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Death of the Recorded Music Industry (not a minute too soon)

The RIAA stopped suing people for sharing music, they announced last week. My own belief is that selling recorded music to profit some large corporation, because only they can get musicians heard has died the death of a thousand cuts. It’s the mimeograph trying to hold off the World Wide Web. Not going to happen.

The Grateful Dead have long had a great business mode; they encouraged fans to record show and share them. I remember hearing Jerry say, “We’re done with the music. You can have it.” Want to make a living at it? Tour. And sell online for those who appreciate liner notes, or as MP3s but for God’s sake, why make Sony or Columbia or the rest of the riaats, I mean rats, get all the cheese?

The history of the treatment of musicians by these people is legendary. Most musicians signing to a major label lost the rights to their own works, and often most of the profits. There is a plethora of songs and stories by artists complaining about their labels, most famously John Fogerty with Vanz Kant Danz (but he’ll steal your money, watch him or he’ll rob you blind). So what’s the new model? Here’s an idea.

My current favorite singer songwriter is Ingrid Michaelson, who embodies getting music heard and spread using new technologies and techniques like Barack Obama did. Maybe I’m out of touch, but it looks to me like an entirely new paradigm. She started out on MySpace and built a community of fans and ended up touring. I’m thinking about how a local talent with some music out there could use this to expand the base and get heard.

Ingrid’s latest effort, “Be OK” has an extremely spare orchestration, entirely acoustic and minimal. Her previous works had big scores and lots of instruments and were great fun, but this one is so much more intimate. And I suspect, less expensive to record and mix. With a little work, why couldn’t an artist record his or her own tunes and mix them with GarageBand or equivalent? Other than a decent mike (we’re talking performers here; you got the mike, okay?) it seems it couldn’t be that hard to actually home produce a dozen cuts for a CD.

Here’s the trick. When it becomes viable for an artist to record an album at home at very little expense (except time), does that mean we could have an entirely democratic world of music? Has it already happened, and I’m just clueless?

As both of my readers know, I’m very concerned with social justice, which will be even more important as we slide into the decade long Great Depression 2. Here’s a chance for artists to kill two birds and get stoned. Ingrid’s latest CD used a couple of engaging, cheap and effective methods available to anyone. First, the profits from the single, “Be OK”, are being donated to the fight against breast cancer. I think food banks would be a very appropriate recipient these days.

The beauty is that once you’re being charitable, much less chutzpah is required. For the very inexpensively created album, a singer who wants to reach a wider audience could put the songs on the net and either turn over all the profits to a charitable organization or from the one song. Radiohead released an album online last year where the customer got to choose the price. Especially when it’s for a good cause, I think people would pay a fair price.

The other nice thing about an album doing good is that you can tap into the national and international networks these outlets tend to belong to. As a longtime fundraiser and donor I call tell, these people are connected.

Being for a good cause also makes it easier to get local press, TV coverage or at least a spot on local NPR. Volunteering with the group couldn’t hurt. You’d know who does what for who, and how to get the national arm to highlight you. This just might be the new paradigm. Every third or fourth album for a good cause, and tour if you need to make money.

This might be a dumb idea, but usually when people say my idea is dumb, I’m about to make a lot of money.

Merry Christmas!

Gay Marriage and the Christians

I’m borrowing somewhat from a post on The Huffington Post, but the hypocrisy of cherry picking the Bible is a real pet peeve of mine and I never get a straight answer, in spite of asking friends, family and strangers who are Christians. The whole idea of defending marriage from gays and lesbians seems especially silly when the Bible more forcefully rejects divorced heterosexuals. Rush Limbaugh has been divorced three times from women. My friend David has been with Bill for 15 years and together they are raising two nice kids.

Which one is harming the family and marriage?

There are way too many divorced Christians for anyone of stature in the church to stand up and point this out. Because there are so many inconsistencies in the “pick and choose what’s a sin” meme, I’m going to stick to this one till I get an answer. Why don’t we execute heterosexual adulterers? The Bible demands it.

What am I missing?

1. Every word of the Bible is true (as Mike Huckabee stated).

2. We are ordered in the Bible by God to kill adulterers.

3. Anybody feel up to explaining to me why Christians don’t propose the death penalty for adultery?

And by the way, any answer involving “it’s a mystery” needs to turn on itself and ask whether marriage isn’t a mystery as well. Right out of the box, anytime a lot of things remain “mysteries”, you might want to think long and hard about attacking others. How about these apparent truths:

Judge not that you be not judged.
Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

That’s just off the top of my head, but doesn’t a theme seem be there?

Here’s the result of a search for “homosexuality” in the NIV Bible:

9Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders 10nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Okay, that’s it. That verse is the only hit. Period. In the entire Bible. Same search on “poor” gets 178 hits. Divorce? 33. Unless we ban drunks, adulterers, greedheads, slanderers and swindlers from marrying, we are hypocrites. And Jesus didn’t even say it. It was Paul. Who curiously didn’t think much of any kind of marriage.

Whatever. I’d love to have a talk with an actual Christian who can explain who gets to decide what is real law and what is just some funny history. Otherwise, the entire religion remains an absurd joke.

Social interaction placebo

For the last twelve years, I’ve avoided punching a time clock, or actually any other form of organized employment other than the occasional board meeting. I’m a social animal, and really need interaction with other people. My wife is a fine and lovely companion, but we have little to argue about, and I already know most of her opinions. Social interaction is about the only thing I miss about work. During the whole Monica thing, I was dying for a water cooler to hang near and hear what people were saying, but it wasn’t happening.

Then there’s FaceBook. I’ve sort of casually drifted into it, but I realized it’s a replacement for the water cooler. Email is sort of direct and almost intrusive compared to just dropping a line on what’s up. So it’s like work, without the work, and only with people you like. Interesting.

Fifteen years ago, I was flying around the world, trying to convince people that this internet thing was worthwhile, and would change our live in huge ways; the democratization of the media, an end to TV induced “post literacy”, new social venues for oddballs and specialized interests and a whole world of advantages.

The irony is that all of it has come to be and yet I’m still just stumbling onto this stuff I was forecasting so long ago. My nephews and nieces get huge chuckles watching Uncle Jeff stumble through getting the iPhone or Mac to do what I want, never mind the Tivo or satellite, considering I was there at the birth of all this stuff.

Anyway, I’m not sure how it makes money, but FaceBook is yet another amazing example of how cool interconnectivity is. I wish I could get in touch with the thousands of dismissive skeptics who told me I was nuts and that this internet thing would never catch on. In 1993, I tried to help raise venture capital money for what is now the largest ISP in the world (currently part of Verizon) at a valuation of eight million dollars and got no takers. Eight million. Funny how thing turn out.

Manufacturing Meltdown

So Chrysler is shutting down all of its’ plants for a month. Toyota halted construction work on a plant in Mississippi that was to make Priuses. This stuff is all interconnected, and the bad times are here when debt levels, corporate, government and personal, are at all time highs. You can’t live off of negative savings. It just doesn’t work. Honestly. Do the math.

