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.