Reprint Reprint: Our Lords, At Play In The Fields

How Brightly They Do Shine
[A Reprint Of a Reprint from July, 2010, just because I'm really in a mood about Our Fabled Elders and Betters, and because I can. Not that anyone cares.)

"It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed." —Kin Hubbard, Offered As The "Quote Of The Day", The Big Picture

Barry Ritholtz, whose blog I look at frequently, is an investment advisor whose take on America's class of super-rich occasionally rotates between gently mocking derision and moderate envy.

I've never been able to figure out what prompts him to gravitate in one direction or another, but I think the idea is that in his universe, it's no sin to be rich -- but it is if you were dishonest and rapacious about it.

If the quote above, gracing Barry's website this morning, was posed to him as a choice, Barry wouldn't be voting for Poverty. Quite the opposite. Neither would the poor little guy above (How's Poverty working out for him, by the way?). The happy people above don't have to choose wealth; they're too busy shopping.

While that kind of choice would hardly be news (most persons would choose physical comfort over penury), for the kind of world he lives in, Barry understands it's those with money to invest who butter his bread. Just something to keep in mind.

Barry Ritholtz: Good Head For Da Numbers, Dis Guy

Barry's a smart guy, believes as strongly in free-trade capitalism as one can, believes that business is about psychology and competition; and feels that predicting in advance the tidal shifts of money washing around in the markets is The Great Game, and it's all about Making The Right Call, because that's what other people pay him for: He's a principal in a modestly-sized investment advisory business in New York, and he blogs about the kinds of data, the solid (and suspect) numbers, and utterances and divinations of Big Names in the financial world.

Apparently, Barry and his Firm do rather well (God forbid it should be otherwise), and while I don't like the fish tank Barry's chosen to swim in or many of its other creatures, as a former financial analyst Dog, I can appreciate the idea of making decisions based on the most reliable data, and because he seems more fact-based than not I at least pay attention to his take on things.

It's my guess that Ritholtz feels too much of the Free Markets' decision-making is based on misleading interpretation of data provided by government and business, and poor analysis of the real data that is available -- all of which obscures what is really going on behind the curtain. I can appreciate that.

And, he's been critical of the greed and excess that effectively destroyed America's Middle Class, and has so heavily weighted The Game in favor of our Masters Of The Universe©. Barry was sounding skepticism, and then an an alarm, about the Markets and the underlying derivative/real estate Mambo long before the crash.

He's even written a book about it, Bailout Nation. It's a good book, and I recommend it. It's not a Manifesto, and it focuses on what happened in the last days of the Lil-Boots Bush regime, and the early days of Obama's administration -- and how the U.S. Government has effectively paid taxpayer's money to save failed financial organizations led by greedy, sociopathic losers; hence, the 'Bailout' in the title.

[Please Note: Those are my characterizations of the times and events, by the way, not Ritholtz's. His research is solid and his occasionally acerbic observations are worth the price of admission. Buy the book; you'll learn things.]

Cover Of Bailout Nation (via SamSederShow)

To sum up: I appreciate Ritzholtz' drive for accuracy, and seeking better fact-based methodologies for sussing out market trends: Again, it's what he's paid for. At the same time, I don't much care for the industry he's a part of; it's my right to wrinkle my nose and growl at it, deep in my throat, as much as it's his right to jump in his particular tank and swim.

---

Barry and his family are in The Hamptons for their Summer vacation. The fact that you may not know or care where the Hamptons are is an indication of your Wal-Mart-shopping, Beer-Swilling, Mall-trolling, Fox-News-believing, worker-bee, Drone-peasant status.

For You: Trip To Cardiovascular Surgeon You Can't Afford, Not Included

The Hamptons are an area that encompasses the eastern end of New York's Long Island, and above that, across the Long Island Sound, the south shore of Connecticut. It's a fabled place of summer fun for the wealthy, and a tradition for the East Coast's Hereditary (and Noveau) Rich -- just like Taking That Second Job, and Wondering How To Tell The Kids We're Losing Our Home are for the rest of us.

The actual Wealthy -- Old-Money Bluebloods and the Mega-Noveau Riche Hedge Fund Managers, Pop-Rock Starz Of The Moment, and Hollywood Mega-producers -- own homes there. There are no McMansions for these people,who manage the architects and designers they hire, and are concerned with "getting it right". They don't have to live within a construction budget imposed on them by a loan officer, and don't have to (Ca-Ching!) refinance to upgrade. They can afford what they want, right away.

The Bright Spot: Rising Sea Levels Will Put These Places Underwater

The less (but still respectably) rich who can't afford a Second Residence (not yet; but we have hopes for them; yes, we do) can lease a home in the area for the three-month Season (for some high-end properties, the cost is over $100K per month), then return to their co-op apartments in the West Seventies or trendy lofts in Soho and TriBeca.

Rich Hamptons Girlz, Partying With Their Kind Until Dawn

And, Barry is there, in the thick of it all. He blogs about it -- as much to proudly announce Je sui Arriveste!, as to report the season's activity an indicator that America's Elders and Betters have started 'living large' once again. The fear of appearing to be too conspicuous in their consumption -- of being heard to grunt too loudly at the trough -- seems to have abated since the 'unpleasantness' of 2008.

Out here in the playground of the rich and famous [Barry tells us], the schism between the two Americas is about as clear as one can ever see.

[Please Note: The photos below are not part of Ritzholtz' blog post. They, and their captions, are part of Before Nine and added as visual counterpoints.]

The slowing economic growth may be what most people are focusing on, but the brutally apparent trend here is on luxe spending. Conspicuous consumption may have had its setbacks the past few years, but it's on full display out here.