So now we’ve got a few hundred thousand more unemployed, at least for now, because Congressional Republicans and the White House had no problem with three quarters of a trillion dollars for banks, but balked at a fifteen billion dollar loan to save jobs. Um, I don’t get it. Two percent of what the banks got (with no obvious benefit I can see to anyone) to save, or at least extend millions of jobs is a problem.

Except for a very few cases, like the workers sitting in at the factory in Chicago, there doesn’t seem to be much organized action by normal citizens yet. Yet.

We leave for Florida next Saturday, and it’s always interesting to read the local press as we pass through small town America. The last two years, the big change we noticed was the unbelievable number of check cashing/payday loan outlets. In one small town in Virginia, Great Bridge, I counted 22 of them just on the main drag.

The real estate sections of small town newspapers are interesting insights into the realities of the local markets. Unfortunately, while the newspapers are dying a death of a thousand cuts, they do a less than stellar job covering their two biggest sources of revenue, the auto industry and real estate. Try googling “time to buy is now” and see how many sad messages like this are out there. It’s sad, but nobody gets paid to bear bad news.

Made Off

I was feeling all superior over the Bernie Madoff scandal, and would mention to any available ear what sheep people were to invest in something so obviously flawed. Today, I got an email from my money guys showing that I was out $42,000 to the Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Doh! Perhaps a little modesty next time, you think?

Unsubscribe

I’ve had an AOL account for nearly 20 years, and over time I’ve ended up on a seemingly endless series of subscription and spam list. Back in my day, you never responded to these things, because it simply proved it was a valid account and the volume of spam increased. Recently I realized fully 90% of my inbox contained crap I didn’t want. I mentioned it to Liz, and she said she’d been unsubscribing, and it seemed to be working.

Lo and behold, there is an unsubscribe button on most of these mailings. The trick is finding it. The graphics show in real scale and color the headline, and the unsubscribe button. One is obviously the first thing you see and the other, the last.

Bonus round- when you unsubscribe, they send you a confirming email, sort of a last slap in the face. Who knew?

Of Barbers and Haircuts

In the year or two that prices for stocks and houses have been cratering, have you noticed they are always forecast to improve in a few months? It’s been years. Why do we keep listening to the experts when they keep being wrong? Ever notice the experts who offer these forecast for stock recovery work with what used to be investment banks? Notice that the folks saying the time to buy a “home” is now are generally builders and realtors? (Didn’t it used to take love, not just a realtor to make a house a home?) Remember all the credit card offers sent to you, your kids and the dog? The credit card companies are now shocked, shocked that people would be human and frail and foolish and misuse them.

Billions for advertising, but not one penny for education.

We the sheeple have been fleeced and are now were being asked to pay for the privilege. Next time the flacks tell you to buy a house soon, prices will never be lower, odds are he or she is with the National Association of Realtors. Check it out. Same with ones who say stocks are a bargain. Usually brokers. There’s a reason Warren Buffet is the richest man in the world; he once said, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” And he took his own advice.

Here are some more inconvenient and unconventional truths for you to ponder. This is in fact Great Depression 2. House prices won’t be back to 2006 levels yet by 2016. Real unemployment is already over 10% in reality. (The methods for reporting it are far different than they used to be.) The stock market won’t recover for a decade. Remember 2000 when the NASDAQ hit 5,048, versus today eight and a half years later it’s at 1,445. Buy and hold? Stocks are best in the long term? That’s down over 70 % over nearly a decade! How long did you plan to live? Does your broker still say to buy and hold?

Anyway, we should have seen this coming and a few did, like my friends at iTulip.com. But nobody makes commissions or gets elected by telling the bad news. You’ve been misinformed by highly paid shills who have profited from your misfortune and mistakes. They trashed the hotel room and we get the bill. It’s called a bailout.

The new reality

There’s no way in hell that the economy we enjoyed for the last 25 years is coming back. No amount of stimulus, tax cutting, free trading or anything else can bring it back. It was an unsustainable bubble created by a deregulated FIRE economy (finance, insurance and real estate), denial of risk and an unprecedented use of credit and debt. It’s amusing to watch the pundits slowly catch on, but only ever so slowly.

The economy of the last 25 years is no more going to bounce back in a year or two than the NASDAQ. It was widely believed in 2000 that the index would be back to its’ peak in a matter of months. I was literally laughed at for saying it could take a decade. Looks like I might have been too optimistic, since at under 1600 it’s off its’ peak of over 5000 by what, about 70%? How’s that Enron stock holding up?

So in my view it’s a given that credit will be very, very much more rare in the future. I’m not sure the credit card companies will be able to survive it, but the rest of us will manage to muddle through. Once again, one will have to save up to buy a car. Doesn’t say much for demand for new cars does it? Sorry Detroit.

Same for flat screen TV’s, video games, computers, MP3 players, cell phones and all the other extras we’ve come to believe we not only need, but deserve. Sorry China. Sorry Best Buy.

I expect to see a lot more cohabiting, and hopefully more niceness. When everyone is skating on thin ice financially, wouldn’t it be nice to see acts of kindness as self-insurance in the case that your situation falls apart? It’s going to be easier to crash in someone’s spare room and help with the rent if you did the same for them before your situations reversed themselves.

Here’s another thought somebody clever will come up with- a value menu at local restaurants. You know, rice and beans for a buck. Maybe takeout only. Maybe with donated ingredients. Food will definitely be viewed and consumed differently. The fast food industry is going to either adapt and change or go the way of the dodo.

The other thing will be housing. There already exists a huge number of foreclosed and vacant houses in America. It’s in nobody’s best interest for them to remain vacant. They represent a nearly worthless asset to the banks that seized them. I believe there’s a great business opportunity for someone to manage renting out rooms in foreclosed houses and getting people housed, as well as getting the banks something for their investment.

Hello? Underemployed real estate workers this is your opportunity!

Trump to God, “You’re fired!”

On a side note, it seems that no less than Donald Trump has weighed in on the causes of the current financial meltdown. Could it be irresponsible borrowing and lending? Unregulated and exotic financial instruments? Pure and simple greed?

No! The Donald informs us that it is an act of God, which conveniently gets him out of some no longer profitable contract over loans with banks. Sweet! When I was a kid, Flip Wilson’s tag line was, “The Devil made me do it.” Apparently this time, it’s the Deity.

Hunger

I wonder how Americans will handle hunger. I don’t think most of us ever really had to deal with it. In the spring of 1983 (during the last nasty recession, but nothing like this one) I can remember lying in my bed in a cheap ass flop house hotel in Santa Barbara, California on a Wednesday trying to decide whether to spend my last seventy five cents till payday on Friday on a can of beans or bus fare. Eating the beans would mean a two hour walk to work, which was what I chose, but overall what I remember is the overwhelming helplessness of having a Bachelors degree from a great school and making three bucks an hour moving furniture and being so damn hungry.

Even better, I got fired from that job for having an attitude. As I recall, the supervisor had me stacking chairs in what I thought was a dumb place, and I suggested a different area. I was told to shut up and follow orders. Later, he realized he’d made a mistake, and asked me what the hell I’d been thinking. I told him at three bucks an hour, he couldn’t afford my brains, and that was it. I got canned.

