Into the Void

Sarah Palin just quit her job as Governor of Alaska. The 2012 presidential race has begun!


The pundits are going on about whoever coupld have given her such terrible political advice. Since she doesn’t take advice from anyone but her husband, it seems pretty obvious.

Possibilities:
1) She plans to attend MJ’s memorial service.
2) She is going to work with hubby Todd at the oil company, perhaps as lobbyist or in PR – or better yet, in an Energy Industry organization. Heh, I almost wrote “Thinktank.” As if.
3) An inescapable personal or political crisis looming. Not likely, she wouldn’t recognize an ethical or moral failure if it jumped in her lap and called her “Grandma.”
4) Early preparations for 2012 – the Mayans were right! Alaska is too far from Washington so she really has to get there and make some political allies.
5) She’s going to write a book, do a book tour, go on the lecture circuit – and win a Nobel Prize.
6) Unplanned pregnancy?

Let’s start a rumor.

A friend recently consulted me about a rumor he heard. He wanted to know whether the Muslims are investing money in the US in order to take over. This is my reply:

The simple answer is “No, and if they did it was an amazingly stupid investment.”

But I don’t do simple. :-)

I’ll start by saying, screw the Taliban, they’re stone-age guys with guns and a beautiful book of inspired verses that none of them is educated enough to actually read. And WE put them in power to drive out the Russians.
Third World Traveler: Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden,
and the Taliban

Unfortunately, in the late ’90′s the Taliban was opposing an oil pipeline through Uzbekistan that would have had to come down through their country. This incensed oilman George W. Bush.

The Taliban doesn’t own anything but poppies, guns and rocks. Their country was destroyed by years of war against Russia. There is an entire generation of people who can’t read, who have no government records like land deeds, marriage licenses or birth certificates. They aren’t investing in anything but the feudal system that protects them from themselves.

We often boost up third-world, authoritarian regimes when there is something in it for us.

Ok, so one way is to go to an underdeveloped nation with a mineral you need that you can’t get in the U.S. Pay the guys in power so that they have absolute control over the populace and can use them to mine the mineral. **Saudi Arabia** is a prime example of that – and Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi until we enlisted him to organize the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein are also good examples of it. Where’s that photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein after they negotiated an oil deal?

Think of Teddy Roosevelt riding roughshod over Libya, etc. NeoCons are “Teddy Roosevelt Republicans.” Iraq didn’t go so well, but they don’t see it. With “trickle-down economics” the poor and the middle class bear the burden. It doesn’t affect the NeoCons so they don’t even know it exists.

I wrote a couple of blog entries on the public debt recently. You really need to read some of Jefferson’s and Madison’s thoughts on scrip before you read my short, simple answer. Here’s the URL and a quote from it.

In modern terms, the Federal Reserve Bank decides on a dollar amount that it needs to borrow to stimulate the growth of new businesses or to fund a war, then it prints dollars to symbolize the debt. When you and I then borrow the dollars, we take on a portion of the Fed’s debt. Once we own the dollar bills, we pay interest on the dollars that the Fed borrowed. The Fed borrows not just interest-free, but at a profit.

Pull a dollar out of your wallet if you don’t believe me. There is statement in the upper-right corner “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” The dollar bill is an I.O.U.!

Having read that, and knowing that the dollar is (or was) the standard world-wide, you can deduce who owns our public debt. Pretty much the whole world, eh?

Foreign investors own large portions of corporate America. Fortunately, most of them don’t own isn’t enough to actually control the companies, but what if they did? They’d still want to make a profit!

At the same time, convince these investors that real estate is booming and to invest not in the real estate itself, but in the real estate and financial instutions that hold the mortgages. Stocks are more liquid than mortgages, who would want that hassle?

The way to make real estate boom is to make it easier to borrow money, that is, to print money so there can be more debt. It also is necessary to make it easier to buy an overpriced house, like with variable-interest loans.

So here’s how to eliminate large portions of the public debt quickly: We have induced foreign countries take an interest in our biggest industries instead of in cash. That would be financial institutions, mostly.

Make the institutions crash and have the government take over, leaving all the investors with nothing.

The conflict in Iraq has been taking away our pay raises for several years, so many folks were unable to meet the balloon payments. Countrywide Mortgage went first, and the foreign investors said oh shit and started trying to get their money out of our financial institutions. The Wall Street version of a run on the bank, 1929 style. Suddenly dollars aren’t so popular. (That’s why it looks as if oil costs more. It’s the exchange rate, people!!!)

