Palin closet Socialist

Can't make this up:

The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that "we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs."

The Birds!

Early this morning while Dean and I were going to breakfast, we saw a huge flock of migrating birds. 'Twas neat. This is the second time in a few months that I've seen a really big flock of birds flying by.

We have a birdfeeder out back, and Dean says that the birds are pigs.

McCain on Economics

Talking Photo Booth

SNL Bush endorses Palin

Crappy embed isnt working. Here's the direct link:
http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/update-thursday-bush-endorsement/783981/

Train to Tokyo

Pretty

This is Mill's Lake at Rocky Mountain National Park, one of my favorite nature places. It's a bit of a hike to get to, but worth it.

campaign word of the day

Today's political campaign word of the day is, "troubling."

As in McCain spokesman's statement that, "Obama's record-breaking fund raising is very troubling." Or "Obama's association with a domestic terrorist is troubling."

Taxes

Riddle me this Batman....

How come when McCain wants to cut taxes, it's great, but when Obama wants to cut taxes, it's welfare??

At work today

Customer: Please delete this entire web page, we don't need it any more.
Me: Are you sure you want to delete this entire page? It has links to A, B, C, D, E, and F. Are you sure that I can delete all of that??
Customer: Oh, goodness no! Just delete A & B. Keep the rest. Sorry about that.
Me: Okay. I deleted A & B.

[next day]

Customer: I see that B has been deleted. Did you do that when you were deleting A?
Me: You asked me to delete A & B. That's what I did.
Customer: Oh, I meant delete A and keep B. Sorry about that. Can you fix that?

Me (to myself): Hrrmph.

Consumer-Driven Health Insurance Sucks...

Until I went to CIGNA, I've always been on a PPO. Even when PPOs were bad, they've never been as bad as the HRA plan that I have now. With CIGNA, I can't choose a PPO. HRA (Health Reimbursement Account) and HSA (Health Savings Account) are the only options.

So here's how it works:
CIGNA tosses $750/year into an account for me (and another $750 for Dean).
When I go to the doctor, CIGNA pays the bill up to the $750 limit.
After that, I have to pay 100% of the bill up to $4,000 (the deductible)
After I pay the $4,000, CIGNA starts chipping in again, at roughly 80%.

So here's the situation I'm in: Dean and I have been to the doctor a couple of times and got a few prescriptions. No sweat, but I burned through the $750 pretty quick. Then, one of my blood tests came back with a high creatine count (0.7 when 0.1-0.3 was normal), which indicates poor kidney function. So that took me to a specialist. Since I only have 1 kidney left, it's pretty important to stay on top of these things.

The specialist recommended a CT Scan. I've had these before--they are no sweat. It took 10 minutes start-to-finish. But the bill!! OUCH!!

I now owe $2,000 to the hospital and the radiologist to pay for that 1 CT scan (which, thankfully, turned out negative...I think...the nurse had a hard time interpreting it for me).

I'm supposed to see the specialist again in November for more follow-up tests. At this point, I am probably going to put it off to the new year (when I get another $750 from CIGNA). I just don't see being able to afford another $2,000 for another test this year.

So -- this is how consumer-driven health insurance works, and now I know it first hand.

It lowers the cost of health insurance by forcing customers to have to choose between getting the health care they need and risking that 1 kidney they have left because they can't afford the 10 minute test to check it. It SUCKS.

The Success of Failure

THE SUCCESS OF FAILURE
If there is anything that strikes terror into the soul of the sincere it is fear of failure. To be a success in something marks the measure of our worth. It gives us honor on the street corners of the world. It gives us stature among our peers. It gives us a sense of invincibility. But one of the central questions of life may well be how to tell success from failure.

It’s not so simple a task as we are inclined to think, perhaps, at the first toss of the question. Failure, we know, is unacceptable. We do a great deal to avoid it. We do even more to hide it. But the real truth is that there is a great deal of failure in all success: Winning pitchers lose a good many baseball games. Scientists can spend their entire lives mixing the wrong compounds, writing the wrong formulas, testing the wrong hypotheses.