In Santa Barbara, there were plenty of avocado and orange trees, so you could at least put some food in your mouth in the worst circumstances, but still it’s a really bad place to be when you don’t have enough to eat. I fear we’re entering an era where a lot of Americans are going to get their first taste (pardon the irony) of hunger. There’s really no reason to think it will be pretty.

Not sure what the way to deal with it should be. I suppose since most churches have kitchen facilities that they’ll be a likely candidate for feeding the community. They had soup kitchens in the 30’s in a lot of places, which makes sense since you can make soup out of anything and everything. Hell, I can cook. Maybe that will be my new profession: soup kitchen chef.

In a place like small town Maine it’s not hard to imagine how to put together a program like this. The Rotary, the churches, the town and the Chamber of Commerce could likely all be counted on to provide the basics to feed people a few times a day. The trick would be to stay humble and respectful of those down on their luck, and by God the people of Lincoln county Maine are certainly up to the task.

I wonder how the rest of the nation will fare?

First Snow

No rant just now. I drove to Damariscotta and back, and it all looks like a postcard. This is for our more southerly relatives and friends, which would be pretty near all of them.

Proportionality, part deux

Okay, so both my readers are familiar with two recurring pet peeves of mine, which would be proportionality and the global war on terror. I ran across a factoid that makes the two come together in an interesting way. The Bush Administration has come damn near a preemptive war with Iran to prevent them from getting nuclear arms. The morons in charge want us to believe it’s the absolute biggest threat in the world for a Muslim nation to have nukes, and Obama has even nodded to it. (Oh wait. Pakistan has them and they’re an ally. Ignore this, please.) While a nasty concept, there are worse things in the world than Iran with nukes. We faced thousands and thousands of nukes in the USSR for decades, including most of my life, and nothing bad happened. And they were VERY advanced and VERY well tested.

So here’s the factoid that makes the whole matter so ridiculous. The nuke that North Korea set off (and they are WAY ahead of Iran) was estimated at equivalent to 400 tons of TNT. Oooh. Sounds scary. But it turns out that a fully fueled 757 like the ones that hit the WTC each packed the equivalent of 900 tons of TNT. Large commercial aircraft are common as dandelions, and with the airlines in meltdown, they’re downright affordable.

Get my drift? The biggest freaking threat in the world is a loose (likely extremely unsophisticated) nucular (sic) weapon, worth another preemptive war, but anybody and his cousin can buy a used large airliner and fly it wherever they want. When we were in Tucson last year we saw the huge airplane mothball yard, and it goes on forever. Lots of planes out there if anyone needs one.

Once again, the desire to make us blindly fearful, and the lack of seeing things in proportion leads to ridiculous policies.

And another thing. Last week Peggy Noonan wrote an obnoxious column with the basic idea being that, “Say what you want about W, he kept us safe.” And all of the Democrats fear that two words will be added, “unlike Obama.”

These smug assholes love to use the line that since we haven’t been hit again yet, that W deserves credit. I can usually shut this one up by asking if the speaker will take an oath to switch parties in the event of an attack on American soil. No takers yet. And here’s the punch line- if George W. Bush kept us so fucking safe, what’s he got to say to the families of the nearly 3,000 dead in Manhattan, Northern Virginia and Pennsylvania, not to mention over 4,200 dead Americans in Iraq? The attacks on the World Trade Center were on his watch after he ignored Clinton administration warnings. In their arrogance, any concern of the Clinton’s was deemed unimportant. Thanks, assholes.

He kept us safe? More like he tattooed targets on our foreheads.

Next Job

It has been stated that in the nearly 8 years since he left office, Bill Clinton has pulled down $110 million in speaking and consulting fees. This says a lot about how his judgment and policies are viewed, widely and globally.

How many people do you suppose will pay to hear W speak? There were times when I would have paid him to shut up, but I’m not exactly smack in the middle of his demographic. I just can’t imagine having to explain to shareholders why you spent perfectly good money for advice from the worst President in history. Poor sap. Some right wing think tank will probably give him a title, a stipend and a strong warning against opening his mouth in public or leaving the US.

That poor bastard Alberto Gonzalez couldn’t find work in the private sector for almost a year, and it’s a temporary gig.

Gee, maybe they were right about one thing. A free market tells you what people think you’re worth. And these buckos ain’t worth diddly.

Dumb and dumber

Okay, that last post got me thinking about racists and ignorance in general, so I thought I’d check out the mother lode: www.kkk.bz. Holy crap, they’re even dumber than I expected. On the home page, they refer to Omaha, NB, which I’m pretty sure, would be in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Nope, it’s our own Nebraska, NE for short. The banner headline reads, “THE KNIGHTS IS LEADING THE WAY”. Hopefully they is headed for an English lesson.

Here’s another gem, “DO NOT be fooled! The Knights Party is the ONLY legitimate Klan association in the United States. We are not some fringe fly by night group of disgruntled losers who decided to start a "Klan" group.“ That’s pretty funny coming from a fringe group of disgruntled losers.

Honestly, can you think of a group of losers more pathetic and ridiculous than the Klan?

Supremely Ridiculous

So here I am trying to figure out what the hell to write about. The Huffington Post had a link to a David Duke white supremacy site, and it occurred to me that the attendees at white supremacist meeting look to be some of the least supreme people I’ve ever seen. Definitely ignorant, unlikely to be educated, successful only in the sense of not having starved to death yet.

The focus currently of such groups is the problem with the guy about to enter the White House. How many of the posters on stormfront.org do you suppose went to Harvard Law School, or could have gotten in? I’m thinking damn few. Maybe instead of white supremacy they should call it personal insecurity and be done with it.

I’m so sick of these morons that I’m hoping we can just flush all the racists and be done with it. Go public, get bitch slapped, repeat.

Hell, I’m a 13th generation American, mostly English with some Dutch thrown in, and in traveling around the world I sure didn’t find that the white ones were better or smarter than the tan ones, the olive ones, the brown ones, the black ones or anyone else. If I had to admit to any racism it might be that Asians are smarter than the rest of it. But then again, I think it’s for cultural, rather than racial reasons. But honestly, if you look at the racial makeup of the University of California, you gotta think them Asians got something on whitey, but you don’t see them forming “Yellow Power” movements, even though they could probably statistically prove superiority. Sheesh.

Yikes! It's worse than I thought!

Okay, I knew there was going to be a really nasty, long and slow recovery for the financial system, and I’ve been accused of being Chicken Little more than once, but all I can say is Holy Fucking Shit. My bud, Eric Janszen (third smartest man in the world) posted a bit over on iTulip that explains why none of the injecting, pumping and flooding of cash into the financial system can do any good. The piece requires a rudimentary knowledge of economics as well as financial and monetary policy, but the guts of it are as follows.

I made much the same case a few days back but when Eric tells it it’s more compelling and scary. Basically, the major banks shared their risks by buying and selling each other credit default swaps (CDS) so if their bets went bad, somebody would bail them out. An excellent metaphor in a comment on Eric’s post states that it was like a bunch of swimmers tying themselves together far at sea for safety, and then immediately take on more weight than they can handle, thus all sinking together. Basically and collectively they owe more money than there is in the world, something like most of a quadrillion dollars. That’s $1,000,000,000,000,000.00.

