Portland, oh Portland, or "more dum circles" and "Nude computer repairmen"

Below is an actual ad posted on Craigslist. I love my city. Ad starts NOW!.... !

$

600 Artistic, dorky and geeky gay couple seeks friendly home (central SE / NE)


We moved / moved back to Portland in early November and found a lovely home in the Division / Hawthorne area, and have very much enjoyed being here, but our roommates are all moving out, so we are seeking our next house in this lovely city.

Atom is a photographer, who loves hand drumming and cooking, and is hoping to find more dum circles.

Duncan is nude computer repairman, who loves reading blogs, taking very long walks across town, and biking around.

We both love our bikes, and we have three of them we will be bringing into the home. We also love dogs, and ideally our roomies would have one or more, as we do not.

To see the original go here

Newsflash: Founding fathers for mandated health care

http://www.common-place.org/vol-09/no-01/rao/

John Adams signed a bill into law in 1798 that mandated that all maritime sailors purchase mandatory health insurance for the care of disabled seamen. So there, tea partiers. Phhhhhhpt.

All-in-one handy global warming argument page

http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

141 anti-global warming fallacies with links that provide debunking

The Fractal Theory of Canada

Background.

Given a community A and an adjacent community C, such that A is prosperous and populous, and C is less populous and prosperous, and nonreciprocal interest of C in the internal affairs of A, often C will need ego compensation by occasional noisy and noisome display of its superiority over A. In this case C is said to be the canada of A, C = canada(A).

For example, it has been previously established that

canada(California) = Oregon
canada(New York) = New Hampshire
canada(Australia) = New Zealand
canada(England) = Scotland

The Fractal Theory of Canada.

For all A there exists C such that

C = canada(A)

For example,
canada(USA) = Canada
canada(Canada) = Quebec
canada(Quebec) = Celine Dion

It would appear that the hierarchy would bottom out an individual. However an individual is actually a community of tissues, tissues of cells, cells of molecules, and so forth down into the quantuum froth.

canada(brain) = pineal gland
canada(intestines) = colon
...
canada(electron) = neutrino

and so on. There is no bottom.

"My God! It's full of Canadas!"

Stolen, in its entirety from my beloved Language Log, here.

An empty box

In Kentucky at least, big time trouble for, well, any bank that thinks that it holds a mortgage and anyone that thinks that they have invested in a CDO.

Veddy interesting: here's a deposition that discusses how some of that fraud happened. Hint: it involved making stuff up.

Foreclosure Mess Getting Interesting

Wells Fargo Mortgage Foreclosure invalid because Wells Fargo can't prove they own the Mortgage, if you happen to live in King County, NY. read the case here.

You might notice how annoyed the judge is, when you are at it.

Prop. 8 overturned

Text of the opinion.

You thought we had a housing bubble?

In Beijing,

Real, constant quality land values have increased by nearly 800% since the first quarter of 2003,....

Keynes was right. For an example, see how well Germany is doing.

From Der Spiegel:

During the worst of the global financial meltdown, Berlin pumped tens of billions of euros into the economy and spent hundreds of billions propping up German banks. Now, the country is reaping the benefits as Germany is once again Europe's economic motor.

Why can't some politician see Economics as a science rather than as a political philosophy?

It's good to be really really rich; everyone else is out of luck.

The Disequilibria blog has a post up that neatly breaks down all of the income gains for the last 10 years or so.

They all went to the top .1% of earners. The top one tenth of one percent. They made great fistfuls of money.

The rest of us are poorer. This is why we're in a recession/rapidly shading to depression. No one has any money to buy anything but for a handful of aristocrats.

The blog Naked Capitalism has more, here, "58% of real income growth went to top 1% since 1976."

Marvin Gaye for the 4th

The Star Spangled Banner, what else?


And a little Jimi comin' over, showing us what the whammy bar, and the US, is really about

When I was at BYU, we were all supposed to pause at 8:00 when the Star Spangled Banner was playing. Needless to say, I often didn't. This is the version I really wanted coming out of those loudspeakers.

Someone really really rich gets it.