For Them: So Pretty, And Softshell Crabs A La Stone Creek;

And, The Best Cardiovascular Surgeons Money Can Buy

We went to several very nice, quite pricey restaurants. In Quogue, the Stone Creek Inn on Tuesday night at 8:30 was jammed. The parking lot was a teenage boy’s wet dream: Bentley GTs, Maserati Quattroportes, Ferrari SuperAmerica (dude, what was with that ugly gray?). Out here, 911s are de rigeur, and MB S550s are cars you give the nannies; they all get parked in the back. The restaurant was filled with beautiful people wearing designer clothes, oodles of jewelry (middle aged white guys should never use the word bling).

Oh, and way too much plastic surgery — everyone had a kinda surprised look on their faces.

2009 Maserati Quattroporte (Top); 2009 Bentley Continental

GT (Bottom); Barely Legal Mistresses, Always Optional

On Wednesday night, Starr Boggs in Westhampton Beach was jammed. It was a different crowd — more family, less “fabulousness.” Perhaps it had something to do with their prix fixe only menu (Sun, Tue, Wed) — both joints are 5 stars, but Starr Boggs cost about half of Stone Creek, where I didn’t get the sense that anyone ordered from the prix fixe menu.

...I found it particularly notable that the mid-line restaurants were only half filled; the action was all higher end places...

At East End Jet Ski, the girl who worked there said they had been reasonably busy. BTW, if you are thinking about dropping $5,000 on a waverunner, spend $75. Its great fun for a half hour, but I am less sure I would want to spend a summer on one . . .

Regardless, whatever disinclination to spend the wealthy may have had in 2008 and early 2009, it has been banished here.

We're defined by our choices and actions. I guess, with all due respect, we choose to invest our lives in what we believe most important -- the wealthy (certainly, those Ritholtz describes) have already done that. It's about, you know -- bread, and butter, and all that.

---

Have You Seen The Little Piggies

No One Was Surprised

 "Now The DOJ Admits They Got It Wrong"; Bill Black, September 10, 2015
As posted in The Big Picture, 9/13/15

By issuing its new memorandum the Justice Department is tacitly admitting that its experiment in refusing to prosecute the senior bankers that led the fraud epidemics that caused our economic crisis failed. The result was the death of accountability, of justice, and of deterrence. The result was a wave of recidivism in which elite bankers continued to defraud the public after promising to cease their crimes...

It is now seven years after Lehman’s senior officers’ frauds destroyed it and triggered the financial crisis. The Bush and Obama administrations have not convicted a single senior bank officer for leading the fraud epidemics that triggered the crisis. The Department’s announced restoration of the rule of law for elite white-collar criminals, even if it becomes real, will come too late to prosecute the senior bankers for leading the fraud epidemics. The Justice Department has, effectively, let the statute of limitations run and allowed the most destructive white-collar criminal bankers in history to become wealthy through fraud with absolute impunity. This will go down as the Justice Department’s greatest strategic failure against elite white-collar crime.

The Obama administration and the Department have failed to take the most basic steps essential to prosecute elite bankers. They have not restored the “criminal referral coordinators” at the banking regulatory agencies and they have virtually ignored the whistleblowers who gave them cases against the top bankers on a platinum platter. The Department has not even trained its attorneys and the FBI to understand, detect, investigate, and prosecute the “accounting control frauds” that caused the financial crisis...

A commenter at The Big Picture noted:

Iamthe50percent

The Obama administration are just corporatists with a liberal social agenda, but ... with a regulatory agenda indistinguishable from Bush. Don’t listen to (R)’s that call him a Socialist. He’s not. Rahm Emanuel is the prototype.

Any questions?

___________________________________________________________

Annual Reprint: Long, Strange Trip

(Originally posted September 11, 2010)

Nine-Eleven

On November 22, 1963, I was on the playground for 10:00AM recess at my elementary school when teachers called classes back inside prematurely. After a few minutes, the school's public address system was broadcasting the carrier for CBS' radio network, announcing the shooting of JFK in Dallas and, ultimately, the audio portion of Walter Cronkite on CBS television announcing the President's death.

Where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot? was a fixture in the cultural landscape for a large number of people (now referred to by the younger set as 'Bloodsucking Useless Boomers') for a long time, due to the magnitude of the event and because it was shared in real-time by the cutting-edge media of the early 1960's.

So, September 11th, 2001: Where were you on 9-11? I had gotten up to go to work around 5:30AM PDST, and as usual turned on KQED-FM's NPR news. After stepping out of the shower, I heard a report that a plane appeared to have crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York -- I've been in Manhattan and had seen how huge those buildings were. To me, "A plane" meant a Cessna, or similar light aircraft.

I remembered seeing a 1945 film newsreel about a B-25, flying through dense fog, directly into the Empire State Building. A similar incident at the WTC would be tragic, I thought; but it was an accident, for crying out loud, on the other side of the continent, distant. No one in their right mind would deliberately kill themselves, I sighed, and I shaved.

At some point the report was updated; I heard the words "jet airliner", which moved the entire event in my mind from 'Cessna-going-off-course' to the category of Did-You-Call-The-Coast-Guard-About-This?-It-Was-No-Boating-Accident.

Turning on CNN, I sat on the edge of an armchair, watching an image of the WTC towers from CNN's Manhattan headquarters, and other shots from a helicopter hovering over the Hudson. A few minutes after I sat down, I watched as the second airliner slammed into the second WTC tower.

Images Like This, and Worse, Were Broadcast And Published

In Europe, But Not In America (Photo: UK Guardian, 2001)

No joke: Aside from Holy Fuck, the only thing I recall thinking was, This is what standing at the curb in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, watching the Archduke Franz Ferdinand being shot, must have been like. I knew immediately that what I was seeing was another line in the sand being crossed, an event with consequences that would be immense. The dice were in motion in the Crapshoot that is our Universe, and what I was watching was the proof.