Hence the “Holy Fucking Shit” comment above. That’s about $150,000 for every man, woman and child on earth, or about three million dollars for every American. That much money simply does not exist. The American, and therefore global financial system is dead. Kaput. Finished. And no bailout is going to help.

Man! This thing is unwinnable. If you have any dollars at all, and live in a first world country, this stuff is really important to learn and understand.

Figures lie and liars figure

There are any number of pundits out there in Punditistan who remind us why this isn’t the Great Depression 2. There are no bread lines, no hoboes, blah, blah, blah. The thing is, we are so near the beginning of a long, long process. There were no soup kitchens in 1929 and 1930 saw one of the greatest stock market rallies ever.

I read a great bit of wisdom from some old English dude, whose name escapes me, “We leap into debt, and crawl out of it.” I think the whole GDII thing is like that. When your neighbor loses her job, it’s a recession. When you lose yours, it’s a depression.

So anyway, one of the pearls of wisdom being cast before the swine (present company excepted) is that unemployment is “only” six and a half percent. Jeez, when I got out of college it was over ten percent. (Remind me to whine about how much that sucked.) Here’s a little inside baseball. There are many different unemployment numbers. Really.

The “official unemployment rate” is technically known as U3. Over time it has been twisted to make things seem better than they are. It does NOT include discouraged workers, part time employees who want fulltime work and marginally employed workers. These folks are however counted in U6, which is the number they never tell you about. They used to, but not anymore, so any historical reference (“It was much worse back then”) is either misleading or patently false. How’s that for a pisser? They think we’re stupid, and unfortunately, they’re usually right.

Here’s the deal. For October 2008, the “official” U3 unemployment rate was 6.5%, which is high, but not historically. The more accurate, and underreported U6 unemployment rate was 11.8%, and that my friends is a nasty number. No bread lines. Yet. No hoboes. Yet. No food riots. Yet.

Let’s take care of each other, remember the neediest and share what you have with those who need it. It’s a great time to short the market, but a lousy time to short karma.

Cold and dark

Here we are in beautiful East Boothbay, Maine where the son is pretty much below the trees by 3:30, and it’s not even December yet. The dogs refuse to believe their suppertime is after dark (at 5pm) because as Florida dogs, they don’t know about sunsets before about 6. The scenery is really great, and we’re down to the hardcore full-timers since most of the seasonal people have gone away. Sources vary, but it looks like we have about 2,500 year round residents and as many as 30,000 in summer. I’ve walked into more than a few restaurants in the last month and realized I knew everyone there. Kind of cool, and kind of weird.

It’s been really cold as well, and it’s odd to see the 500 feet of so of ice at the end of the Little River. The dogs tend to jump over frozen puddles, which is funny and Sophie likes to break through the ice and pick up pieces of it. Better than rocks.

I had to visit Harvey for the monthly running of the engine and generator. Waves of nostalgia washed over me, and I realized we’d had this rig for a year and a few days. What a monstrous marvel that coach is. Next year, we’re planning another trip to Mexico and I can hardly wait.

Yesterday, in Damariscotta, we stopped by in time to catch Santa Claus riding into town in a horse drawn wagon. He was heralded by (I kid you not) the Reny’s Rockettes. Just another day in small town Maine. The way life should be.

Sacrifice, Sharing and Compassion: We Can Relearn

There’s a strong stubborn, individualistic strain that runs through the American psyche, and it can often represent the best and the worst in us. It’s most egregious variety, and more and more observable these last 25 years is the idea that both the rich and the poor deserve what they have. In a new book by Malcolm Gladwell called “Outliers” he explains how nobody gets where they are through their own doing, especially at the very high ends of wealth. Bill Gates had access to a computer terminal in 1969. (I first touched one in 1974, but access was severely limited.) Because of a wealthy family and a years long head start, he was able to do quite well for himself. As I’m fond of saying, with his poor eyesight, he wouldn’t have survived to puberty in sixth century Somalia.

In the coming difficult years, we as a nation are going to have to find ways to help each other out, sacrificing some of our own time and resources for the betterment of others.

Today is Thanksgiving, and I just attended an extraordinary event that is hard to imagine anywhere else. A friend runs the most popular restaurant in our little town, and for Thanksgiving he serves an awesome gourmet Thanksgiving dinner for anyone to attend and it’s all FREE. Instead of a check, you get an envelope in which you can make a donation to the local Meals on Wheels. Portions are huge; Liz and I left with 4 of those big takeout boxes. It could feed us for days.

The beauty part is since Mainers are proud people, the hungry ones have a hard time asking for help. If someone spots you at the food pantry, it’s embarrassing. If your extended family is chowing down at McSeagulls, no one has to know that you only put a dollar in the envelope, and no one is the wiser. Plus, you can take home enough food to feed a hungry family for weeks. The wait staff and cooks volunteer their time, and often the food is provided at cost or free to the restaurant. It’s a great tradition, and it let’s those of us doing pretty well a chance to give back to people who need help, and nobody has to know what anyone puts in the envelope.

If we’re going to survive as a people and a nation, there’s going to need to be a hell of a lot more of this going on. We need to stop resenting the needy for their needs and start being thankful for just how incredibly fortunate we all are.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Proportionality

Probably “statistics” would have been a more appropriate heading, but what the hell. I have a pet peeve about proportionality, and especially the federal government, the man on the street and the media’s inability to have a perspective on the scale of disasters and other historical events. The Bush Administration has taken this to crazy level, spending literal trillions to prevent another 3,000 dead Americans, whereas that much money could save hundreds of thousands, more likely millions of lives if applied to medical research. (Stem cell, anyone?)

On 9/11, I was in London for a board meeting, and I’ll never forget the hours spent staring at the TV in my hotel room. The most bizarre part was watching a CNN interview at a Wal-Mart in South Dakota. A woman who must have weighed 300 pounds was sucking on a cigarette and telling the reporter, “You couldn’t get me into one of those deathtraps” referring to commercial aircraft. I’m thinking diabetes, heart disease and cancer are much more appropriate concerns, but that’s the way most people have come to think. Just be afraid of the last thing you heard about on the news or talk radio or wherever oblivioids get their misinformation.

Economics is the study of scarcity. If there’s enough of something, there’s no market for it, like air for example. The free market does one thing pretty well, and that is to set a price for stuff. One key shortcoming is that there is no market for public safety or national defense. How much we spend is based on policy decisions by the current rulers and reflects their mindset and worldview. For the last eight years, we’ve tried to become the Death Star, Fortress America, and Fort Apache.

Costa Rica dismantled its’ military in 1948, and they’ve never had a problem with it. Average incomes are 1500% (yup, fifteen times) neighboring Nicaragua’s, and they have a better health care and education system than we do, not to mention longer life expectancy. I’m not saying we need to completely dismantle the military, but is it really necessary to spend more than the rest of the world combined?

Here’s another stumper. In the last decade, around 3,000 Americans have died in terrorist attacks. Every day, it’s estimated that around the world about 30,000 children starve to death. A decade is 3,562 days, so for our 3,000 killed, there were over ten million children starved to death. So over 36,000 kids starved for every American killed in a terror attack. Doesn’t that make it seem a little silly to focus so completely on this stupid Global War On Terror? Maybe a little more help with food aid? How the hell does a country in which most citizens claim to be Christians get its’ priorities so completely fucked up? The Big Guy famously said, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.” How the hell do you square that with Bush doctrine and actions?