If the dollar is worth less, the debt is less! But simultaneously it gets harder to attract those foreign investments we need so badly to support the opulent lifestyle that we euphemistically call “the American Dream.”

The Fed is trying to control it, so the fall is slow, but we are definitely falling and who the hell knows where the bottom is. Maybe it will stop when Americans have the same lifestyle one of our biggest creditors, the Chinese.

Oooo.

Let’s talk about the Department of the Treasury for a minute. When you buy a Treasury Bond or other instrument, you are borrowing money from the future of the United States financial health. What I meant to say actually is that you are betting the the government will be strong enough to pay the bill with the stated interest at the end of the term of the bill. The shakier the U.S. looks, the harder it gets to sell them.

Thee Treasury department web page maintains a list of what countries hold the Public Debt in Treasury notes. If you want to demonize oil producers by generalizing them as Muslims, then they are #4 on the list. Venezuela is actually Catholic. The Carib and Luxemborg entries actually are world banks that launder money for everywhere. Ditto Switzerland.

As for this bailout, your grandkids will still be paying for the last eight years of laissez-faire economics 30 years from now. Personally, I think that only folks who voted for oilman Bush should have to pay for the bailout.

Basically, your question has no meaning. We have been relying on foreign governments to support our opulent lifestyle for years.

I have been considering picking up some cheap real estate to sell a few years from now when the market picks up. I don’t see why our friends the Saudi Arabians wouldn’t do the same thing. Along with lots of Japanese, Chinese and Russian citizens. I don’t see this as a sinister plot, I see it as good Capitalism.

Which doesn’t means it’s good for you and me.

Did that sort of answer the question?

No hope for help… | Oddly Enough | Reuters

“I have a message for every homeowner worried about rising mortgage payments: The best you can do for your family is to call 1-800-995-HOPE,”

… Bush said after a White House meeting with administration officials and lenders on a new plan to help.

Unfortunately he was a couple digits off, it is actually 1-888-995-HOPE(4673) . That gets you through to the Homeownership Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit group which offers free housing counseling for homeowners.

The article above gave me a giggle.

The “subprime mortgage” problem is being beaten to death on the news, and I have no intention of beating it to death here. If you can’t afford a house, look for a cheaper one. When determining whether you can afford a house, you don’t count future increases in income or expected appreciation of the property into the equation. And if you’re a bank buying mortgage notes from mortgage brokers, please check the financials of every single mortgagee before you use my savings to buy it.

Simple.

It’s the American dream, again. Anyone can be a homeowner.

Never mind the incalculably bad political decisions that have led to this situation. Let’s see: unemployment is up, salaries aren’t increasing, making it difficult to adjust to balloon payments. The value of houses is dropping, evaporating home equity.

And now, foreign investors are pulling their money out of the whole industry. The public debt? That’s owned by foreign investors. It increases every time a bank forecloses on a mortgage – the bank can only get pennies on the dollar in a sheriff’s sale. The investors are pulling their money out, destabilizing the stock market. Our money is worth much less in the world market, giving many Americans the mistaken impression that everyone in the world is greedily charging us more for things like oil and clothes. It’s not greed, folks. It’s called the “Exchange Rate.”

We are so screwed, even those of us who aren’t on the verge of losing a house we shouldn’t have been allowed to buy in the first place.

The Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act

X-Originating-IP: [209.158.227.171]
From: RepGerber@pahouse.net
Reply-To: info@pahouse.net
Subject: Energy crisis demands action now
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:00:13 -0400

Energy crisis demands action now As the war in Iraq continues, energy and fuel costs rise and America’s energy consumption continues to cause climate change, the need for a cleaner and more energy-independent Pennsylvania is paramount. The Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act, as part of the House Democratic Caucus’s Energy Independence Strategy, would put Pennsylvania in the forefront of the alternative and renewable fuel economy. This legislation would mandate the blending of ethanol, soy and other clean energy sources in fuels. It would establish production and distribution standards to advance the shift to cleaner and cheaper domestic fuel sources. And it would help to stimulate the Pennsylvania economy with in-state production of renewable fuels. Our proposal is likely to come to a vote on the House floor next week and, if enacted into law, would put Pennsylvania on track to produce enough homegrown fuel to replace all the fuel we now import from the Persian Gulf. Clean the environment. End our dependence on foreign oil. Reduce fuel costs. Stimulate Pennsylvania’s economy. Show your support for this important legislation. Contact your representative and tell them to vote YES on House Bill 1202!