It also seemed unreal, a Hollywood special effect -- as if CNN would break for a commercial at any moment;  it would turn out to be this generation's War Of The Worlds broadcast.

I sat watching as the South and North towers collapsed (Wikipedia's timeline of the events puts that at 6:59 and 7:28 AM PDST, respectively), flipping back and forth between networks for coverage of the airliner plowing into a wing of the Pentagon. Finally I left to make my way to work on mass transit.

On a BART train, I was amazed at the languid attitudes of the crowd of commuters -- reading books and newspapers, a few tapping on laptops -- as if it were just another Tuesday morning. No one appeared stunned; there was no conversation about what had just occurred.

Finally, I turned to a woman sitting opposite me, reading a folded copy of the (pre-Little Rupert) Wall Street Journal, and asked if she was aware of what had happened that morning. "Yes," she replied, adding in a please-pass-the-salt voice, "There are supposed to be more of them [i.e., airliners] in the air to hit other targets."

Had anyone estimated how many? "No," the woman shrugged, and went back to her WSJ. I don't know what surprised me more, her matter-of-fact attitude, or her piece of news.

---

That was September 11th -- a red line on the American calendar in so many ways, the culmination of a large number of threads in our history, and the pacts and choices successive administrations have made since America decided to follow an Imperial course.

The attack on the Trade Center towers could have been another kind of defining moment for America. Our government and institutions could have taken it as an opportunity to press for a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy; we could have opened a dialog with others, rather than dictate to them.

Lil' Boots, 2004 Republican Convention:

Feared And Bigger Than His Daddy, At Last

I'm not suggesting it coulda been a Kumbyah moment; I am saying that it was a crossroads moment, and that our choices mattered. But, the government was run by men who had no interest in anything except power (personal, partisan, and financial) and policies that meant the use of force in furthering that power. What else could we have expected from the likes of President Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld? From the PNAC crowd, Fat Karl Rove, Little Tommy DeLay, and Lard Boy?

And the Leader, "the Decider", had been photographed years before, sucker-punching an opposing player in a rugby game when he was 'legacy' at Yale -- his "character isolated by a single deed". He was pious, insecure, frequently agnered if not shown sufficent 'respect' due a member of one of America's elite old-money families -- and he was a Zero, an empty-suit front man whom the PNACers and the Imperial strategists could manipulate.  There was little chance any rational strategy would come out of Lil' Boots administration.

(And remember, these geniuses had been pushing Lil' Boots to invade Iraq just days after he was appointed to the Presidency at the first inauguration. September 11th was simply an excuse.

And, they believed it would be simple, 'Roses All The Way', 'Greeted As Liberators' ... so no one planned for occupation, or fighting an insurgency for seven years; or for the effect on the U.S. military of multiple redeployments and 'stop-loss' denials of separation. They never conceived of failure; therefore, it wouldn't happen.)

So what followed from 9/11 shouldn't have been a surprise: An utterly unnecessary, even illegal invasion of Iraq, supported by intelligence about WMD's invented by right-wing operatives to create a causis beli, and pushed in the national media by sociopathic egos 'journalists' like Little Judy Miller, and pundits like David Brooks and William Kristol, and Little Tommy Friedman, to name but a few.

Palettes Of $100 Bills, Baghdad, 2003 (Photo: UK Guardian)

And let's not forget the $12 Billion in cash (at least; no one really knows), piles of U.S. currency shrink-wrapped and paletted and airlifted to Iraq. Some $9 Billion in cash cannot be accounted for. And all the cool new powers used by that dry-drunk, Frat-Boy younger son of an American ruling-class dynasty; or all the power available to President Cheney.

There was plenty of money to put in C530's and airlift it: 363 Tons of it. There was plenty of money being made from the war, and tax breaks to the wealthy, which reduced tax income to the government; but there was no money  and Lil' Boots wanted to cut health care, cut social programs that continue the ideas of the New Deal, and privatize Social Security... because there's just no money to pay for it.

And there's Guantanamo, 'black airlines' flying suspected terrorists to secret CIA prisons, and the extra-legal, secret program of 'renditions'. Let's not forget Abu Ghirab. Let's not forget people like John Woo, whose written suggestions created what he still claims is a "legal" basis for torture as national policy.

Civilian Casualty Of Baghdad Suicide Car Bomb, 2007

And what followed wasn't just prisons and a lack of due process for terrorist suspects, but developing a matrix of information [Note: This was posted before Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of surveillance performed by America domestic and foreign intelligence agencies] -- based on the unprecedented data-mining of domestic email and cellular and telephone traffic, of banking records and public record databases; the rise of a government/corporate State surveillance and intelligence apparatus that outstrips the wildest dreams of the Gestapo and the KGB.

Obligatory Cute Small Animal Being Interrogated At

Undisclosed Location By CIA In Middle Of Blog Rant

And, very little seemed to be about defeating Al-Qaeda, capturing or killing Bin Laden and Al-Zwahiri -- otherwise, we would have finished the job in the mountains of Tora Bora in October of 2002, and Iraq would never have mattered. We would have kept Lil' Boots' promises to the Afghans about rebuilding their country, instead of ignoring it -- at least half the reason the Afghan Taliban were able to come roaring back, and are now as strong as they were in 2001, if not stronger.

The 'Go-Go', Lil' Boots Bush years were about a larger Rightist agenda; it was about deregulation, defense contractors, and higher profits; and it was about Fat Karl's dream of rigging elections for permanent Republican rule of the United States.

