Happy Hanukkah

Hiding in a box

A few hours ago a boy floated away in a balloon. Everyone lost their minds trying to figure out how to get him down.

And then "The Larimer County Sheriff, Jim Alderden, said that he was found hiding in a box in the family’s garage."

I'm sorry, what?

A sad, surprising end to the season

No trip to regionals this year. Very disappointing. We brought a strong team, but our weaknesses were too apparent and too easy to exploit. Turns out, high pressure zone-d is not something we were prepared to play against. Not that we should have been surprised.

Upshot, in a strong section which somehow only got 3 bids to regionals, we ended up fizzling out and finishing 5th.

Next year, BLU!

Sectionals

Metro NY Club sectionals is tomorrow in Middletown, NY... unless it rains all day today. Which, at this point, kinda looks likely. So it might be postponed to next weekend. I'll let you know.

You can follow along with BLU's (my team) progress here:
http://www4.upa.org/scores/tourn.cgi?div=127&id=6245

Edit: postponed until this coming weekend

Toy Soldiers

Here's something fun to think about. And by fun, I mean frightening.

It's incredible to think how close we were to living in a banana republic.

Wasn't Me

Interesting piece in Vanity Fair (who reads Vanity Fair?) (Michael Lewis on A.I.G.) which tries to shed some light on what was going on in AIG's Financial Products unit. It's titled "The Man Who Crashed the World" which, considering the text, seems wildly inappropriate to me. Must've been added by an editor.

The article sources Jake DeSantis. A guy you might remember from his public resignation in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times.

First, AIG is a huge company that does many fine things (like insurance) very well. Second, no one at AIG (including even those people in the Financial Products unit) is directly responsible for the financial meltdown. Nothing criminal was done there, nor anything particularly shady.

A whole bunch of people were asleep at the switch. Responsibility runs the gamut from federal regulators, state agencies, banks, auditors, credit rating agencies, and yes, insurers. Even inside AIG, it's certainly short-sighted and wrong to lay the blame at the feet of a handful of operators in one small division of a huge multinational company. However, there's a LOT of responsibility and plenty of blame to go around. Everybody's getting some.

The facts are that AIG's Financial Products division did a variety of incredibly stupid things (insured sub-prime loans) for a very very very long time (several years) with contracts containing ludicrously one-sided provisions (that eventually sunk AIG). They did this because it generated income, money for nearly nothing, and they were oblivious to the risks.

They enjoyed handsome profits (and salaries) facilitated by AIG's fine reputation. While the money rolled in, nobody really bothered to check what kind of risks they were taking. When they finally realized what they'd signed on to, they denied that the risks were really that bad. Then once they could no longer deny it, they closed their eyes and prayed they would make it through somehow. Then when all hell broke loose they shook their heads and said, "It wasn't me! It was my boss! He's a real bozo."

If the greed and callousness of the 80s earned its participants the nickname the "Me" generation, the sheer denial and finger-pointing of the 0s may well earn us the "Wasn't Me" generation.

Hello San Diego

Rebecca and I are in San Diego! Woo!

The plane ride was uneventful. We took off in rainy, overcast Newark and landed in bright and sunny California. Continental still bucking the no-food trend by providing ... microwave hamburgers with american cheese? What in the world are they thinking. You can't just give us a turkey sandwich?

Staying with my sister in Hillcrest. We went out for delicious Mexican food just down the block (I ate too much) and then crashed for a nap.

No calls from work. It's 4th of July weekend. LIfe is sweet.

Diamonds are for crap

The New York Times is running a miraculous piece in the business section about the Russian diamond company, Alrosa. (The Russian government owns a 90% stake in the company).

Here's the basics: diamonds are not a particularly rare stone. They're just mined by two companies (De Beers and Alrosa) that have been colluding for decades to keep prices inflated.

De Beers was recently forced, by a EU decision, to stop hoarding diamonds to inflate their price. In response it's cut production, leaving Alrosa as the worlds largest diamond producer. The world market for diamonds has essentially been scuttled, and Alrosa (unburdened by any government regulation) is busy hoarding its diamonds and attempting to market them as investment opportunities (rather than selling them as decorative stones).

Choice quotes:

“If you don’t support the price,” Andrei V. Polyakov, a spokesman for Alrosa, said, “a diamond becomes a mere piece of carbon.”

“A diamond ring should not cost $100,”

“We have to tell people that diamonds are valuable,” he said. “We are trying to maintain the price, just as De Beers did, as all diamond producing countries do. But what we are doing is selling an illusion,” meaning a product with no utility and a price that depends on the continued sense of scarcity where there is none.

It's quite difficult for me to understand how the diamond myth got started and how it's been propagated for so long. And my brain just can't quite wrap around the concept of selling diamonds as an investment. If they're just common stones (albeit pretty ones), then what would ever make their value rise above the cost of digging them out of the ground?

Here's to the hope that the diamond industry is on its death-bed.

Obama on Spot?

"Obama on Spot Over a Benefit to Gay Couples"

That's the headline of an article in the NY Times today. The story basically breaks down like this: On the one side, a federal judge in California has said that the same-sex partners of the federal employees of that court are due the same medical benefits as a heterosexual spouse. On the other side the administration and the Defense of Marriage Act.

