Good Morning, All. It looks like we will have a sunny day to start. Hope so. I have to go out to the library today. My books aren't due yet but I have read what I want to of them. I think I said once one one of these posts I no longer force myself to finish any book that loses my interest. I also have two grocery bags of books culled from my collection that I plan to donate. I would really rather not dodge the rain drops.

I know the feeling, Kay. When I read some of the stories and hear some of the asinine statements public figures make, I have the choice of keeping my mouth shut or turning the air blue. Sometimes speechless is the only response that makes sense. There isn't language to express my response adequately.

For those who follow the 'peak oil debate,' take a look at this for a bit of sardonic humor on the topic. Peak Oil Hausfrau at the Energy Bulletin lists 10 ways to talk about peak oil without actually using the phrase.

An interesting item (interesting for me because I don't have to drive it) is the closure of a long stretch of the Cline Avenue overpass by the Indiana Department of Transportation. It is a major north-south corridor here in Northwest Indiana. Evidently the structural supports are so corroded that the entire overpass is unsafe. I have just been reading some articles on it in the Northwest Indiana Times. (I get it by way of Google search but you can easily Google it yourself.) Evidently an access ramp on the same stretch collapsed in 1982 killing almost a score of people and injuring as many. My first question was 'what has INDOT been doing in the intervening years?' My second thought goes back to an observation I made many, many years ago. In our political system it seems to be much easier to get money for new construction but much harder to get it for continuing maintenance or for improvements on existing structures. I have been reading about dangerous bridges and overpasses for the last 30 years in three different states. Four states if you include Illinois where much of our news comes from.

Taddyporter at BitchPhD has an excellent suggestion for ending operations in Iraq--pay for it. Dear unlamented George managed to put most of the badly misnamed War On Terror off the books. Obama did us all a service by insisting that the costs be placed back on the books and in the open. And I, for one, have been totally disgusted by the cadre of Republicans (and their Blue Dog allies) who will spend anything for a misguided military adventure overseas but not a penny for real needs here at home.

Well, it is now late evening and I am off to play Farmville on Facebook.

Good Morning, Everyone. Chilly but the sun is coming up so at least we will have that. All the rain from Ida went well south and east of us. We are seeing more frost on the roof tops. Can't tell about the cars since we put the plastic sheeting over the windows a month ago and have a 6ft fence in back. The trees are well past peak color and most have lost their leaves. We see the piles all over town as we go on our errands.

Well, here is something to get your blood up by way of Huffington Post this morning. Evidently, Goldman Sachs studied the potential effect of health care reform legislation on the STOCK PRICES of the five largest insurance providers. Goldman concluded that the best option (i.e., would provide the best increase in stock prices) would be (drum roll, please) NO REFORM AT ALL. Surprise, Surprise!!! (dripping sarcasm). The second best, looking at this metric, would be a watered down version of the Senate bill. Damn, and I thought they couldn't water the thing down any more than they already have. I guess that tells us exactly where the health of 47 million American men, women and children ranks with our corporate masters. Well below the fraking stock prices of the five largest insurance companies. Also notice that isn't profits.

This little item from Gawker brought a sardonic chuckle all around. I couldn't find any link to verify his statement that barista jobs at Starbucks now require a graduate degree but I think he is right on on his summation. I have made similar observations whenever I see ads for various 'colleges' (names of which I don't recognize) or hear the President or one of his people tout education as a way out of un/underemployment. Especially when the students will get out of the programs with a backbreaking load of debt and a chancy (still) job market.

It is now late afternoon and the clouds have moved in. I finished cleaning our plant shelves today. That area becomes a bit of a catch all so most of the effort went into getting things put away. But I also had some small glass candle holders that I needed to clean out so I could refill them--essentially make new candles. I got two poured but will need to get some more of my wax remainders out to get the last four done. I use my small votive candles to form the cores so I don't have a lot of fiddling to do with the wicks.

I haven't seen anything else worth commenting on so I will post now and see you tomorrow.

Good Morning, again. How is everyone out there? We are fine here. We saw some moderately heavy frost on the rooftops this morning. But the sun is shining and the temps are expected to be in the high 50s--not bad for November. We still haven't had a hard frost in our area. Nothing much planned today--just another round of house cleaning. I have another three sets of shelves to get straightened out and we need to clean the fish tank. I will have two grocery bags of books for the library and I found two books I had been looking for--for a long time. I thought I might have given them away by mistake or lost them in moving. Once upon a time I could visualize any book I had and walk right to it--that when I had triple the number of books I have now. I can't do that any more. Damn!!!