Victory, to these assclowns, had a very different meaning -- and little of it was military.

But let's not forget, too, how dissent or criticism of what would become that unnecessary war; of even more power given to people with poor impulse control, was looked upon in the immediate aftermath of September 11th.

• Andrew Sullivan (9/16/01) -- The middle part of the country--the great red zone that voted for Bush--is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead--and may well mount a fifth column.
• Robert Stacy McCain (9/27/01), columnist for the All Perfect Great Father Moon Washington Times -- Why are we sending aircraft carriers halfway around the world to look for enemies, when our nation's worst enemies--communists proclaiming an anti-American jihad--will be right there in front of the Washington Monument on Saturday?
• Robert Horowitz (9/28/01), Los Angeles Times -- The blood of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans is on the hands of the antiwar activists who prolonged [the Vietnam War] and gave victory to the communists... this country was too tolerant toward the treason of its enemies within.

Those who dissented, who believed the country was manifestly on a wrong track, were smeared as 'helping the enemy', a 'fifth column' for Islamic fundamentalism. "You are either with us, or with the terraists", as Lil' Boots so bravely told other governments of the world after the World Trade Center attack.

The chittering hatred all sounds like standard Tea Party rhetoric, now. From their point of view, to dissent and criticize is only permissible when you're attacking the Left -- and that socialist, illegitimate ruler in the White House; the dirty hippies; all those "in rebellion against god".

Our economy continues to implode, and it has never been clearer who is benefiting from the policies of the Right; but, then, it's been a long, strange trip from September 11th, 2001. Few things should surprise us any longer.

Another Lil' Boots quote:

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: In history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. (Applause)

-- George W. Bush, Address To Joint Session Of Congress

Is that appropriate as an epitaph for those who wish to do America harm?

Or, does it speak to how we have allowed ourselves to be lied to, and led; will it end up being our epitaph, a closing quote for the United States Of America?

There is no ‘populist’ version of a world where some few are born booted and spurred, and the many are born saddled, and ready to ride, and that's precisely the world which conservatism is trying to preserve.

Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)

End Of The Enlightenment

A few weeks ago, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky “powdered with stars” (in Milton’s words); such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world’s most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death.

I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.”

“We’ll wheel you outside,” they said.

-- Oliver Sacks, "My Periodic Table"; New York Times, July 24, 2015

In Jewish tradition, it's said that if you save a human life, you've saved the universe, whole and entire.  What happens, then, when a life goes out? Oliver Sacks, MD, passed away over the weekend; in his passing, I'm fairly certain not many people understand what we've lost.

Sacks was among a shrinking number of scholar-scientists, the last in a lineage of European --  men and women -- and (this, a bit of a trope) generally English intellectuals, educated in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Donnish, possibly eccentric, but clearly brilliant; frankly curious about the world and passionate about the why of a thing, driven to chronicle and understand it.

They were often polymaths, prodigious writers, frequently (unless it was their principal method of expression) also fair composers of music or art. They understood the importance of clear thought and speech, of how to argue and to reason and explain what they'd found in their exploration of the world.

(This same category of person could include Newton, Pitt, Einstein; Goethe; Mary Wollstonecraft or Jane Austen; William and Henry James, among others -- but Dr. Samuel Johnson pops into my memory for a moment: Language and clarity of thought was his obsession, and a lifelong struggle with what was most probably Tourette's Syndrome -- a condition caused by "dysfunction in cortical and subcortical regions, the thalamus, basal ganglia and frontal cortex", per Wikipedia.)

For Sacks, the mystery which captured his attention (Sacks described himself when working as 'obsessive') is what we carry in our skulls -- the electro-chemical seat of all pleasures and terrors, Bardo and Paradise: the brain --  and he knew well how much we do not know about that organ, or anything else.

In a series of books over roughly thirty years, Sacks presented popular chronicles of the scientific aspects of neurology by sharing tales of his patients. On one level, they were 'medical mystery stories' -- Why do these things happen to us? -- principally about his patients' rare or notable afflictions, and that often these same people developed gifts of insight or ability due to those same conditions.

But, while every tale noted the pathos of their circumstances (Sacks the physician used his obsessive intellect with a dispassionate eye), they were also stories which presented his patients' conditions with real compassion: Sacks the man never forgot that they suffered, laughed, were persons with lives both before and after they began to experience the world in an uncommon way.

Riding Kiddietown's public transit over those same thirty years, I've seen only three individuals which I could say with confidence had a neurological condition (as opposed to those with apparent psychological ones, including the drivers). Principally, the outward signs are motor tics or repeated hand gestures, some relatively subtle and others very manifest. We live in a culture that glorifies physical perfection, High School-like popularity, wealth, and youth -- and looks down with distaste upon or ignores anything less. By presenting rare and notable neurological conditions in his books in a way that made it possible to see the human beings they had happened to, Sacks made it more likely our response to the person on the bus, repeatedly touching the side of their face, or whose head spasms to the left every few seconds, would trigger that same compassion, in us.

A friend recently repeated to me something once said by their best friend, a physician: We're all just one blood test away from a reminder of mortality. Sacks' chronicles remind the majority of us of our luck in this Game, so far (There, But For The Grace Of God...), but also a momento mori that our lives are a Dice Game, and that at some point after thousands of throws at the table that luck will give out. We will not live on Sugar Mountain forever. We will suffer all that flesh is heir to.  Sacks understood that; and even if this is a Game where no one gets out alive, he was still grateful to be here.