Spread the word!

I am utterly appalled by the ignorance of the present energy issues displayed in HOUSE BILL No.1202, otherwise known as the Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act.

Perhaps the Pennsylvania representatives aren’t aware of the gas crisis in the early or mid-70s where the State of New Jersey had to go to even-odd day gas rationing.

Maybe the Pennsylvania representatives have forgotten the gas crisis in 1978 or 1979 during which lines at the gas station where up to a half mile long. Gas stations sold out their daily allotment by 10AM. People were shooting each other in gas lines in anger and frustration. Increased energy costs caused several years of stagflation, where prices and interest rates went up but salaries didn’t. The average Pennsylvanian’s life savings lost a large percentage of buying power, forcing retirees to go to back to work.

The problems inherent in relying not just on foreign oil but on fossil fuels in general are not new. Any rational, responsible individual opted a long time ago to forego luxuries such as comfort, style or the illusion of safety in favor of reduced emissions and better gas mileage.

Let’s be clear, also, that the United States buys most of its oil from friends and allies. Iraq was once a friend and ally, and continued oil revenue is essential to building a government to replace the one the United States destroyed. It would be wiser to stop buying oil from that notorious Wahabbi stronghold Saudi Arabia.

As it is written, HOUSE BILL No.1202 will have no effect on Pennsylvanians’ driving habits. The bill provides no incentive for individuals to use less gas or to pollute less. There is no mention of the paranoid trend towards larger vehicles that occurred after 9-11, as if the family car is a bomb shelter rather than simply a means of getting from point A to point B. There is also no mention of the windfall profits American oil refineries have made by basing manufacturing overhead allocations that did NOT increase on the increased cost of the raw material. The emphasis in HOUSE BILL No.1202 on biodiesel technology trivializes or ignores viable alternatives to the internal combustion engine, much less the development of proposed new alternative energy technologies. There is absolutely zero mention of the effect continued reliance on fossil fuels will have on carbon dioxide levels in the air we breathe. There is nothing the bill about addressing the soil depletion that will occur if current farming practices are continued while implementing biodiesel technology.

HOUSE BILL No.1202 is an short-sighted, agrarian solution to an industrial problem. In fact, the solutions outlined in HOUSE BILL No.1202 are exactly the solutions that high school ecology clubs were promoting in the ’70s. These solutions are so archaic that to implement the bill as written would be to set energy policy back 30 years. The result of HOUSE BILL No.1202 will be to push Pennsylvania back into the the Dust Bowl era. A post-modern technological solution that addresses multiple social, financial and geopolitical facets of the energy problem makes far more sense to any reasonably intelligent Pennsylvanian.

Iraq Pennsylvania Persian Gulf climate change energy crisis

<rant>
Email to someone I don’t even know who has been spamming me with chain letters.

Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 09:57:50 -0400
To: ————-
From: Leslie
Subject: I’m blogging this. Thanks. Re: Gas War

Did you write this in crayon? Or worse, did someone else write it in crayon and you merely forwarded it because you liked the big purple letters? You obviously didn’t think this through.

If you do this you’ll drive the price up at the other gas stations…

1. because most Exxon-Mobil gas stations are privately owned by local merchants, not by Exxon-Mobil
2. because unbranded gas stations usually buy from the big oil companies, including Exxon-Mobil
3. because when BP and Citgo and Hess and Lukoil stations run low on gas they’ll buy some at an exorbitant price from Exxon-Mobil
4. because the small stations also increase their prices according to supply and demand – they have to make a living.

Consumers don’t call the tune in a capitalist society. Deal with it. The producers do and they employ sophisticated marketing strategies based upon well-established behaviorial psychology techniques to do so. Psychology in the US has been focused on predicting the actions of large numbers of people, and of MANIPULATING them. You don’t get to decide what you want – you buy without thinking why you prefer one brand over another. And you forward junk mail with the same lack of thought.

The real answers to the problem are too hard for Americans. Bicycle. Take the bus. Get a hybrid vehicle. Don’t use electricity from oil-burning power plants. Instead, set up solar panels and wind turbines to generate your own electricity, using commercial nuclear power as a backup only.

