us. But, if we do deploy carbon-sucking robots or massive silicate bombs hither and yon, they'd better be pretty well-tuned to return us to 1800 levels of CO2, or whatever goal we set. Or, we go to Snowball Earth, which while different from 'Fogball Earth,' or whatever you want to call our future stable globally averaged surface temperature state, is not necessarily better.

That decades-long lag is an important thing to keep in mind. Our glaciers are disappearing and we're seeing a number of other effects from, say, 1960 levels of CO2. But, it's not 1960 anymore. Irrespective of any bobbing pipe deployment, it's going to get a lot, lot worse before it gets better.

Am I counselling despair? No! Perish the thought, along with most of humanity. I just think we should be directing our energies to two things:

(1) Figuring out how a tiny elite can survive and prosper in the inevitable apocalypse, and
(2) Getting me into that elite.

I'm just thinking out loud here

But, there are 423-thousand-odd K-6 students in New York. So, let's call that 60,000 Fourth Graders. And, if we give each one of them an XO Laptop, and send another overseas, that would probably have all sorts of wonderful effects.

It'd cost $24M. Which is a big bake sale, but a small chunk of the $16.8B the New York Schools consume. Of course, everything is. We could fight for almost three weeks in Iraq with the amount of money we waste on educating children in this city.

Maybe just one really wealthy guy. Anybody got twenty-five million dollars? You have until November 26th to pony it up.

update: What are the odds that the Gates Foundation will pay for Linux laptops? It's got Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim's money tied up.

Democrats are waking up to the fact that their legislators aren't on their side

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com looks at Dianne Feinstein in the Senate today, and gives some perspective on why the Democratic Congress passes FISA, doesn't pursue impeachment (despite the March deadline I gave them) and continues to not act on Climate Change, among many, many other failures which might have surprised registered Democrats.

By very stark contrast [to Congressional Republicans], most (though certainly not all) Democrats in Congress -- particularly the most influential and longest-serving ones in the Senate like Feinstein -- have contempt for their base and share virtually none of their values. In March of last year, I had an e-mail exchange with the spokesperson for a key Democratic Senator on the Intelligence Committee regarding how bloggers and their readers could work more closely with Democratic Senators to highlight the need for the NSA lawbreaking scandal to be investigated and taken more seriously. Ultimately, they made clear that they wanted nothing to do with actual citizens who were eager to bring that situation about, as I was told.

Greenspan's Comedic Genius

When Alan Greenspan denied supporting the Bush tax cuts, I wanted to make a blog post tying it to various appointees coming out over the last few months decrying decisions they were supposedly mostly responsible for, topping it with the President's own criticism of the decision to disband the Iraqi army. But, I have this problem with laziness. So, I'm just linking to Tom Tomorrow's Greenspan Revue.

That's not common

A RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT INVESTIGATING THE AREA OF LOW PRESSURE IN THE EASTERN GULF OF MEXICO FOUND A BROAD CIRCULATION CENTERED ABOUT 115 MILES WEST-SOUTHWEST OF ST. PETERSBURG FLORIDA. THE AIRCRAFT WILL CONTINUE TO INVESTIGATE THE LOW THIS AFTERNOON...BUT THERE ARE NO INDICATIONS YET THAT THE LOW HAS BEGUN TO ACQUIRE TROPICAL CHARACTERISTICS. THUNDERSTORM ACTIVITY WITH THIS SYSTEM REMAINS LIMITED AND DISORGANIZED. HOWEVER...THIS SYSTEM HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME A SUBTROPICAL OR TROPICAL CYCLONE OVER THE NEXT DAY OR SO AS IT MOVES WEST-NORTHWESTWARD OVER THE WARM WATERS OF THE GULF OF MEXICO. ALL INTERESTS ALONG THE NORTHERN GULF COAST SHOULD MONITOR THE PROGRESS OF THIS SYSTEM.

Tropical cyclone formation in the Gulf of Mexico. Has this happened before?