Even if you take the logic at face value, it’s more than a little hard to buy the sense of proportionality. Suppose you lose a hundred thousand Americans in a nuclear terror attack on a large urban center EVERY YEAR. That would make terrorist attack the sixth leading annual cause of death, behind heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory illness and accidents, and barely ahead of diabetes.

I can’t find the data, but it sure as hell seems like we’re spending more in Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11), Afghanistan and in the Department of Homeland Security (doesn’t “Homeland” kind of smell like a swastika?) than we are working to prevent heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory illness and accidents? How does this make any sense if you have even the vaguest sense of proportionality?

The size of the problem

The problem with this financial tsunami is getting the average dude/chick on the street to grasp just what madness the monsters of Wall Street and Greenwich have put us in and just how hard it will be to get out of. Plain and simple, debt is not wealth. But it was treated that way for the last 25 years, and the result if all the borrowing and crazy, highly leveraged (that means borrowing by the truckload) derivative deals.

The sub-prime mortgage is peanuts compared what these Wall Street wizards have come up with. Remember, the motivation here is that you get a big chunk of winnings if you win, and at worst you lose your job if you don’t.

Think about it. Someone hands you $100 in a casino, and tells you can keep 20% of the winnings, and if you lose you have to leave the casino. Logically, you want to make the highest paying bet, no matter the odds. I’d drop it on roulette; it pays 17 to 1. So you take a shot and win 20% of $1800, or $360. Sweet! You made more than you bet. Now add in the concept of being able to borrow $10,000 because you have that original bet. Win now and your personal payday is $36,000. Lose now, and you don’t just leave the casino, you owe it $10,000.

That almost exactly what happened on Wall Street with something called a credit default swap, or CDS. It works like insurance for corporate bonds, but you buy them whether you have the bond or not. Like buying life insurance on someone else. There are an estimated $65,000,000,000,000 (sixty-five trillion dollars) worth of these out there, and nobody is sure who or where they are. To compare, every mortgage in America adds up to about $13,000,000,000,000 (thirteen trillion dollars).

When the CDS market collapses (as it must) the net losses are FIVE TIMES the effect of every home in America with a mortgage gets foreclosed and never sold again. Fun stuff, huh? Now get this; the CDS market is only about 10% of the total derivatives market, estimated at $650,000,000,000,000 (six hundred trillion dollars).

To sum up, the toxic loans, deals and derivatives on the books of the world’s banks, pension funds, college endowments are worth fifty times the value of every mortgage in America. The current economic decline cannot end until this debt goes away. One teeny problem is that there isn’t this much money in the world. This is so much more than any sub-prime mortgage, and the next asshole who tells me it’s the fault of lefty do-gooders helping poor people houses they couldn’t afford and political contributions by Fannie and Freddie is gonna get hit.

This sums it up

War is good for the economy like cannibalism is nutritious.

Timeframes to fix things

My brother posted a comment that really is worth a full on rant. It was also the inspiration for the short prohibition rant, so thanks for that, Bubba. The chattering class and the Sabbath gasbags seem to be treating the current economic crisis as something that can be turned around by Christmas. If we just figure out which lever to pull, everything will be fine and we’ll be refinancing our houses for flat screen TVs and all will be well with the world. No, no, no, a thousand times no.

Anyone who’s been listening to me the last, what 4 or 5 years, knows I expect the end of capitalism and our living standards as we’ve know them the last quarter century. Anyone under 50 has never been an adult in a REAL recession, and I can tell you they suck big time. I got out of college and started looking for work the exact month unemployment hit its post WWII peak at almost 10%.

Let me tell you that sucks big time. The guy cleaning the Slurpee machine at 7-11 had a PhD in physical chemistry. No shit. I moved furniture for $3 an hour for six months, with a freshly minted BA in Economics from a snotty New England college, hustled my ass off and got nothing but hundreds of rejection letters.

Anyway, compared to the 1930’s and the shit coming down the pike, that was a walk in the park. In the immortal words of Bob Marley, a hungry mob is an angry mob. When was the last time you saw a mob of hungry Americans? Sure there are pockets of poverty that bad in America, but when it’s all you’ve ever know, it’s different. I’m talking former real estate agents, former bankers, former hedge fund quants, real live hungry, angry, no make that furious, previously spoiled and entitled upper-middle class Americans actually spending days, weeks and months without nearly enough to eat. How pissed will they be? How pissed would you be? I know how pissed I’d be, and I’m not even the violent type.

How can an American administration react in the face of widespread, I mean really widespread, Dustbowl style poverty and hunger? I’m one hell of a lot more optimistic about Obama/Biden handling it than Bush/Cheney. (Concentration camps? Americans at Gitmo?)

Think about it, we can’t just have thousands of Americans living on the streets, on a constant prowl for food. Churches have always pissed me off by their very existence, as they represent a waste of resources for a guy who doesn’t need a house, being empty 99% of the time and NOT providing for people who really need shelter. Maybe to keep their tax-exempt status, the churches would be required to offer up half of their total floor space for people needing a roof over their heads.

I can hear the squeals of complaint about socialism and God helps those who help themselves and why don’t they just get jobs. Such has become the state of the church in America. If anyone cares to actually read the New Testament, I can’t think of anything Jesus would more approve of, but I guarantee not 1% of American Christian churches, in a nation housing crisis and in the midst of Great Depression 2, will open their doors to people needing a place to crash. On second thought, the Unitarians would, but they aren’t “real” Christians anyway.

Imagine thousands of acres of tents, pallets of MRE's, virtual refugee camps right here in the good ol' US of A. Imagine the politics of this country would change in a way that will make the last election look like a reelection.

Bottom line here is that we are in for a very rough 8 or 10 years, that very few living Americans can recall or even imagine. I wonder how we’ll get through it? We’ll certainly see the best and the worst of people, cuz nothing brings out one’s true nature like true need.

A new 21st amendment

The prohibition against alcohol in the United States ended in 1933. While it didn’t immediately end the Great Depression, it sure took the edge off and put a lot of gansters out of business. Suddenly an entirely new (sort of) industry developed with jobs, taxes and all that good stuff. Wouldn’t it be a nice idea to pick up a $100 billion in new taxes given how we’re throwing cash at every banker with a tin cup, which would be all of them? The marijuana crop market value is hard to pin down, but the DEA finds $100 billion to be a good guess. Regulate it, tax it, sell it, voila! We lose a lot of nasty gang and mafia activity, help out the agricultural sector, and save a bloody fortune chasing down nonviolent people and incarcerating them.

I’ve seen in estimated that 80% of the US prison population are in for nonviolent drug offences. The annual cost seems to be around $48 billion. Honestly, when will we just wake up and legalize and tax the stuff? It’s not like it’s off our streets. It’s freaking everywhere!