Oh, well. On to other things. I came across this article at MSNBC. What it lays out shouldn't surprise anyone who has followed big Pharma over the years. The thing that really concerns me is the fact that the FDA relies on the studies done by the pharmaceutical companies when they decide that drugs are safe enough and effective enough to market. But for years those companies have proven that their profits are much more important than the public's health and safety. Yet we (our government, that is) continue to rely on them to provide truthful and accurate information. Why do we keep expecting these leopards to change their spots?

I am so glad to see that someone is finally questioning, seriously, our presence in Afghanistan. Perhaps I should clarify that. Someone is finally asking what the hell our aims there are. We have lost more lives in Afghanistan and Iraq than we did on 9/11 and spent (squandered, really) more money than was lost in the economy from the reactions to 9/11--and for what?? Those who think we are safer have a very low bar for judging our safety, in my opinion. We have managed to alienate most of those who were sympathetic after the event and even made our staunchest allies question our collective sanity. I have thought for some time that we should have gone in with the limited aim of decapitating both the Taliban and al Qaeda and then leaving them to clean up the mess. And we should never have gone into Iraq. Maybe others are coming around to similar positions.

This whole issue of a commission to deal with Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security annoys me as anyone who has read previous posts knows. I call it the height of cowardice. And I really hate the notion that programs I have paid into all my working life and have been repeatedly assured would be there when I came of age to draw on them are in the hands of these dastardly cowards. And I am even more pissed off at the maneuvering involved--attaching an unpalatable provision to a 'must have' piece of legislation--that is extreme cowardice combined with a very nasty slyness. I have read of a number of people who think Social Security is merely a government run ponzi scheme worthy of a Madoff. However, Madoff's victims (those who were really victims) had a choice we don't have with regard to putting money into the scheme--THEY could have rejected the scheme and not invested. Nobody can refuse to pay the taxes supporting Social Security. This whole commission idea is nothing more than a craven means of theft and the thieves are those we have elected.

If anyone really thinks the 'Great Recession' is really on the mend they should read this and think about the implications. California has, of course, been in the media spotlight with its budgetary problems and political gridlock. But the report cited in this article mentions 10 states with one-third of the nation's population and economic output as being in very fragile economic condition. Just because the Dow is looking good now doesn't mean the recession is over and just because we see a point or two uptick in economic activity or a point or two less in foreclosures doesn't mean that the economy is really recovering--not for most of us.

Maureen Dowd has an excellent opinion piece in the New York Times that totally skewers the big banks who are on schedule to pay out bonuses that are larger than those that generated a public howl last year. If there has been a howl this year it hasn't gotten all that much coverage in the mainstream media. I have only seen a few bare bones mention on the national news shows. CNBC has had a running debate this week on the bonuses but with the usual positions already staked out--on the one hand those who think that government should stay out of setting compensation of any sort and that the banks need to pay their top talent exorbitantly to keep them while on the other the heads point out that most of those banks are still 'owned' by the taxpayers who bailed them out last fall and winter. Owners are supposed to have the right to set compensation rules. And as she also points out the originators of the Protestant Work Ethic would join with Adam Smith to express outrage at what is being done in their names. God's Work?? Not unless you believe in a totally perverse god!!

Good Morning, Everyone. It is nice and sunny today. Yesterday was gloomy even if warmer than normal for November. It was a wasted kind of gloom since we didn't get any rain to go with the clouds. More house cleaning planned for today.

However, a couple of things caught my attention. The news media has noticed that the big banks are rolling out new credit card fees and establishing new requirements for credit card customers hoping to beat any new deadlines Congress might impose. They are essentially blackmailing us and our political leaders. Either they get to pocket obscene profits without regulation or they will choke off credit. They are hoping that we, as a society, will decide that we need them more than they need us. It feels somewhat like the old Cold War notion of MAD (mutually assured destruction). On the one hand they are right. To keep our economy going the way it had been going we need liberal credit because wages haven't fueled our standard of living for at least the last thirty years for the lowest paid two-thirds (plus or minus) of our population. A middle class standard of living has been possible for most of us only because of borrowing of one kind or another--credit cards, home equity lines of credit, easy credit for car purchases. And even then most of it required two working adults as well as liberal credit. Their tactics will work only as long as a significant portion of us decide that the old way of life is desirable. What happens when we don't?

Another news story this morning raised my irritation level a notch largely because it came close on the heels of a similar irritation earlier during our weekly grocery shopping trip. The supermarket had a sign noting that they would be open from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. on THANKSGIVING. And people wonder why I hate retail??? That is a wonderful holiday for their workers; but, hey, they should be grateful they have jobs, right?? Then this morning Wal-Mart announced they were going to be open on Thanksgiving--all 24 hours of it. Supposedly they want to avoid a repeat of the incident last year when a temp worker was trampled to death by frenzied shoppers on Black Friday. Really??? It sounds to me like these retailers simply want every nickel they they can get and don't mind screwing their workers, again.