Sacks discovered he had cancer in 2006, a rare form which echoed aspects of the human condition that had fascinated and driven him: an ocular tumor, a melanoma, in one eye. Nine years later, it reappeared as multiple metastases in the liver.  This past February, he published a short essay about it in the New York Times ("My Own Life"), and followed it with others in July ("My Periodic Table"), and a final word about Shabbat this past month."I have no belief in (or desire for) any post-mortem existence", Sacks once wrote, "other than in the memories of friends and the hope that some of my books may still 'speak' to people after my death."

Whether something else exists or not, Now he knows what we do not. I hope he was able to see the spread of the night sky again before leaving.

And, it's another Mensch that leaves us. As I've said before, we live in a world with a limited supply of Mensches.

__________________________________________________

August

Hi Mom

Your day.

Parker and Ward

Virginia

I've already had to repost my thoughts about Sandy Hook after yet another rampage by some angry nutjob.  I'm not going to do it every time we see the effects of combining Angry Nutjob with Firearms, or I'd be reposting it every week, it seems.  But I will quote myself:

Only in cases like Sandy Hook does our national debate begin and end with, "Guns don't kill people; the people using them do". And that's it -- Pilot Error, essentially, is the public finding; and any other meme is just filler in the media. That, and people repeating, "It doesn't happen every day."

I'm sure that fact is a comfort to the extended families of twenty children, who died because they were shot with high-powered handguns. Twenty children...

What happened in Sandy Hook yesterday has happened before -- in Columbine; in Denver; In Virginia; in a mall in Seattle last week; at a Dairy Queen in the Northwest. There may not be massacres, but annually there are many multiple-victim, firearm homicides in America.

And they will keep happening, until something changes about how firearm ownership and possession is discussed, and regulated, in this country.

The debate is not about Operator Error.  It's not about something that happened "over there" in another city or state. It's about twenty dead children.

 Per Reuters:

Two journalists, reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward of Roanoke CBS affiliate WDBJ7, were shot during a live interview on Wednesday by a disgruntled former station employee who later killed himself. The woman who was being interviewed was wounded and hospitalized.

Parker's father, Andy Parker, urged state and federal lawmakers to take action on gun control, especially to keep firearms out of the hands of people who were mentally unstable... "How many Alisons is this going to happen to before we stop it?"

The United States had about 34,000 firearms deaths in 2013...  with almost two-thirds of them suicides, according to the [CDC]...

The last time there was a push at the federal level for tighter gun control was following the massacre of 26 people, mostly children, at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012... [the legislation] was rejected in April 2013 by the U.S. Senate, including by some lawmakers in [the] Democratic Party.

_________________________________________________________________

Katrina

Character

Rick Bower, AP - Canal Sreet,; September 4, 2005

Most mainstream news organizations are hosting ten-year retrospectives of one of the most tragic natural disasters to befall a major, iconic American city -- the flooding of New Orleans at the end of August, 2005, caused by one of the most powerful storms to hit the U.S.: Hurricane Katrina.

Not that unnatural disasters haven't occurred to cities in the U.S. -- the abandonment of Detroit is the most obvious; Love Canal in the 1960's, Manhattan on 9-11; even other natural disasters like the Great Johnstown or Brownsville Floods; the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906. But the catastrophe in New Orleans was different -- because of who lived in the city; and who was in charge of the government which was supposed to protect and rescue its citizens. All its citizens.

It became a tragedy watched in near-real-time on cable and mainstream news, and it was magnified by indifference, arrogance and incompetence. Today everyone just calls it 'Katrina'.

________________________________________

Terms like Personality and Character are used to describe traits of an individual -- 'personality' referring to something mutable, changeable; while 'character' is something more essential and fundamental, the bedrock and framework unique to each person that animates a 'personality' like a suit of clothing -- the upshot being that personality can change, but not character: Blood will out. A Leopard can't change its spots.

For me this week, remembering Katrina is a short meditation on the idea of Character, as personified by two women -- one black and poor, the other white and a member of the top one-hundredth of our One Per Centers.

_________________________________________

On Monday morning, August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina had slammed into the coast of Louisiana; four major levees had been breached around New Orleans and much of the city was flooded. People had died. More were dying. Thousands were losing everything they could not carry.

To escape the flooding, 11-year-old Danielle Mollett helped her ill grandmother Diane Mollett, 64, up into the attic of their home in the Ninth Ward, the area of lowest elevation in New Orleans and the district that would be hardest hit by the flooding. 

In the aftermath of the Hurricane's landfall, the weather turned tropical, sultry; temperatures rose -- hard on those trapped in the confines of an attic. With no food and little to drink, they waited for help.

Danielle Mollett, Interviewed For The August 24, 2015 Edition Of CBS News (CBS)

On that same August morning, George "Lil' Boots" Bush -- the "Decider" -- appeared in Arizona to present a birthday cake to John McCain. He spoke about his plan for Medicare, and gave Katrina only a passing mention.

 Bush had been told that the New Orleans levees might not hold, that there was potential for a catastrophe. That this had happened, that 85% of the city was deeply flooded, had already been communicated to the White House on the evening of August 29th.

On August 30, New Orleans had descended into something out of Dante. At the same time, Lil' Boots appeared in California, at the Coronado Naval Air Station in San Diego, where he had delivered his 2003 "Mission Accomplished!" speech, claiming Vic'try in Iraq.  Bush spoke about those wonderful times -- and made mention of Katrina, saying help would be coming "any day now".  And he was photographed trying to play a guitar.

Lil' Boots left for Crawford, Texas on Air Force One,  intending to take a Labor-Day vacation at 'The Ranch'.  White House aides, aware of what was happening in Louisiana, suggested the situation was serious enough that the President return to Washington.  Lil' Boots was not happy, but agreed to cut short his vacation by a whole day, but through that night it became clearer just how bad it was in New Orleans.