Let’s see… an food industry executive is an expert on the oil industry? What’s his name again?  And the Halliburton engineer – knowing how to crack petroleum doesn’t make you an expert in Microeconomics.

According to Snopes.com, the Gas Wars email you sent me has been circulating since 2001. You missed the May 15th boycott by 6 years.

Who are you and where did you get my email address?

Leslie

</rant>

At 08:13 PM 5/8/2007 -0700, you wrote:
Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 20:13:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: ————————-
Subject: Gas War
To: ———————

In addition to the Gas War set for 15th May 2007, here is something else we all can do ..

jdowney01@GAS GAS WAR – an idea that WILL work. This was originally sent by a retired Coca Cola executive. It came from one of his engineer buddies who retired from Halliburton.
It’s worthy of your consideration.
Join the resistance!  I hear we are going to hit close to $4.00 a gallon by summer and it might possibly go higher! Want gasoline prices to come down? We need to take some intelligent, united action. Phillip Hollsworth offered this good idea,
This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the “don’t buy gas on a certain day” campaign that was going around earlier!

… and lots more of the same. Click the snopes.com link above.

I had a very fruitful discussion with my shrink Saturday morning. I wanted to know why it is that some of the folks on the bipolar lists who are obviously far more stable than I am are on disability. It has been suggested that I have force of will, a concept that is complete and total <useless substance>, as is evidenced by my lack of control over my weight.

I’m in a weight loss program. Forget WW, they are amazingly ineffective. But at least they’re inexpensive, eh? This one was $550 for a 17-week program. My goal is to lose at least 30 lbs by the end of the program. F*cking expensive 30 lbs. But you know, you do what you have to. This one is going to work – the emphasis is on identifying triggers and modifying behaviors, and it builds in the changes on a week-by-week basis to avoid an overwhelm. The goal, then, is not weight loss, per se, but creating new habits to replace the old, dysfunctional habits.

What I walked away from the shrink’s office with on Saturday was this: “Motivation is ephemeral.” $125 and worth every penny of it.

If anyone else is interested in “playing in mind” instead of “playing in world”, here’s the concept: “Motivation” implies an external goal of some sort, and external goals can become less important or can have hidden demotivators.

*Commitment* is a better thing to have, because it is self-directed and unwavering.

Or something like that. I will be mulling this over for the next few days, particularly with regard to my weight-loss program. I’ll be continuing the antipsychotics until I get a grip on things.

Disability. No, I couldn’t do it, not permanently. I would lose my already poor social skills, I would break loose from the 24 hour day, I would get *nothing* done. I need the structure that working a 40 hour week gives me.

Besides, engineering pays a whole lot better than mental illness. I’m not clear how they tax SSDI, but my base salary is about 3.5 times what I’d get on SSDI. For the record, I make less than half of what I’d make if I were stable. It’s a tradeoff. I would have to quit my shrink – I pay out of pocket to get a shrink who is competent enough to keep me functional – so I would definitely lose ground as far as controlling the illness goes. The public health shrinks are worse than useless, they are outright damaging. If you fall into the system, it’s all over for you. And engineers aren’t expected to be paragons of normalcy anyway. Being bipolar isn’t a big issue so long as you don’t deliberately antagonize anybody. Geeks and autistics have a lot in common, but that’s another story for another day.

My big worry is this – since bipolars are notorious for lack of insight into our own illness, perhaps I am fooling myself into believing I’m doing ok when in reality I’m tottering about making a total ass of myself. And blogging it, no less.

My next worry is this – we always chide the newbies for quitting their meds and winding up having another episode. "But I’m not sick any more!" you hear them bleat. So I take a base of two meds. If I feel an episode coming on, I can add others as needed. It’s the new food pyramid, with an all-seeing chocolate eye at the apex. Being allowed to adjust the meds myself posits, of course, that I have the insight to know when it’s time to do so. Given my big worry, lack of insight, perhaps I should be rapping my own knuckles for stopping the emergency meds once I stabilize. Perhaps I should just take it all the time and stop worrying about TD and weight gain and drooling.

NO. That’s not an option.

So what I’m getting at is… if you don’t use it, you lose it. Social skills, reasoning ability, mathematics, whatever. If you reward yourself for being disabled, you will become more disabled. If you reward yourself for being healthy, you will be more healthy. The key is to find effective rewards and to apply them.