Mark Morford has a good post this morning on the 60 Minutes story I didn't comment on earlier this week. We were also somewhat put out about this story. First, we don't care much for celebrity gossip and are especially put off by such gossip paraded as news. Second, we have no intention of buying or reading Agassiz's book and so didn't want to sit through an unpaid advertisement for it. Third, they devoted two thirds of their air time to that story and only one third to the much more interesting story about the threat of cyber attacks. WTF??? Fourth, we were stuck watching the last 3 minutes of a football game that lasted almost 20 real minutes in order to get to 60 Minutes and were grateful that the powers that be didn't spend the next forty plus minutes going to the tail ends of other football games. I don't know which is the more irritating--the looooong 3 minutes or the overexposure of an former tennis star's confession to bad behavior.

Entitled To Know has a piece that parallels my thoughts (in an earlier post) on the notion some in Congress have of establishing a commission to, as they so nicely say, 're-negotiate the social contract.) We elected our representatives to make the hard choices for the good of us all--not to kowtow to the special interests, not to preserve their political career and electability. They are not doing that job. And now they want to establish this commission to take the heat off themselves and make decisions that will affect all of us, most of us adversely??? Unfortunately, they may just get away with it.

Richard Heinberg has an interesting post today. I am one of those people who cannot see things in a black and white or binary (right/wrong, good/bad) light. When the issues of climate change, or health care reform, or peak oil come up and various pundits come out with their statements of 'problems' and 'solutions' I am most likely to say 'Yes, but...'. One of my teachers, some many years ago, made the observation that for every question science answers several more questions are revealed in the answers. And for every techno-fix to a given problem the fix creates new problems we never even dreamed of. Mainly because we wore the blinders of the 'problem/solution' mindset.

Good Morning, everyone, although it may not be morning still when this gets posted. We have some housekeeping chores on tap today. Yesterday was our usual shopping day and today is our laundry day. Though shopping is a weekly errand laundry is, perhaps, every two weeks. It takes that long for us to accumulate enough for full loads. It may get a little more frequent with the winter because our sweats are much more bulky than our jeans and tee shirts of summer. But today we also plan to sweep the carpets (oh, how we hate carpets. Much rather have smooth surfaces to dust mop) and dusting the book shelves. Anyone who follows this blog knows that we do housekeeping when the spirit moves us and we are thankful that it doesn't move us very often.

Boy, I am so glad that Wall Street bankers are on schedule to receive even larger bonuses than before the catastrophe of last fall when the Government had to step in and save their collective asses. And I am overjoyed that the Dow went up by almost 200 points yesterday. Yeah, that is just dripping with sarcasm because that isn't my reality. This reflects my reality and has for longer than I care to think. When I graduated from high school my classmates and I could expect to land jobs that either paid a living wage immediately or would in very short order. Now even a bachelor's or master's degree may not get you anything like that. I remember a friend from one of the institutions of higher learning I spent so much of the middle twenty years of my life attending looking at the job market some fifteen years ago. She described the offerings as a road to 'genteel poverty.' I find the memory ironic whenever anyone talks about education as the way out of our present predicament.

James Kunstler always provides a good read and this Clusterfuck Nation column is no exception. Periodically in this blog I talk about the diseconomies of scale which few economists want to write about. Banks, brokerage firms, and insurance companies are not the only institutions that fall into this category. Governments do also. For the last three years the discussions that dominated the news at this time of year has been 1) the State of Illinois pending deficit and 2) the budgetary shortfall for the City of Chicago. This year is no different and, though the deficits are larger than ever, the story is still the same. The off year election ads are hitting the airwaves and range from the mis-informative to the non-informative, from merely annoying to downright stupid. Just think--day after election day next November we should be seeing the first hats thrown into the 2012 Presidential races. I can hardly wait (heavy dose of sarcasm here).

Well, it hasn't been too bad so far. I got 3 bookcases and two dressers dusted. That is the bedroom. I haven't even touched the computer/sewing/craft room which has 5 more book cases. But I think I have done enough today. Tomorrow I will do the downstairs with its 4 bookcases, 2 media towers, tv and stand. I already have a fairly full plastic grocery bag of books to donate to the local library.

See you tomorrow.

Good Morning, everyone. We had a perfect fall weekend with plenty of sun and above normal temps. It seems to be overcast right now but the temperature is above normal and we may yet get some sun.