Genes speak louder

'Rionn' is a Welsh, or really Gaelic name. 'Fears' is Irish, and I'm about a quarter Scott Irish. As far as 'Malechem' goes, go ahead and Google it. I'm the first nine hits. It's not a super popular name. I know it sounds vaguely semitic, but if I had to guess I would say it's a vowelized spelling of Mlgm, which is again Gaelic, as far as I know.

I'm really only a quarter Welsh. But, when I went to Wales on Saturday, the girls were incredibly cute; not the World Cup Groupies, but the girls working in the shops, museums and restaurants. I've been to places renowned for cute girls before -- Tokyo, Bali, Somali neighborhoods of Nairobi, Santiago, Providence, Prague -- but I think I'm genetically programmed to like Welsh girls.

update [Mom chimes in]:Based on Grandparents surnames, you are 2/8 Welsh (Jones ), 3/8
English, Hosford, Taylor, Bardwell) and 3/8 Scotch-Irish (Malechem,
Kinney, Millin). Love, Mom

Remington Steele and Two Supermen

I saw Pierce Brosnan in Skiathos. He loaded two young boys, who I assume were his children, into a taxi just across the sidewalk from our boat. Nobody pointed out that he looked just like me. Well, 61 % like me. Which is why we have computers.

In order to compass the controversy I wrote about last night, I had to look through some old blog posts. And this one caught my eye, so I wondered, what would a 4 1/2 year old picture of me look like now? Pierce Brosnan was the answer, followed by Tom Welling and Christopher Reeve.

I know that my overwhelming charisma makes you suspect that you think I'm more handsome than I really am. But, no, I'm 54 - 55 % Man of Steel.

This is what DC Comics' heroes look like these days, however.

The best investment I made this year...

Was taking out too much money from a British ATM the day before the Fed cut the prime rate. The Saudis, according to the linked story, did not cut their prime rate as well, suggesting they no longer want to be pegged to the dollar. That story's linked to a review of recent Chinese monetary threats.

We need massive inflation to correct the housing bubble, as people really don't want to nominally lose money when the sell. So take enormous fixed-rate loans and use them to invest overseas. Now, capital flight is bad for the country, so you should discourage everyone else from doing this, but look out for Number One.

Well, this hole's pretty deep, but if we keep digging, I'm sure we'll get out eventually.

We had an economy built on a housing bubble set to deflate. This brings us to about 2001. But, the Administration reached out for criminal, nonsensical and deceitful ways to keep a rosy glow about the economy's cheeks. So, it reduced what regulations it could -- letting securitization take hold -- stopped enforcing what regulations it did have -- allowing liar loans and the like -- and signalled to mortgage lenders that interest only loans with balloon payments and 125 % mortgages would be totally OK with them.

So, housing prices continued to run away, and if the balloon payments had been more than five years, they would have run further. I can only hope that the desire here is to create a permanent depression with a persistent underclass that are willing to sell their bodies to the government, as the Pentagon has forecasted a massive alien invasion and we need a cyborg army to combat it. That's the only charitable reading I can see.

The houses aren't increasing in underlying value. People will just pay as much as they can borrow. Say you, I and a guy we don't like are on an airplane that's going down, and there are two parachutes -- as a quick tip, the important thing is to watch the lines, and keep them from getting tangled. I'm not telling him that. So, they retail for about $450, but they're in a vending machine run by eBay. We have to bid for them. So, we will be on the phone with our banks, financial advisors and accountants trying to put together a package that's larger than he can. I would totally loan you another $500,000, but I have kids in school (hypothetically.) Houses are more or less the same thing. If we used the cash in our pockets, I might win with $12.35 and a tenth of an ounce of lint. But, the more money he's lent, the more money I'll borrow.