The great depression was ended by a class traitor. Franklin Delano Roosevelt came from one of the richest families in America. But, he caught polio as a youngish adult and couldn't walk. He could, however, drive. He drove everywhere, zigzagging across
America. He'd stop his car and talk to people on the road, just average citizens, and somehow learned what it was like to not live in the bubble of wealth. When he became president, he was not beholden to his family or his (extremely upper) class. Taxes on the rich went way up, laws to protect the poor were enacted.

We're back to the same class structure as existed just barely before the great depression--a huge amount of the wealth in the country is in the hands of just a tiny handful of people.

Here's how one person describes the inequality:

If we divide the wealth of the US into thirds, we find that the top one percent own a third, the next nine percent own another third, and the bottom ninety percent claim the rest. (Actually, these percentages, true a decade ago, are now out of date. The top one percent are now estimated to own between forty and fifty percent of the nation's wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%.)

When half the wealth of the entire country is concentrated in a tiny percentage of the population it impoverishes the other 99%. One percent of the population simply cannot go out to dinner often enough to support restaurants, cannot go to the theatre enough to support the arts, cannot buy enough clothes to support clothing stores, and so on. The engine of our economy is the middle class. We know what happens when the middle class doesn't have enough money to spend because it's being hogged by a tiny handful of people, because it has happened before: it was called the Great Depression. Currently, the distribution of money betwixt and between the rich and poor is just about the same as it was in 1929. How fun.

Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel and a genuine rich person understands the quandry we're in. Read about it here. I doubt that he'll run for public office, however.

A Very Young Rod Sings Acapella

Oh Rod Stewart, what happened to you?



Here's one more from 1972--with Rod reading the lyrics for "You Wear it Well."

Curiously enough, the band seems to be following some sort of dress code; everyone has to wear yellow. Except the violin player, who looks like someone's dad.

Last one, live Faces from 1973.

We're funding both sides of the war in Afghanistan!

Yeppers, that's right. We're paying contractors, who are paying off the Taliban to let the contractors employees work without getting killed. The Taliban are then taking your and my tax dollars and using it to kill fellow Americans. A perfect circle. Whar are we doing over there, again?

Private security contractors protecting the convoys that supply U.S. military bases in Afghanistan are paying millions of dollars a week in "passage bribes" to the Taliban and other insurgent groups to travel along Afghan roads, a congressional investigation released Monday has found.

The payments, which are reimbursed by the U.S. government, help fund the very enemy the U.S. is attempting to defeat and renew questions about the U.S. dependence on private contractors, who outnumber American troops in Afghanistan, 130,000 to 93,000.

From McClatchy News Service.
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/21/96286/report-finds-us-tax-money-may.html#ixzz0rdR7JEtl

Remember that last oil crisis? Summer of '08? When prices were so high?

Here's an explanation of how they pulled it off; notice that BP was one of the players.
Quote:

According to [Victor] Davis, the scam starts in 2000 with the formation of the ICE - the Intercontinental Exchange. The ICE - founded by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, Total, Shell, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale - is an online commodities and futures marketplace that exists outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws.

After a Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003, the ICE was found to be facilitating "round-trip" trades. This is where one firm sells energy to another, and then the second firm sells the same amount of energy back to the first company, at the same time and at the exact same price, as told by Davis.

No commodity ever changes hands

Quite shockingly no commodity ever changes hands, but the transactions still send a signal to the market, artificially boosting company revenue. Angry yet? There's more.

Because the trading is unregulated by Washington, its difficult to gauge the scale on which "round-trip" trading takes place.

But when DMS Energy were investigated by Congress, the company admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were round-trip trades. This means 80 percent of all trades in that year were false trades. Not a drop of oil changed hands, but the balance sheets showed increased revenue.

The idea is to hike up commodity prices. For example, according to Davis, after the ICE turned commodity trading into a "speculative casino game where pricing was notional and contracts could be sold by people who never produced a thing, to people who didn't need the things that were not produced", Goldman Sachs were able to triple the price of commodities in just five years.

ICE can create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand

The beauty (or rather the horror) of the scam outlined by Davis is that because they control the oil markets, the ICE can create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand in order to charge consumers an extra dollar per gallon of gas. And whereas this may not seem like much, this $1 soon becomes $50 billion A MONTH as global drivers consume 1.7 billion gallons of gas every single day.

Looks like BP should have plenty of cash on hand squirreled away somewhere.