The problem is that there are two faces of failure, one of them life-giving, the other one deadly. I have seen them both.

The first face of failure I saw in the life of an internationally recognized writer who, first intent on being an English professor, studied at Oxford but failed. I gasped at the very thought of it. But she spoke about the loss of those years and that degree with a laugh and a toss of her head: “Luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “Otherwise I’d be in a small college someplace teaching writing. As it is, I’m doing just what I’m supposed to be doing.” I thought about the remark for days. Here was a woman who knew the place of failure in our eternal quest to be ourselves.

The second face of failure I saw in a woman with great musical talent who, discouraged by the difficulty of her early studies, dropped out of music school and never studied another thing in her life. She died disgruntled, underdeveloped, and trapped within the boundaries of the self.

Clearly, failure may, in the long run, be the only real key to success. The first step to becoming what we most seek may well be indifference to dashed hope and perpetual disappointment and the depression that comes with reaching for guinea gold and grasping only dust.

But if that is the case, then we must develop the capacity for failure in a society that glorifies success but gives short shrift to the forging of it. We must learn to recognize, to value, to prize all the endless attempts it takes to do what we want to do but which for us is still undoable.

– from Seeing with Our Souls: Monastic Wisdom for Every Day by Joan Chittister (Sheed & Ward)

Belated 4th of July

Whilst I was getting pictures off my camera for the previous post, I came across some pictures I took during our 4th of July fireworks here in Eudora. I'll get them all up on webshots later tonight.

Pottery & the blog

I have been so busy lately, that I haven't really had much time to spend on the blog. It's still mostly a place for me to vent about the crappy things going on in politics.

One of the things I've been doing this summer, and now into the Fall, is taking pottery classes. So here's a picture of a few things that I've finished. This Fall we're focusing on Korean decorative techniques, but I don't have any pieces to show yet.


If you look at my blog stats, you see a rapid decline in postings starting in May. That pretty much reflects how busy I've been this summer with Souljourners and church. Dean and I haven't been able to get away on the weekends to relax because we each have obligations at church. This spells doom in the long-term.

My biggest obligations end next week, and then I am taking all of November off (in terms of heavy church stuff) until Advent.

why i luv the internets...

So here's a great thing...

Here I am at my computer listening to an NPR podcast. They're talking about how to follow the market, and how the DOW Jones isn't the place to look right now, that we need to look at the "3-month treasury rate." So, the radio broadcaster has the investment banker on the phone talking about this rate, and how do you find it. So the investment banker says, "well, go to yahoo finance and on the left hand side click on the "more bonds" links. So here is the investment banker on the internet telling a radio broadcaster how to find this rate, and here I am following along on my computer and seeing what they are seeing and following the conversation much more closely.

Yes, the internets is a good thing...

From:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2008/10/deleveraging_fairy_tale_ending.html#more

My takeaway: the $700 billion bailout will not fix this problem.

De-leveraging -- Fairy Tale Endings

Filed under: Understanding The Crisis

Our friend, Satyajit Das, sends a note from Australia.

He is the credit derivative expert who was featured in Alex's story on our recent hour on This American Life.

Alex and I just love talking to Das (he goes by his last name). He can bring a sense of flair and drama to the discussion of credit derivatives. That is hard. We have not found a lot of opportunities to use the words "flare" and "drama" in the same sentence as "credit derivatives."

Das's book, Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives is, actually, a dazzling tour of credit derivatives. It's a good read, even if credit derivatives weren't an important part of the financial crisis.

It's nice to give Das's book a plug, since I've stolen ideas from it for stories. Like the one in which I explain risk management by looking at the pollen shakes when doused in water.

De-leveraging -- Fairy Tale Endings
By Satyajit Das

In the Arabian Nights, the beautiful princess Scheherazade buys one day of life at a time by recounting fantastic fables that entrance the King who has condemned her to die. Investors and traders are currently telling each other fairy tales to buy one day at a time to stave off the inevitable.