On August 31st, Lil' Boots demanded that he be flown from Texas, low over the city, on Air Force One. The huge 747 buzzed the area repeatedly for over a hour -- interrupting relief efforts requiring helicopters. As Bush stared out a window, press secretary Scott McClellan later quoted him as saying, "It's devastating. It's gotta be doubly devastating on the ground." 

Bush returned that day to the White House, held a cabinet meeting on Katrina, and spoke briefly in the Rose Garden to describe federal relief efforts.  FEMA's uncoordinated reaction before and after Katrina struck (and that of its polo-playing director, Michael Brown) had been stupefying. Mainstream television news had reported on the confused and ineffective relief efforts -- too little, too late, and most of it FUBAR.

Privately, Representative Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] urged Bush to fire Brown because of all that had gone wrong; "What didn't go right?" Lil' Boots replied, and on September 1st praised Brown publicly ("You're doin' a heckofa job, Brownie!").

8 days later, 'Brownie' was allowed to quietly step out of an active role in managing the crisis. On September 12th, he resigned as director of FEMA; in later testimony before Congress, Brown alleged "that Lousiana governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin bore most, if not all, of the blame for the failures in the response to Katrina, and that his only fault had been not to realize sooner their inability to perform their respective duties." (Wikipedia)

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In New Orleans on August 31st, 11-year-old Danielle Mollett had managed to help her grandmother out of the attic where they had been trapped. Her grandmother's health was failing. They were lucky enough to be seen and rescued by one of the few boats bringing survivors out of flooded areas, taking them to the New Orleans Superdome stadium, which was situated on slightly higher ground than the rest of the city -- still, lower portions of the structure were flooded by three feet of water.

An estimated 30,000 people found their way to the Superdome between August 29 and September 2. Conditions were bad: limited food, water, sanitation and medical services; sewage systems were backed up by the flooding. The most seriously ill -- like 64-year-old Diane Mollett -- were given small folding cots to rest on.

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Boots, On The Little Rupert Network From New Orleans

To balance public perception that he showed little concern for the tragedy on the Gulf, Bush quickly flew back to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and fumbled through a long, photo-op tour of the region. He even made an 'Address To The Nation' from New Orleans. A few miles away, at the Superdome, not enough of the thousands of survivors had adequate food or water, and no one seemed able to get any to them.

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But by now, too many people had seen just how desperate things had become -- network news reporters at the Superdome were shaken by what they saw of the conditions there. On September 1st, Paula Zahn of CNN interviewed FEMA director Brown, who claimed to have "only just learned" 30,000 people in the damaged Superdome had no food or water: "Sir, you aren't just telling me you just learned that the folks at the Convention Center didn't have food and water until today, are you? You had no idea they were completely cut off? " she asked, incredulous. 

Brown appeared bored as he replied, "Paula, the federal government did not even know about [them] until today" --an obvious lie, since evacuations from the Superdome had been going on, slowly, for over 24 hours.

No one seemed to be in charge. In FEMA's inactivity before the catastrophe, and its mismanagement in the aftermath obvious to anyone watching the news, the government's response seemed too little, too late. Another fuck-up, like Iraq -- Because FUBAR; and because the people suffering and dying in New Orleans were poor and primarily black.

On September 2, NBC broadcast a live Concert for Katrina, to raise awareness and money for relief efforts. Standing beside comic Mike Meyers, Kayne West offered an observation about the disaster which was broadcast live across America -- except on the West Coast, where tape delay allowed NBC to delete his remarks:

Meyer's Look ("OMG: On Teevee??") = Priceless

"I hate the way they portray us in the media. If it's a black family, it says we're looting. If it's a white family, it says they're looking for food. And you know that it's been five days because most of the people are black... We already realize that a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they have given them permission to go down and shoot us. George Bush didn't care about black people."

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On September 2, Diane Mollett died on her cot, waiting to be taken out of the flooded city to the Houston Astrodome. Her 11-year-old granddaughter Danielle was alone, surrounded by strangers in a nightmare; she would stay, "balled up inside myself" for two more days before being bussed, by herself, to distant relatives in Texas .

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As a show of their own concern (and damage control for the Bush brand), former President George H. W. 'Poppy' Bush had reached out to former President Clinton to found a charity organization for relief and rebuilding.  On September 5th, Poppy and his wife, Barbara, toured the Astrodome in Houston, now filled by thousands of refugees from New Orleans.

Barbara Bush had recently spoken about her son's invasion of Iraq, which wasn't going well ("Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? ...It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?") -- and after her tour of the Astrodome made this observation, broadcast on National Public Radio's Marketwatch program:

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they [refugees from New Orleans] all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the [Astrodome] here, you know, were underprivileged anyway; so this (chuckle) – this is working out very well for them."

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Danielle Mollett wept, remembering the death of her grandmother. She has spent the last decade trying to remake her life and move beyond what she experienced in New Orleans. It's a proof of character, and its quality, that she's succeeded.

Then, there's Barbara Bush. Her remarks, and the social class she represents, provide indications and testaments as to the quality of her character, as well.  And, her son... well;  the less said about him, the better.

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MEHR, MIT LUMPENHUND:  Lil' Boots -- too arrogant and limited to recognize that he has failed at almost everything he has attempted as an adult; too dim to recognize that he was an empty-suit front man for President Cheney -- appeared in New Orleans today to speak at a local school in commemoration of New Orleans, a city "which never gave up".

Auf Nicht Wiedersehen, Lil' Boots, you Poultroon *; you Lumpenhund nutter.