A critical issue is whether Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises, should be allowed to purchase mortgages above the current $417,000 conforming loan limit.... This issue is crucial because the market for jumbo mortgages has seized up, and a lack of funding for these more expensive loans could have a major impact on housing values in large U.S cities. There is strong pressure in Congress to loosen the reins on Fannie and Freddie even more in the current housing downturn.
...
"There is little question that allowing the GSEs [government-sponsored enterprises] to securitize jumbo mortgages would give a short-term lift," Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is expected to tell the House Financial Services Committee at a hearing today, according to prepared remarks. He is expected to say, however, that it would be "unreasonable and irresponsible" to expand their businesses without addressing their regulatory problems.... Mr. Bernanke [said] Monday ... that if Congress is inclined to raise the limit it should consider doing so in a way "that makes the change explicitly temporary as well as promptly implemented." Mr. Bernanke stopped short of endorsing the idea.
...
In another sign of an administration shift, the regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, agreed to relax restrictions on the mortgage-finance companies' investment holdings. Ofheo's new policy allows ... the companies to add a combined $40 billion in mortgages to their portfolios by the end of March. In making the changes, Ofheo cited recent progress by both companies in repairing internal controls, though it pointed out that neither company had returned to timely filing of financial statements from past accounting scandals.

Fannie Mae called on the regulator to allow bigger increases. "We still believe the more effective response, given the extent of the market disruption, would be to raise our portfolio cap by at least 10%," Fannie Mae spokesman Brian Faith said.

What's with the SEC?

Requiring companies to disclose their climate risk? Keeping an eye out for insider trading at hedge funds? Why are they doing all this work all of a sudden?

What's prison for, anyway?

Daniel Biechele, 30... the manager of Great White... who lighted the pyrotechnics that caused a fire that killed 100 people in a Rhode Island nightclub [, the Station, in West Warwick] in 2003 was granted parole on Wednesday. He will have served less than half his term.

Boy meets band, boy manages band, boy inadvertently slaughters a century of fans, boy goes to prison. I don't know a lot about him, but I imagine Mr. Biechele killed all those people out of negligence, rather than malice. And he was sentenced to four years in prison, but will have served two when he is released in March.

Why do we send people to prison? Is it to rehabilitate them?

In prison, Mr. Biechele, of Winter Haven, Fla., was a bookkeeper for an organization in Woonsocket that helps disabled children and adults.

But, what if you're a nice guy to begin with, you make an error in judgment, and something very bad happens? You're accountable, you go to prison. But, all it can do is clarify to you why you were already staying out of prison. So, why would you ever qualify for parole? You'd think if that were the goal of gaol*, the sentencing judge would be able to set a time period when you started.

Is it to reduce the risk to society by interrupting your pattern of pyrotechnic band managing? How do they know that that's accomplished? Is it to hide you from vigilante actions by your victims' families, or merely to punish you? Again, I'm not sure I see the logic of parole. If we just let you go once you start loving Big Brother, I don't see what we'd do to people who love Big Brother going in. If we're supposed to be warning other band managers from negligently handling pyrotechnics, well, this sends the wrong message.

I'd like some clarity on why we imprison people.

* -- sorry, just had to work 'goal of gaol' in..

The Old Adventures of God Man

So, seriously? Ruben Bolling lets me see the new covenant in a way I'd never tried before. In the Old Testament, we were in service to God. He exists, we worship him, and He gives us helpful things like laws to live by. If we forget to worship Him consistently, He'll destroy our cities. If we fail to snap to when He delivers instruction, He'll have us swallowed by Leviathan. If we falter in a second hand command, He'll turn us into pillars of salt. There is a God, and you do what He says or He will make of you an illustrative case. Job is the great exemplar of piety -- keep believing, keep worshiping, it won't necessarily do anything for you.

But, the New Testament, the transformational power of a personal relationship wiith Jesus Christ, the stress on the Golden Rule, the 'he whoever believes in me' and 'whenever two or more are gathered in my name' are deals God is striking with you*. Now, some people read the concept of an afterlife into the Bible, and you're getting all this other stuff, so why not? So, the New Testament lays out a lot of advantages to believing in God, whereas the Old Testament you just had a structure of reality.

Maybe it was increased competition?

Maybe the census bureau should add some income levels?

I was comparing myself against other 35-39-year-old white men who work year-round at the Census Bureau site. So, there are about 6,730,000 of us, 6,725,000 of whom had income -- 5000 worked for free, which was mighty white of them. 311,000 made between $20K and $22.5K -- that's the biggest bin below $30Kpa -- and 435,000 made between $40K and $42.5K, which is the largest bin.