The drama and tumult of recent events are not symptoms of the disease but the cure. The "disease" is the excessive debt and leverage in the financial system, especially in the US, Great Britain, Spain and Australia. In the lyrics of the Bruce Springsteen song -- many have "debts that no honest man could pay".

The "cure" is the reduction of the level of debt (the great "de-leveraging"). In 1931, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon explained the process to President Herbert Hoover: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. ... enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."

The initial phase of the cure is the reduction in debt within the financial system. The overall losses to the financial institutions (net of re-capitalisation via new equity issues) are $400 to $600 billion and may well go higher. This requires reduction in financial sector balance sheets (assuming bank system leverage of around 10 times) of around $4 to $6 trillion through reduction in lending and asset sales.

For example, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers resulted in $600 billion of debt being eliminated. In turn, this inflicts losses on holders of Lehman debt that in turn flows through the chain of capital. The destruction of Lehman Brothers' capital (around $20 billion) also permanently diminishes the capacity for further credit creation in the future.

The second phase of the cure is the higher cost and lower availability of debt to the real economy. This forces corporations to reduce leverage by selling assets, reducing investment and raising equity (for example, as GE have done). This also forces consumers to reduce debt by selling assets (where available) and reducing consumption.

Feedback loops mean reduction in investment and consumption lowers economic activity placing stresses on corporations and individuals setting off defaults that trigger losses for the financial system that further reduces lending capacity. De-leveraging continues through these iterations until overall levels of debt reach a sustainable level determined by lower asset prices and cash flows available to service the debt. The process of destruction echoes W.B.Yeats' words: "All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born."

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Within the financial sector, de-leveraging is well advanced. In the real economy it is in the early stages. Fairy tales in financial markets focus on the "superhuman" abilities of regulators and governments to avoid the de-leveraging under way.

The key issues are availability of capital and liquidity. The perceived abundance of liquidity was, in reality, merely an illusion created by high levels of debt and leverage. As the system de-leverages, it is becoming clear unsurprisingly that available capital is more limited than previously estimated. Central bank reserves and sovereign wealth funds are often cited as evidence of the amount of available capital. These reserves are invested in US dollar denominated US Treasury bonds, GSE paper and AAA rated asset-backed securities. It will be difficult to mobilise the funds and convert them into the home currencies of the investors without large losses.

Government and central bank actions need to be focused on managing the transition to a lower debt world. Actions should be directed to three areas.

Banks must be forced to write-off bad loans without delay even if this means breaching minimum solvency capital requirements. Bank capital needs must be addressed by forced mergers and restructuring, new equity issues and (in the absence of other options) nationalisation or liquidation. Central banks need to guarantee (for a fee) all major bank transactions to reduce counterparty risk enabling normal transactions between banks and other parties in the financial markets to resume.

Elements of these actions are already in place but the absence of a co-ordinated global strategy reduces effectiveness.

A global conference (along the lines of Bretton Woods) under a respected chairman (Paul Volcker is the obvious choice) must be convened. It would bring together all the major players including the vital creditor nations -- China, Japan etc -- to develop a framework for the major economic reforms (currency policies, fiscal disciplines, trade barriers) to work towards a resolution of the crisis.

A principal objective of this conference would be ensuring supply of funding for the US in the transition period. Recent comments by China about US responsibility for the crisis and its resolution miss the point. As China's Premier Wen Jiabao observed the U.S. financial may "affect the whole world". As Wen noted: "If anything goes wrong in the U.S. financial sector, we are anxious about the safety and security of Chinese capital..." All creditors have much to lose if the de-leveraging process becomes dis-orderly.

Like a giant forest fire the de-leveraging process cannot be extinguished. Thoughtful actions can create firebreaks that limit preventable damage to the economy and the international financial system until the fire burns itself out.

The Arabian Nights had a happy ending. The King after 1,001 night of enchantment and three sons pardons the beautiful Princess Scheherazade who becomes his queen. Despite the fairy tales that investors are putting their faith in currently, the de-leveraging that is at the heart of the current financial crisis may not have such a happy ending.

the markets