Full on Depression, part deux

It’s remarkable how much of the punditry has been getting this economy so wrong for so long and people keep booking them as experts, people buy their books and take their advice on faith. They are condescending and so often so wrong. Here’s a Fox News tidbit: “The Dow Jones industrial average is down more than one-third from its high a year ago. The stock market lost 89% of its value from its peak during the Great Depression.”

Okay, we’re down 50% now (the article was from last month) after a single year, but from 1929 to 1932 it went down 89%. Apples to apples my journalists Chernobyls. Let check back in 2 years, shall we? Next, of course, it’s not the GD ‘cause there aren’t soup lines. A more accurate assessment would have ended that sentence with the additional word, “yet”.

Next comes “buy and hold” as an investment strategy for US equities. I got out in the 90’s and never got back in. Let’s see, I got out of stocks just about 10 years ago this month. If I had bought and held, how would I be doing? Considering the fact that it was mostly WorldCom stock, it would have dropped to zero.

How about the Dow Jones? 99% of financial advisor would tell a 55-year-old man in 1998 to be in stocks in a big way. At 65, this year, there have to be a hell of a lot of people feeling like they played by the rules, but got screwed anyway. Not even counting interest and it was not a clever move.

Here’s an average guy doing pretty well. Let’s see what he’s got. In 1998, he buys a modest $250,000 house with a 30 year fixed mortgage at 9%, with 20% down. He has a solid $100,000 in his retirement fund (above average in US), and feels better and better about life as retirement approaches. Actually, he’s feeling downright smug. Flash forward 10 years.

As the kids needed to pay for college, it was handy to refinance as the value of the home shot up, reaching $600,000 a few years back. No need to stuff as much money into the retirement fund, since we’re feeling house rich. Make contribution of $2,000 a month and enjoy the rest. You’ve earned it. Time to refi for that sporty little Mercedes he’d been eying, and the feeling that with the house getting so valuable, the $500,000 in total mortgage and home equity lines of credit was handle able.

$100,000 in the Dow on November 27, 1998 would be worth $80,909 by last night’s close. The Dow went from 9334 to 7552 in those 10 years. The $2000 annual contributions get him almost all the way back to the $100,000 he started with back in 1998, but ravaged by fees and inflation.

Now the house, valued at $350,000 is seriously underwater with $500,000 in loans on it, and his almost $100,000 retirement fund can’t cover the gap. Welcome to the new retirement folks. Entering retirement with a net worth well below zero is going to be a bitch. And common. And heartbreaking for people who just did what they were told to.

We need a better social safety not to mention a social contract, and some of the big winners of the last quarter century are going to have to cough it up to pay for it. The rich bastards talk a good game, but they’ll fold like a house of cards the first time pictures like this surface. Visualize the scene of a public barbecue. Children playing, people drinking beer and sharing potluck. Men are taking turns with the handle on the spit. There are a few cops and the ambulance guys are there and it’s all pretty festive. That’s when you notice the body on the spit over the coals with the apple in it’s mouth is the field dressed body of the abusive rich bastard who closed the local factory and sent the work to China to save a few pennies on labor. No jury anywhere in the new America would convict anyone involved. The arrogant few who have been raping America these last decades talk tough, but the tough talk stops when they stop to realize what real class warfare looks like.

Full on Depression

This morning I was talking to an entrepreneur who has been so buried in his work that he didn’t realize what the economy looked like. Cool product, sort of Garage Band on FaceBook, but what a time to be looking for money! Citibank can’t borrow money (except from the government), so I’m pretty sure pre-revenue start-ups will be in a tough patch.

We’re really seeing the shit hit the fan in real live America. What must it feel like to spend your entire working life to put away a few hundred thousand in the old 401(k) and have a house that’s gone up so that you’re damn near a millionaire in 2006 at age 63 and ready for a happy retirement? 2 years later, you’re upside down on the house, and the 401(k) has fallen over 50%. Holy crap! That must grab one’s attention.

I continue to be amazed that no one is shooting up the banker that did the mortgage or the broker who advised to buy and hold US stocks and all the other nonsense that’s been spoon-fed by billions in advertising by the morally bankrupt finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) businesses. It is difficult to imagine just how different the US economy will look after this debacle. We’re definitely past the age of the unregulated free market triumphalism that has haunted us since Reagan, but it’s hard to figure out what will take its place.

My truck

Early Bird

Here in the Greater Boothbay Region of Midcoast Maine, there’s a tradition I’ve not seen elsewhere (actually, quite a few, but that’s another story). Saturday is “Early Bird”. At 6 am, the people of the town show up downtown in pajamas and bathrobes and shop. Yup, they shop. Prices are cheap, and usually the earlier, the bigger discount. When we went two years ago, one shop was selling gift certificates worth $100 the next August for $50 in November. Obviously they needed the money in November and could afford the giveaway in August. That being said, the store actually shut down. Oh well.

Anyway, two years ago when Liz and I first went, we had a bad moment halfway to town worrying that we’d been pranked, but sure enough, bright and early on a Saturday morning, the sidewalks were packed with PJ clad people with shopping bags. We stopped in at the favored watering hole around nine for Bloodies and Benedicts. Hanging at the bar in PJs. Is this a great place, or what?

While I’m bragging on the Greater Boothbay Region, we have a problem with the price of lobster collapsing. Apparently the economy and the closure of some large lobster processors in Canada and Iceland resulted in plunging lobster prices like I can remember from the seventies. Getting as little as $1.90 a pound at the dock with fuel at $4.00 a gallon had many of the townsfolk in a world of hurt. This being Boothbay, and this being Maine, the community organized a big lobster sale; five bucks each, cooked or live. It was to start at 9am at the High School and go all day.

Well, the line started forming at 7:30am and by 1:00pm there were no lobsters left. Seven thousand lobsters sold and they could have sold thousands more. This in a town with a year round population of about three thousand. Mainers really come together to help each other out, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier living out a depression in Maine than in most parts.

Thanks to all in Boothbay for letting us join this sweet and gracious community we’ve come to love so well.

No recourse

Okay, so I should have know this from the gitgo, but I only recently learned that most mortgages in America are no recourse loans, which means they can seize the house, but that’s it; they can’t get your 401(k), your savings, your cars or anything else. This changes the advice I’d given before, and in a pretty serious way. The assclowns of conventional wisdom still act as if a credit score was somehow important. A credit score, as stated here before is a marketing gimmick some hack made up to make you think debt was good and even necessary. Cash is king and a good credit score plus $3 will get you a latte at Starbucks.

Given that your mortgage is no recourse, and given you are upside down on your loan, simply stop paying the mortgage. It will take them a year, maybe longer, to get you out of the house. When I went bankrupt in 1992, it took 11 ½ months to get us out. If I’d had a salary while running my first startup, think of how much cash I could have saved up!

So you stop paying the mortgage, get to live in the house free for a year, and have the discipline to use the extra cash to pay off all debt and actually put some away. Where does that leave you? Finding a nice place to rent, preferably walking distance from work, putting away savings and living a simpler life. And remember, rent is not just throwing money away if real estate prices are going down. It’s just common sense.

The economy

It’s like watching a slow motion car crash as the pundits get around to realizing that happy days aren’t here again and that a 25-year binge doesn’t end in a 6-month hangover. When Wall Street trashes the hotel room, taxpayers get the bill, and this one is a doozy.