The article says that this has put Obama in a spot, because if he ignores the court then he risks appearing to renege on his campaign promises to the gay/lesbian community. And if he follows the court's order then he risks alienating the Republicans with whom he's trying to work on other issues.

A "spot"? Who talks like that?

But more seriously, this seems like a no-brainer to me. The republican side of the gay-marriage act has been consistent in saying that they're not opposed to homosexuality, they just think that marriage is between a man and a woman. This seems like a cut-and-dry case of giving gay partners the same rights as straights without using the super-special M word.

If Republicans are offended by this is just proves that their agenda is not protecting marriage it's treating gays and lesbians as second-class citizens. (Plus, you know, the court ordered the federal government to do it.)

YSA Made It!

She's survived another year! Happy birthday little badger girl!

To celebrate, the Tomog is throwing a Big American Party.

Mixed Tape?

OK, forgive my pedantry. I have been seeing the phrase "mixed tape" far too much recently. It hurts my brain. I don't know what a "mixed tape" is.

If you are referring to a CD carrying a collection of musical songs, then the term you are looking for is mix-tape.

Wikipedia... disagrees... but that's because Wikipedia is edited by idiots.

Demagogues of the Left

“The American people are figuring it out, This is not a stimulus bill; it is a spending bill.” - Sen. John McCain

“What do you think a stimulus is? That’s the whole point.” - Pres. Barack Obama

The democrats have control of Congress, they have the White House. But they're way under-represented in the crucial demagogue count.

Perhaps this should be seen as a welcome change in Washington politics. Under the Bush regime the Republicans passed huge tax cuts for the wealthy in the name of stimulus. They floated the housing bubble and loosened bank regulations in the name of stimulus. They invaded an old, personal enemy's country in the name of fighting terror. They gave no-bid contracts to Halliburton in the name of rebuilding Iraq. They gave a huge government handout to the insurance companies in the name of improving health care. And another huge handout to the banks in the name of saving our economy.

As with the Iraq war, the perception of the Bush administration's policies was completely detached from the reality of their actions. And the funny thing was, though we knew that they were lying, we never stopped listening to them.

Now those same fools are out shouting about the wasteful stimulus package. The alternative they tout is vague tax cuts, even though that was the economic policy of the last 8 years. The last 8 years of excess which led to our current crisis.

When pressed, their only plan is C.Y.A.

A cynic, looking at this situation, would see that for the minority party, there's very little upside for Republican politicians in an economic recovery. The Republican platform is built around the wisdom of the free market, the importance of personal responsibility, and the wastefulness of government spending.

Our 8 years of Bush were a grand experiment in pure ideology.

And they brought us to ruin. Because the free market is free to crash like a goose-stricken airliner. Because the richer and more powerful you are the less you can be trusted to do what's right. Because government agencies cannot regulate entities that are stronger than they are.

We all remember Bush's version of "stimulus". (Seriously, I thought we'd given up on supply-side economics after the 80s. The fact that it stimulated squat-all, didn't bother anyone else?)

Now, at the start of the Obama administration, we see a new concept for stimulus. Government can be the answer when all else is in panic. The free market is too cruel and capricious to be trusted with our future. And those who end up in positions of strength must be constrained by equally strong protections.

The Republican party-line is that this recession is a freak occurrence and has nothing to do with the policies of the federal government. That Bush's stimulus would have worked, except that we were attacked by terrorists and then fought two wars (budgeted off the books, of course).

Nevermind that 9/11 had almost no long-term affect on our economy. Nevermind that, historically, wars are a huge stimulus because of increased military spending. Ideology trumps reality.

If they didn't have the demagogues, the Republicans would have to stand up in Congress and say, "We don't support this package because if it succeeds we have to admit that we are ideologically bankrupt." And they might have to admit that they can think of nothing more politically expedient than 4 more years of economic stagnation (the better to discredit Obama with).

So they demagogue. They babble incoherently on the senate floor and on afternoon talk shows.

Why are we still listening to these people?

Now what?

So, the pivotal moment has come and gone. Some of my friends were in this crowd.

So far the most surprising thing that has happened was Dick Cheney in a wheel-chair. Throwing out your back "moving" things, eh, Dick? Let's see, this is capital hill, right? Politicians don't do their own heavy lifting, especially when that lifting is literally lifting stuff.

What kinda physical exertion do politicians notoriously get up to... Nevermind. Bad mental image.

But yes. More than one million people packed into the area to be able to say that they were there. Yo Yo Ma was on hand. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court flubbed his lines. And Obama gave a speech that I enjoyed. I liked this part:

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

So America has inaugurated it's first actually black President. And the first few hours of the Obama administration have gone pretty well. Now what?

Are we actually prepared for this paragon to do the grunt work of leading our country? Can the pundits who so endlessly laud him handle waiting weeks and months for Congress to cobble together legislation? Are we going to be able to handle it when the inevitable missteps occur?

I honestly wonder if these same people who look on Obama as the messiah will have the patience to wait for things to get better. These last 8 (perhaps 12) years have to have rocked everyone's faith in our elected leadership. I get this eerie feeling that if the next 6 months aren't a complete revolution, that cynicism and weariness that has so marked our political discourse will creep back in.

It Could Be Worse

failblog.org a compendium of failures.

Not all of them are failures, though. This clip is a Penguin Win.



Though, I guess it's also an Orcas Fail!