Or maybe the key is that motivation vs. commitment thing.

BUT… all of that is psychological bullshit. Stuff that I have to work out in my own head. It is *about* bipolar disorder, but it is not a commonality to all bipolars, it’s not part of the diagnosis. Does that make sense?

About the weight loss program. The manual we are working from assumes that the people in the class are unable to weigh pros and cons of menu choices. Now, on a good day I’m able to say… do I need to eat 4 oz of chicken to fill up, or will I feel satisfied on a smaller portion of higher calorie beef? To go over your menu doing that for each item is complicated, and on a bad day it’s practically impossible. To uncomplicate it, they say, “Don’t eat beef, it’s too fattening.” Like, DUH. So don’t *eat* as much!

We could go on about vegans and how holy^Whealthy their dietary beliefs are… when someone lays that mess on me I ask them whether vegans breast-feed. *BOOM!* Head explodes. My shrink and I had a good laugh over that recently. I will also add the bibliographic entry for an article from an anthropology text for the ’80s or ’90s – “Science, Witchcraft and Religion” – about how the health-food industry was taking on a moral tone that even back then had a cult-like quality. Your body is a temple, and the health food clerk is its priest. The book is back in print, maybe I should buy another copy.

It’s kind of like, well, I don’t want to make people examine the liver and muscles of every pig they slaughter to be sure it doesn’t contain the particular diseases and parasites that will also harm humans – issues that don’t pertain to cattle – so I’ll just set up a rule of thumb… “Don’t eat pork!” And so you have kosher laws. Orthodox Jews may try to separate the dietary laws from any pragmatic, temporal reasons for their existence, but trust me, there are very good reasons for not letting pre-literate nomads risk their lives on “unclean” foods.

Do we trust the guys who butcher pigs to put our health above their money when it comes to rejecting infested pork? Hmmmm…

Did you know that fat carries toxins right up the food chain, where it gets more concentrated the higher up you go? So maybe we should eat less fat? NO, wrong answer. The brain is 60% fat. No wonder the kids are hammering down french fries, their brains are starving. We think that low-fat is healthy, so we starve their brains from before birth. I think we’re going to discover that autism is due to insufficient fat in the dient. There is considerable evidence that adding fish oil to the diet improves AHDH and bipolar disorder. The answer, then, is to provide foods with a healthy Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio. The MH docs are saying a max of 4:1 with a minimum of 1 gram of Omega-3. I’ll edit this later to include links. Grocery stores are carrying a cooking oil that meets the criterion. It browns a little bit at normal temps when you saute with it, but that’s not an insurmountable obstacle.

Or maybe I’m inventing all this.

Something I wrote last year: Mitochondria Food. I will be updating this.

[Hey, this new version of WordPress makes it easier to insert links. And here I've been doing it manually.]

But back to the stability issue. Ah, hell, I’ll break this into separate posts later. Why do I care what other bipolars do? I care because there’s a good chance that bipolars are an important genetic variation, one that brings inventiveness and creativity at the price of instability. By medicating us into submission, the status quo is preventing the evolution of the human species. Evolution is a very real threat to folks whose power lies in making the little people follow their small-minded rules of thumb. Uh, yes, this was part of the discussion I had with the shrink. He recommended a book on neuroplasticity, which I will post separately.

If there’s no global oil shortage, why is it necessary to go to extremes like extracting oil from shale?
For years now they’ve been using water to flush out the dregs from near-depleted oil wells. It seems pretty obvious.
There was a gas crisis in the mid-70′s where they went to even-odd day gas rationing. I think I’d just gotten my drive’s license, so it might have been in 1974/5.
In 1979 there was another. A couple of times I got into gas lines early in the morning, only to be sent away when the gas station closed at 10 AM. It was bad. I wound up quitting my job, siphoning the last gallon of the gas out of my car into my motorcycle, and looking for a job closer to my house. At a huge reduction in pay. It didn’t matter that I could afford the price hike – gas just wasn’t available!
At this point I have a Classic Prius. It still uses gasoline, but it doesn’t gulp it.
I’m hearing reports that people are cancelling their Memorial Day shore trips because of gas prices. PEOPLE! It’s not worth skipping the holiday over it. It’s only a few dollars. Find a shorter way to work next week to make up for it. Park the SUV and use your kid’s Nissan. And DAMN, don’t switch to a lower octane, it will give you lower gas mileage.