The sense of normalcy is sort of worrying if you believe (as I do) that it’s early 1930 and the shit is in the air on the way to the fan, but everyone with a job and a paid up mortgage is in complete denial. The hard thing is to figure out what to do. Stock up on canned goods? Ammo? Water? Gold? Hard to say what’s best, but in a few years we’ll all know in hindsight what we wish we’d done now. And that’s frustrating, since that’s how I think. I always want to know what I will wish I’d done today 3 months from now, 6 months from now and a year from now, but I just have no idea what the hell that is.

Maybe it’s time to think about an alternative energy business. Something to focus on while the whole thing unfolds, instead of fixating on watching the house of cards collapse. I did the same damn thing on November 4, 2008. I sat in front of the TV and the laptop at 4 pm and started surfing for any info. By 10, I was asleep and missed all the good parts. Sometimes, being early is counterproductive.

Sort of like being on a sinking ship, if you’re near your lifeboat and wearing you personal flotation device it could probably seem boring just waiting for the end and the order to board. A catastrophe to be sure, but in such slow motion as to be boring.

Death threats

Apparently, there have been a huge number of death threats made against the current president elect. They range from the stupid to the cruel and ignorant and just about every nasty, slimy place in between. Somehow, the idea of a person of mixed race, one of those being African, throws a spanner in the gears of a certain class of ignorant, lower class white folk. I’ve always assumed these idiots are so lacking in accomplishment that they must bitterly cling to the idea that somebody, somewhere, somehow is more worthless than them, and they come up with black folk. Previous generations of these pinheads hated the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Catholics and anyone else they could identify as somehow different and imagine themselves superior to.

Gee, maybe the way to feel superior is to be superior. Get a freaking education. Or at least get one for your kids. Ignorant and angry is no way to live a life. This is America. Go get your piece of it. Honest to Dog, if you need to feel superior, you could volunteer to work with special needs kids or adults. Imagine for the first time in your life being the brightest one in the room. Priceless! And it doesn’t require committing a felony like threatening the life of a government official does.

Instead of “Don’t make our county an Obamanation” bumper stickers, your rusted out F-150 could sport “I’m smarter than Sarah Palin’s youngest” and be done with it. It has the benefit of (possibly) being true. Some of them folks, no, it wouldn’t be.

Anyway, the way W has wrapped himself so deeply inside a vacuum of security is ironically a great setup for the president elect. The kind of person they worked so hard to keep out is now on the inside.

Even higher today. WTF?

No rant, just a wicked high tide

Work (shudder)

So with the economy tanking and all, and the investments that allow this slacker lifestyle falling like a prom dress at midnight, I’ve been thinking about work. What would be a worthwhile pastime that would fit my skills and allow a semblance of our current lifestyle? It’s tough to reconcile the need to spend a lot and the desire to be lazy. Work was always enjoyable when I did it, but sleeping till nine or so is really, really habit forming.

Anyway, I don’t want to go back to a 60 hour a week executive gig, with suits and HR and all that happy horseshit, but what else to do? I’m thinking a solar energy consulting/installation thing might make sense. I need to do some research, and the economics were more compelling with oil at $150 a barrel, but I think we’ll be there again soon enough.

I’m not sure if Maine or Florida do it, but there are provisions in many places for selling back excess capacity to the electric utility company, plus tax credits, so it seems like a winning field. iTulip has called the next two bubbles, alternative energy and infrastructure, and I don’t know squat about roads, dams and bridges, but I do know a little about photovoltaic systems, having lived for weeks at a time on two catamarans I owned and sailed from Maine to Florida and the Bahamas. So I guess a little study time is required, and then maybe we give it a go.

Liz and I have looked at houses off the grid in the Florida Keys, primarily on No Name Key and Cooks Island. Both are really wonderful wild areas where water comes from a cistern and electricity from the sun. Cooks was accessible only by boat, through half a foot of water, which would be a challenge, but I think we would have enjoyed it. Obviously, the Keys are a good place for solar, since it’s sunny all the time, and the cistern thing works because of all the rain. No, that’s not contradictory; in the Keys it can rain inches in minutes and then be sunny again.

Anyhoo, we’ve spent some time with solar powered stuff (Harvey the RV has a photovoltaic panel on the roof) and I think I understand the basics. Just need to figure out the business case. Probably worth looking into wind as well. As it stands now, the weak point in the system is storage. Battery technology is getting better, but still sucks. If fuel cell would come down (a lot) in price, storing hydrogen gets interesting.

Work. What a concept. Stay tuned for more on opening a business.

Scary stuff indeed

I have no idea why I’d want to smash my thumb with a hammer like this, but in looking for an inspiring topic on which to bloviate, I checked out the Hannity Forums, obviously connected to our rational, thoughtful, fair and balanced pal, Sean Hannity. Holy crap! These people are really scary! There’s comparison of Obama to Hitler and OBL in the same post. Here’s a typical sample: “The electorate in this country gave the terrorists just what they wanted.”

Huh? I suppose just the way 9/11 made our constitutional liberties invalid, the election of Barack Obama makes democracy invalid. Somebody needs to explain to me what the hell is patriotic about accusing the President Elect of being a terrorist? How do you love America and hate the outcome of its most basic feature, the election? There’s a very schizophrenic cognitive dissonance going on here, like alleged Christians who abhor abortion but support the death penalty and the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghans. Honest to Dog, I don’t get it.

Let’s look at the last two Presidents and what happened on their watches. I recall eight years of peace and prosperity under Clinton. We successfully prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned the perps in the first WTC bombing, and I personally made a fortune. Then we had the W years. I recall a recession, and now the start of a full blown depression, 2 wars, Bin Laden still breathing and a 10 trillion dollar deficit.

What the hell are these people smoking to be afraid of a Democrat in power?

I want a green RV

It seems that there are a few ways to live very lightly and cheaply on this earth, my favorite being the sailboat. With a decent photovoltaic setup and a water maker, you can pretty much stock up on beans, rice and bait and live for damn near nothing in some pretty spectacular places. The outer islands of the Bahamas come to mind, and we’ve spent many beautiful months there doing just that.

But bad weather is annoying, and dragging anchor at midnight in a storm sucks, so we’ve switched to RVing. At first blush, this is a hideous blow to the environment, what with getting eight miles to the gallon and all. But this isn’t commuting. It’s living. Last year ago we did a grand four-month trip across the US and deep into Mexico. It was way fun and actually turned out to be ecologically highly defensible.

First issue is fuel. We traveled eight thousand miles and burned a thousand gallons of diesel. We have friends in nearby Nobleboro, Maine who burned fifteen hundred just to keep the house warm. Hmmm. Who’s Al Gore’s pal now?

Second is water. The amount of water wasted by the average residence is incredible. I’ve seen 170 gallons per day, per person thrown around as an average number. Onboard Harvey, our 39 foot diesel motor coach, we can last three to seven days on 100 gallons of fresh water. That’s about 5% of what the standard household goes through.