1,016,000 35-39-year-old men made over $100K. That's bigger than any of the bins. I don't have a conspiracy theory for this -- it's not like it's in anyone's interest to obfuscate incremental structural changes in income distribution -- but it seems like bad data management to have 15 % of your data in the 'everybody else' bin. I know I've got a high-earning race and age, and one would expect that year-round workers earn more, but even for 'all sexes, all ages' 2.6 % of the data is in $100K+.

Ingrid's picking back up

I don't want to say "I told you so," but you might plan to not be in Manhattan on, say, October 4th.

CLOUDINESS AND THUNDERSTORMS EXTENDING FROM THE LEEWARD ISLANDS NORTHEASTWARD FOR SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES ARE PRIMARILY ASSOCIATED WITH THE REMNANTS OF INGRID. ALTHOUGH THIS ACTIVITY HAS INCREASED TODAY...UPPER-LEVEL WINDS ARE NOT FAVORABLE FOR SIGNIFICANT REDEVELOPMENT OF THIS SYSTEM.

I guess it's worth being explicit about what I believe is going on here, which is that the models used to predict cyclone development and track, and even the distinction between tropical cyclones and run-of-the-mill storms, are based on the Ocean-Atmosphere interface behaving like it has for the past few hundred years. As a civilization, we have a lot of experience with the Atlantic, and we feel like we pretty much know how it responds to stimuli.

But we changed it.

The mixed layer's different, the gulf stream's different, the injection of fresh water and the freezing of salt water, they're all different. So, we no longer have a system with familiar response characteristics. But, admitting that we changed it, and taking that into account when we predict what's going to happen with any particular storm, is a very political move.

This is what's so fascinating about the story of X. Bill Proenza, which I'm starting to think would make a good opera. X complains about the stupid Mars lander, and his staff denounces him. They were siding with the funding priorities of the administration. And they may also be resisting the influence of climate change on hurricane formation. There are political fish to fry at the NHC.

Here's an example from a New York Times story about the scientific debate regarding whether climate change is increasing the general badness of storms:

But when Christopher W. Landsea analyzed historical records of hurricane activity, he concluded that satellite observations and other new techniques had increased scientists’ ability to detect major storms, skewing the frequency data. Dr. Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, reported this conclusion this month in EOS, an electronic publication of the American Geophysical Union.

This kind of he-said-he-said debate often leads people to dismiss a subject as one about which nothing will ever be known with confidence. In fact, the give and take is an example of the way scientists tug and haul at their own and others’ findings until a consensus takes shape.

No. Introducing uncertainty into a conclusion that we're pretty sure is true is how corporatists deter collective action in the Rovian era. This 'debate' that's going on? The NHC is the only organ on the skeptics side quoted in the article. And this brings us directly to William Gray, the Edward Teller of Climate Change*, who creates a safe zone for meteorologists who choose through political expediency to not believe the climate change is worsening Atlantic storms.

William Gray, OK, did a lot of good for his country, and deserved his position as king of all hurricane forecasters. This guy, really, is a pillar of the hurricane forecasting community. And he doesn't believe in significant global warming, much less that it's affecting the hurricane seasons. This is from Wikipedia:

William M. Gray, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University: "This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential."[26]) "I am of the opinion that [global warming] is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people." [27]) "So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing—all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more."[28])

Dr. Gray has a lot of adherents among government hurricane forecasters. They probably wouldn't go so far as to publicly doubt anthropogenic global climate change, but they'll make the softer case that its not affecting hurricane formation. And so the models are still good. And so everything we're seeing is inexplicable.

On the one hand, my point will be strengthened if Ingrid does do a little wall formation and mosey up the coast. On the other, I'd prefer that she die out as a rainy patch in the Caribbean. The great thing about betting on trouble is that you're either right or better off.

* -- in the sense that Edward Teller chose political advantage over integrity, in creating the Hydrogen Bomb, in testifying against Oppenheimer, and in promoting the Strategic Defense Initiative. He's like the bogeyman of 20th Century American Science.