( * Poultroon = Archaic /Middle French: A rascal, a scoundrel; a coward. )

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Random Early Morning Barking

Someone Make That Dog To Shut Up

Burned And Fearful

Here in Kiddietown ( "One Big Campus; One Big Dorm" ), it's been sooty; the Bay Area has been smelling faintly of burned California's Oak, Pine, Manzanita, Chaparral, Poison Oak, and the occasional home. As a Dog, I can tell.

And in the Big World: How About Yesterday In That Stock Market, Hah? Wheeeeeeee! And while I don't like the imagery, as The Great Curmudegon has said, "Another Day At The Dog Track!"(Reminds me of a George Carlin joke from his standup days -- A news announcer, reading off a list of events: "...and, the stock market dropped six hundred points. Trading was a little spirited, there, towards the end...")

Kim Jong Tubbyboy, Leader of the People's Fun Republik Of Chuckles, is demanding everyone love him and do what he says, or it's war with South Korea, maybe.   Sad Vlad, The Putin, says to the sovereign nation of Ukraine: Do What I Want or the troops I claim not to know about will invade. The followers of ISIS, when not raping women and children, destroying the cultural heritage of the Middle East, and generally turning territory they've seized into Col. Kurtz' paranoid enclave from Apocalypse Now, demand the Earth convert to their notion of what Islam is, or they will invade everywhere.

Donnie Trump says he doesn't care if anyone loves him or not, he'll be invasive. Oh, and, Ooogli Ooogli Ooogli -- Hillary!  Jebby! Who among us can contain the simulated excrement excitement.

(And oddly, a larger number of people in Ukraine than usual have been looking at this blog recently...  you'd think they had better things to do with their time, but perhaps it takes their mind off of being indiscriminately shelled. Good luck to you all, and be safe.)

Crossing The Styx, The Boatman Doesn't Care What You Owned

As usual on my way to work, homeless men (mostly) are still sleeping in the stairwells of the Embarcadero BART station At 6:00 AM. You step carefully over them to enter the station. More are sleeping just inside. You avoid stepping in the occasional puddle of puke or piss or scavenged food.  The men lie stretched out as if beached, or dead; it's the sleep of damage and exhaustion and hopelessness on the banks of the Styx, which is never really that far away for any of us.

A friend mentioned on Sunday that, among other middle-school parents they know (like my friend, involved in some sector of the Tech economy and relatively affluent), several said a number of homes in their various Kiddietown neighborhoods had just been purchased, for cash: two- and three-plus million dollar homes. "Who can do that?" my friend asked. "Can you imagine having so much that you can do that? Two million in cash? I can't."

For some reason, I remembered this conversation as I made my way down, down, into the Sub Way, the electric road beneath the City. It made me consider the the huge gap opening between Those With and Those Without -- right in your face (and particularly in a place like Kiddietown), you see the preening frenzy of affluence and access, getting and having; Another crazy you get from / Too much choice / The Thumb in the satchel / Or the rented Rolls-Royce.

Kiddietown is awash in cash. It's a town full of Big White Busses with smoked windows, painfully thin hipsters, trust-fund girlz who chitter with a nasal whine, and drunken frat-boy clones, all staring down at tiny smartphone screens, dreaming of how they can become overnight millionaires when their startup goes to IPO and is 'acquired' by one of the mega-names of the Tech world.  When criticized, if they bother to respond at all it's with an insouciance that defines them, in a Tweet: Fogeys gonna foge.

The dichotomy between having two million dollars in cash (the life savings of two-plus "regular" working families in America; every nickle and dime they'll ever earn) to "acquire" a residential property, and the  homeless lying unconscious and underground, made me consider where we are as a society and a country. If you've ever been curious what things Dogs think about, that's one.

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Business Cycle Sluts

Technology and commerce drives economies and fuels cycles of cultural change. In the years after WWII, the first large shift began in the decade after Vietnam. Whole industries (steel, clothing, kitchenware, furniture, automobiles) disappeared or downsized. In 1981, Reagan took office with rising unemployment -- solved by cutting taxes for the wealthy, and increasing "defense" spending against the Communist Bloc.

As Daddy Bush became President, the Evil Empire dissolved. We had a quick, winnable war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- but the wartime / 'defense' economy dwindled and unemployment rose again. Daddy Bush lost the 1992 election to Clinton ("It's the economy, stupid").

The second economic shift was the 'Dot-Com Revolution' -- electronic and computing technologies had become mature (and disruptive), and the World Wide Web began to develop. Venture Capital flowed into startups (e.g., Google, PayPal); while established tech names increased their sales and market share (IBM, Intel, AMD, Cypress; HP, Dell, Compaq; Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Oracle; Yahoo, Netscape). Cell phones got smaller; processors got faster and faster.

In Kiddietown, you could walk past beautifully designed storefronts; inside, people were busy... primarily designing websites, software applications, and offering 'transformational concepts' to businesses -- how to do commerce on the Net. The Busy People believed they were building the Future, an end to Old Ways of working and earning a living. No one knew exactly what our Future would be, or how we would all transition into it -- but it would be on the Web, and we would navigate it with a few clicks, and get everything we ever wanted.  It would create jobs!  DEN.com!  WebVan!  Boo.com!  Pets.com!  Yay!

With the 2000 crash, the beautiful storefronts vanished. Before Clinton left office, he had helped Larry Summers and Phil Gramm and the BSD's set the stage for the Go-Go, "Lil' Boots" Bush years. We had Terraists, and a second war in the Middle East. The economy initially grew around 'defense' spending and tax cuts for the wealthy; then, around real estate sales, and the financial / investment 'industry'.  Everyone knows what happened next.