But I want a really green RV. The New York Times on Sunday had an interesting article on green RVs. They featured a couple with a rig similar to ours that refit it to burn left over fast food grease. I think this is a great idea, but it doesn’t scale. There isn’t enough waste grease generated in this country to fuel more than a small fraction of the vehicles on the road. It’s like trying to heat you house using toilet paper stolen from public bathrooms. It might work for one person, but it definitely doesn’t scale.

Our 2007 Toyota Prious gets 55 MPG on a bad day, and I’ve coaxed it to over 80 MPG when really trying hard. I wish it had a solar panel on the roof like our sailboat did, and apparently the 2009 model has a solar panel for air conditioning, but that’s not enough. I want a full on hybrid RV with 10 big panels on the roof, a deployable windmill and an electric motor that can run 100 miles on battery alone.

An RV and an open schedule are perfectly suited to solar and wind. If the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, just wait around. When the batteries are fully charged, then go. Add a water maker and you’re talking really tiny carbon footprint. A composting toilet would be a good addition, and make for a really compelling green existence.

Additionally, normal stick built residences can’t go where the work is or the water or the food or whatever else is desirable out there. With a green RV, you could pretty much always live in the most desirable place at any given time. How many homeowners in Michigan in 2008 wish they could turn the key and drive their houses somewhere most hospitable? I’m thinking most of them.

Anyway, I want a green RV.

Back in the saddle

I’d like to apologize to both of my readers for slacking off lately. A trip to New Orleans, illness, and a short tour of southern Maine got me off of the writing thing, so here we go again.

Anything interesting happen since the end of October? Wasn’t there an election or something? It vaguely rings a bell. I’ll think of it eventually.

There was apparently a large spike in death threats against the entire Obama family during Sarah Palin’s unfortunate run for VP. The whole meme of Obama as foreign terrorist translated to many as “he wants to take our property and our guns, ban our religion and destroy us”. This is pretty hardcore politics, and it seems to have provided a tipping point for some of the white supremacists and hard right nationalists that exist in America, and exist to our national shame.

These people feel a genuine, heartfelt need to save their families and their way of life from foreign, alien, un-American forces that will ban the bible, force abortions on the unwilling, teach explicit sex ed to preschoolers and force the Boy Scouts to hire gay counselors to sleep with young boys. These are actual quotes from a James Dobson (Focus on the Family) letter posted on his web site. There have been widespread musings about whether Obama is the anti-Christ.

If this is the kind of thing your spiritual advisor is telling you, then for a substantial number of Americans, killing Obama is God’s will. What an incredible perversion of faith these people are foisting on their flocks. We’re talking about a Protestant Christian American born man who has served in public service or teaching for most of his adult life, and there are likely millions of Americans who believe the American and Christian thing to do is kill him.

My only comfort is that the younger generation of Christians I know, mostly family, are embarrassed by people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson and other voices of intolerance. That leaves the old, the uneducated, and of course the bitter ones, clinging to their guns and religion. But enough of them have weapons and motivation from a perversion of Christianity to be a very credible threat. It is very, very wrong. And unfortunately, it’s a mainstay of Republican and conservative electioneering.

At least we can rest easier knowing that the wildly unpopular incumbent has put together a massive Secret Service to keep the rabble at bay. The new presidential limo apparently has bulletproof windows five inches thick. Windows. Five inches. Mine are what, maybe 3/8”?

Anyway, here’s to hoping that a black American president flushes the racists from hiding, and we get to see them for what they are. But what about the millions of Southern Baptists who just think they are doing their Christian and American duty? Something has to give, but I sure as hell don’t know what.

What we need to do now

So it’s actually looking like Obama has a chance to win this thing, and oh, what a mess he inherits. I think a few things will have to happen. First, we need a WPA style rebuilding of our infrastructure. The roads, bridges, dams and rails of this country are sub-par, and a big dose of federal funds would be just the ticket. How far do you suppose $700 billion would go to fixing that up? I’ve heard it said that we could build an entire national high-speed rail system for something like $50 billion. How many jobs does that create?

Second, we need a Manhattan Project style attempt to create and deploy alternative energy. We have the minds and the will, let’s just add some cash and do it. I earlier figured it would cost about $5 billion to create a photovoltaic grid big enough to provide electricity for the entire US. How could anyone vote for a $700 billion bailout and NOT vote for a $5 billion stop burning coal and oil in generators plan? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Third would be to provide 5,000 visas and scholarships for Iranian college students to study in America. At $100,000 a whack for a free ride we’re talking half a billion, which is what, a few days in Iraq? Think about the diplomatic impact of having 5,000 students, which multiplied by extended families makes hundreds of thousands of new advocates for the US of A each year in Iran. That beats the hell out a preemptive nuclear strike.

Fourth, read “Three Cups of Tea” and carry it out on a giant scale. The title of the book refers to a Muslim saying that if we have a cup of tea we are acquaintances, and after the third we are friends. Long story short, an American in Pakistan and Afghanistan is building schools with local labor and donated materials. He has created more goodwill for the US and helped those folks more than Condi Rice and W could imagine.

There’s going to be a tough row to hoe as these things cost money. There’s been a huge disconnect in the American psyche about spending and taxes. The figure cited for the bailout is about $8,000 per American household. Will we pay it in increased taxes? Not yet. We’ll borrow it from the Chinese and Japanese and leave the bill for the kids and grandkids. At what point do we stop using the national credit card and start paying for stuff?

Two Republican truisms have hopefully been shattered by recent events. One, lower taxes DO NOT increase revenues enough to pay for themselves. Two, an unbridled free market IS NOT an ideal thing. Alan Greenspan yesterday “admitted that he was “partially” wrong in his opposition to tighter regulation, and added that he was in a state of “shocked disbelief” that shareholders were not protected.” Well, no shit Sherlock.

This is such a tectonic shifts it leads to a head scratching moment and wondering what the hell the Right is going to grasp to now? I stopped in at Townhall.Org, a real cesspool of a right wing echo chamber and they really don’t have much to say. The usual “John Murtha is a traitor” from people who never served in the military and bitching about the liberal media. Yawn. Can it be that the long national nightmare is over? One can always hope.

I remember a headline from The Onion during the 2000 campaign season, “Bush promises an end to eight years of peace and prosperity”. If only we’d known how true that would be. There’s a really interesting graphic showing how the rest of the world would vote for US President. Quick! Somebody spin this as “Obama is a foreigner!”

Anyway, it’s too bad that it’s taken a collapse like this to knock some sense into the electorate, but we had it coming. And thank God they couldn’t kick the can of the economy down the road like they did with the war in Iraq, making it someone else’s problem. This fetid pile of feces lies in their greedy, grabbing mitts, and there’s nowhere else to fling it.

We may end up with an entire generation that distrusts business and free markets, which would be a shame in some ways, but ooh Lord, didn’t we get too far off in the other direction? The worst part wasn’t the enabling of voracious greed, it was the idea that the poor and downtrodden somehow deserved their fates, as if some billionaire in Greenwich didn’t have a hell of a lot of luck on his side, rather than just hard work, true grit or being a member of the lucky gene club.

Maybe we’ll end up with a social contract concerned with more than keeping taxes low and every man for him or herself. I loved it when Obama said this is what W meant by an ownership society. You’re on your own!