I found this item on the Google home page this morning. We can file it under either 'Companies acting badly----again!!!' or 'When are we going to realize that normal criminal penalties are no deterrent to giant, global corporations?' So, Phizer paid a miniscule criminal and civil penalty, said its mea culpa in court (or rather one of its subsidiaries did), and promises to be good--and then violates the agreement before, as the author says, the 'ink is dry.' Then take a look at the list of companies caught doing the same thing--repeatedly. I think this paragraph sums up the situation very well--

“Marketing departments of many drug companies don’t respect any boundaries of professionalism or the law,” says Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston and author of “Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs” (Random House, 2004). “The Pfizer and Lilly cases involved the illegal promotion of drugs that have been shown to cause substantial harm and death to patients.” (my emphasis in red)

The problem isn't just with the drug companies. All of our 'too big to fail' companies have the same scofflaw attitude. Many of our just plain big companies follow their lead.

After last week's optimistic take on the jobs report, it is nice to see some are rejecting the sugar coating. As this opinion states, telling a dying patient that things are looking up because he is dying slower is not a realistic assessment of his medium and long term prognoses. But--what the hay!!--it sent the stock market up. That's all that really matters isn't it?

Last night 60 Minutes had an interesting segment on how vulnerable many of our critical systems are to cyber attacks. I wasn't really surprised by the information. Nor was I surprised by how little private industries have done to combat such attacks. What did surprise me was the very small mention about the role of the profit motive in this. Companies prefer to look like they are concerned and addressing the problem rather than actually addressing the problem. It is simply cheaper. Usually, any even oblique criticism of so-called capitalism or of the profits that underlie it don't make any appearance at all. And another comment also surprised me--the reference was to simulated attacks on the power grid which showed how vulnerable power generators can be to cyber attacks. The consultants staging the simulations found it ridiculously easy to cripple generators. But I wonder how many noticed the next comments on how long and difficult it would be to get replacements because they simply aren't made in this country any more. Want a nightmare? Think about the result of an attack that cripples the power grid during the hottest or coldest part of the year over an extended part of the country. Multiply what happened last year in several parts of the country when winter storms crippled power companies by damaging the power lines. Some placed did not get back to normal for a month. But think what it would be like if a generator that takes three months to repair or replace goes out. Think the scenario is far fetched? I found this over the weekend at The Oil Drum and it was featured in the 60 Minutes report.

Good Morning, Everyone. It is gray today after two nice, sunny days. We are supposed to have temps in the 60s for the next three days. A little above average for a change. The Denver weather made our local weather news. Going from a monster snow storm to 80s made a few jaws drop. Having lived a bit north of Denver for about 15 years, I was not surprised. It was rather typical for Colorado in the spring or the fall.

I found an interesting little article at The Oil Drum today. The author examines the whole notion of 'sustainability' and makes some very interesting points. Every now and then someone comes out and makes the observation that growth and sustainability are mutually exclusive. But growth is so ingrained in economics, perhaps even our psyches, that the notion of a steady state (or no growth) economy seems to be unthinkable. All of the measures by which we gauge economic health are based on increases over some base line. All of our political debates seem to be centered around the notion of 'more' of something for whatever groups want more. Some key points to note from the article: 1) If people don't curb population growth and/or consumption growth, Nature will do it for us. And Nature is a brutal bitch. 2) The main source of problems are solutions. I would add my own observation on the role of technology here. Technology basically increases the carrying capacity. However, please note the laws that deal with concerted efforts to increase either the resource or the efforts to clean up the pollution caused by the extraction, transport, or use of a resource: small increases in population wipe out the benefits of those efforts. Further, if the technology fails, the results are likely to be catastrophic. Famine, drought, and crop failure put more people at risk because there are more people thanks to technologies that allowed the population to grow (i.e., they increased the carrying capacity).

Well, just as I remark on the dearth of economic treatises on the possibility of a no-growth economy I find one, again, thanks to The Oil Drum. As I read this my main thought was that it will be extremely difficult to come up with a notion of no-growth prosperity that can replace consumerism which has been totally imbued with the notion of more. Our jobs give little satisfaction beyond the money which we turn into as many things as possible the winner being the one who has the most of the most expensive toys. Those of us who don't make enough to engage in this race are left questioning our worth because we just can't begin to measure up to the standard.

The Oil Drum has had a larger than usual number of interesting articles this morning. This one has a number of interesting aspects to it. A recent recurring conversation over our morning coffee has been how we seem to have reverted in many ways to our life styles three or more decades ago. We don't eat out much and almost never at McDonalds or other such fast food outlets. We have cut out upwards of 80% of prepared foods. We are starting to grow some of our own during the summer and freezing more locally grown foods. The observation on the effects of our modern system of working for wages are well take. We have made parallel observations on our own. It is ironic how seldom mainstream 'efforts' to combat obesity and diabetes fails to make some of these connections or to really acknowledge how our lives have changed in just the last 70-100 years.