The Crash of 2008 allegedly ended in 2012. Tech expansion and development had continued after the Dot-Com Crash;  Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007; T-Mobile brought out the G-1 Android phone in 2008; and virtual (Cloud) storage technology became a reality.  A decade on from the 2000 Crash, more tools we use in our work and personal lives depend on programmers, developers, technicians, system architects and security specialists than in the Dot-Com era.

This is the third large, and latest, shift in a progression from a manufacturing economy to one based on creating infrastructure, hardware and software to provide access to goods and services. By 2012, the Tech sector, and the "service economy" (both traditional [waiters and hotel staff], and non-traditional [Uber; TaskRabbit]) were the prime factors driving the Fabled Recovery. The beautiful businessfronts returned to Kiddietown.

Money, money, money is being made. The streets are full of BMWs, MBZs and Teslas. Everything from the Crash has been made All Better. The future is robotics and more leisure time -- for some people, anyway; Yay! Why, then, does it feel so much like 2006?

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There are plentiful examples of cultures where the gulf between those who Have and those who Have-Less becomes wider and wider.  My favorite is the European / American 'Golden Age' (roughly, 1875 through the summer of 1914), the time of The Proud Tower, the Distant Drummer.

On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.

Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.

A.E. Housman, "A Shropshire Lad" (1896)

Each time a culture lurches forward, it leaves people behind. I watch the antics of the Kiddies; I see the bodies on the stairwells. I see the restaurants, theaters, bars, clubs and side streets crowded with people exuding energy, spending money; I hear the cars with sound systems pumping Cholo music, Soul and Rap as they cruise the City. I smell the burning neighborhoods in Syria, Gaza, Yemen, Cairo, Brazil. We are so fortunate, here in the Land of the Brave and the Home Of The Hip -- and, damned; but don't bring that up at the backyard parties.

I hope you weren't expecting a real analysis. It's just one Dog's random thoughts, and the feeling that in the rush to grab for the shiny ring, it's helpful to remember that ring is only what we've been taught to want from the cradle; and it's made of brass, inside and out.   Just sayin'.

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MEHR, MIT GOOD OLD MAMA'S HOMEMADE SCHADENFREUDE:  As ever, a trenchant view from one of the Smartest People In The World™ can be found here.

...Population growth is slowing worldwide, and for all the hype about the latest technology, it doesn’t seem to be creating either surging productivity or a lot of demand for business investment. The ideology of austerity, which has led to unprecedented weakness in government spending, has added to the problem. And low inflation around the world, which means low interest rates even when economies are booming, has reduced the room to cut rates when economies slump.

 

Whatever the precise mix of causes, what’s important now is that policy makers take seriously the possibility, I’d say probability, that excess savings and persistent global weakness is the new normal.

My sense is that there’s a deep-seated unwillingness, even among sophisticated officials, to accept this reality. Partly this is about special interests: Wall Street doesn’t want to hear that an unstable world requires strong financial regulation, and politicians who want to kill the welfare state don’t want to hear that government spending and debt aren’t problems in the current environment.

But there’s also, I believe, a sort of emotional prejudice against the very notion of global glut. Politicians and technocrats alike want to view themselves as serious people making hard choices — choices like cutting popular programs and raising interest rates. They don’t like being told that we’re in a world where seemingly tough-minded policies will actually make things worse. But we are, and they will.

The Enduring Mystery

We've Been Boned For A Long, Long Time

Some men see things as they are and ask, "Why?"
I see the same stuff and say, "Yeah, yeah; whatever:
Bender Bender Bender / Bender Bender Bender...

-- Bender

© Mr Fish, 2012

Gorjirra Comes. Maybe.

Potential Big Weather Named For Big Guy; Possible Bay Area Appearance

Don't Tell Him To Use 'Trivago'. Ever.

It's been reported that conditions in the central Pacific Ocean which can help to produce more rainfall in autumn and winter months (as compared with what's been considered historically 'normal'), the famed "El Niño", have been growing stronger.

That strengthening condition has led some weather forecasters -- such as Bill Patzert, a climatologist for NASA, to say there may be a 90% chance that the potential for heavy rainfall in the winter of 2015-2016, to rival even the amount of water which fell during 1997-98 -- as Patzert put it, "a Godzilla El Niño."

(I remember that season.  It began raining in mid-October of 1997, and continued through a nearly unbroken chain of storms straight through into March, 1998. There were few days without rain, even if only a drizzle, and I don't recall seeing any blue sky, period.

(Rivers quickly moved into flood stage; the over-saturation of the ground in many locations meant mud- and landslides. Storm drains became blocked with debris and overflowed. Homes overlooking the ocean south of San Francisco lost their back yards as cliff edges crumbled, and the surf pounded other homes on the coast of Southern California into driftwood.)

El Niño is caused by a shift in distribution of warm water around the equator in the Pacific Ocean. Normally, winds blow strongly from east to west and cause water to move towards the western part of the Pacific -- that is, around Japan. For reasons best known to science, or Toho Studios, this attracts Mothra, or Monster Zero; The Big Guy shows up and Tokyo will need to budget for urban renewal.

However, in an El Niño, the winds moving the water get weaker, and cause the warmer water to shift back towards the east. This causes the water of the eastern Pacific (that is, the West Coast of the United States, Canada, Mexico, northern south America, and Hawaii ) to get warmer. Usually, Megalon will appear; the Big Guy shows up again, and there is some, uh, cell phone interference that follows.  That's not the best news for L.A., or Kiddietown (formerly San Francisco). 

At The Ferry Building: Can Never Get That Cup Of The Good

The Chairman Of The Board was pleased at the comparison with a Primal Force Of Nature™ (being one Himself), and through his Press Office advised he would make a Bay Area appearance soon, his most recent having been the annual Bay To Breakers marathon.

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