Welcome to all of you Brilliant folks who are popping over in the hopes of the same sort of smart and concise opinion and reporting that you enjoy daily on Brilliant at Breakfast...well, all I have to say is....ha, ha, ha, ha!...lately its sort of catch as catch can round here ...but Im happy to have you all here and I hope you like my little corner of the blogosphere!
(... and, of course, thanks to my pal Jill for the link!)
Its casual Friday, as Sammy Seder would say, and it began awfully early with what can only be described as rapids pouring into my basement at a speed that I havent seen in the 13 years that Ive been trying to get control of this slanted cottage hanging onto a boulder in the woods.
I ran to the hardware store in time to get one of the last little floor pumps and the very last big shopvac (14 gallons.) Beggers cant be choosers, and all of my planning with Consumer Reports in hand flew out the window when I was faced with more water than Ive seen down there ever.
See, I have an installed sump pump but it is over on the high ground part of the basement so it has never been used in the small floods that I get with every rain. Today I felt like I was prepared except that there is still around 6 inches of ice over the outlet pipe, which was frozen in the ground anyway. So by the time I got the pump home and started pulling heavy soaked laundry around, the pump guys came and we spent a couple of hours hanging out and shooting the breeze about global warming, one guy's python, my basement snake, and the ins and outs of pumps and shop vacs. I ended up, after the level went below the pumps, vacuming up 5 full shopvacs full of water and mud. I also did a ton of laundry and dragged stuff outside for the dump run that is certainly coming.
The whole time I was listening to podcasts from this past week...and man, is that enough to turn me inside out....and I kept telling myself that maybe I should flee the old house in the woods where my father wants it made very clear that not only did grandpa lay the crazy stone paths and stairs back then in the 40's, but that my father himself helped...credit where credit is due, for sure...and to make it very, very clear that his BLOOD is in the stones. That refers less to the squished fingers of a 10 year old up here on weekends and more to some metaphorical importance in the correction email, just so I know.
So, I guess that the Stamford version of Holes had a big effect on him in the summers that he was here....But really to say nothing of my past 13 years here...and, yes, I just replaced most of the path...blood washed away perhaps?...and I for one am gonna move on to say that yes, we all had a terrible childhood, but Ive been here all alone with a kid, and for most of the time with a young kid and before that an infant, when the place was falling down....So if those summers drew blood, then these full time, 24/7, years and years must count towards hemorrhage?
BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME!! God, do I need a vacation and a shoulder to cry on today!

M-ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC,) saw fit to call my boy John Edwards a "Faggot!" All I can say M-ann, is that YOU WISH!! If I were a gay male cross dresser, as Coulter seems to be, I would hope that Johnny were gay too! But must the she-male use such crude wording? Where I cone from the word "faggot" refers to a particular brand of catty gay person...or its a straight putdown like the N-word if said by a basher.
I know that when these neocons talk they tend to trash the very thing that is their deepest secrets and fear, so I view this as another message in code from Coulter...and perhaps a cry for help.
It occurs to me that, all free speech aside, we might be in much better cultural shape if lying haters like Coulter were not given a platform. I needs to become a pathetic last choice to book these people. Again, I wonder what happened to striving for real intellect and well researched ideas....

I am becoming more and more troubled at the democratic leadership's non-action on hearings and the beginning of impeachment. There is so much evidence and no excuse to not get right on this. I'm tired of what looks one way or another and trying to seem bi-partisan....people are dying and every day there is another report about this administration ordering unprepared and untrained reservists to go over there...and that the "surge" is just bullshit.
The there is the reality of how we treat our injured service people and how much they are cutting out of their benefits. How can this be America?

And around, around goes Rudy Guilliani, with not one person asking him what hes gonna do when he cheats on his new wife and she kicks him out of the white house?!

And the money....Krugman has a good analysis of how screwed we are, and even as all the president's men go on in lockstep about the economy being so great (for rich stockholders,) and full of jobs (the new manufacturing sector in McDonald's!,) we really have alot to worry about.

So I am overwhelmed between physical shutdown after the deluge, the sadness of just feeling stuff, anxiety about Peach in the tree and what would I do if I lose her, and Todd is maybe sick (though he uses so few words that its impossible to tell...and Enquiring minds need to know!)

Sunday is Origami day again at the Natural History Museum and I will have the whole day because my boys are taking morning and afternoon classes. I am definitely going to hit the evolution exhibit and take a ton of pictures so you all can see it....and then maybe if the dragon and mythological creatures exhibit isn't opened yet I will head to the village to bum around my old stomping grounds.

Here is Krugman for those of you trying to understand how Murtha could have caused the markets to crash!

March 2, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

The Big Meltdown

By PAUL KRUGMAN

FEB. 27, 2008

The great market meltdown of 2007 began exactly a year ago, with a 9 percent fall in the Shanghai market, followed by a 416-point slide in the Dow. But as in the previous global financial crisis, which began with the devaluation of Thailand’s currency in the summer of 1997, it took many months before people realized how far the damage would spread.

At the start, all sorts of implausible explanations were offered for the drop in U.S. stock prices. It was, some said, the fault of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, as if his statement of the obvious — that the housing slump could possibly cause a recession — had been news to anyone. One Republican congressman blamed Representative John Murtha, claiming that his efforts to stop the “surge” in Iraq had somehow unnerved the markets.

Even blaming events in Shanghai for what happened in New York was foolish on its face, except to the extent that the slump in China — whose stock markets had a combined valuation of only about 5 percent of the U.S. markets’ valuation — served as a wake-up call for investors.

The truth is that efforts to pin the stock decline on any particular piece of news are a waste of time.

Wise analysts remember the classic study that Robert Shiller of Yale carried out during the market crash of Oct. 19, 1987. His conclusion? “No news story or rumor appearing on the 19th or over the preceding weekend was responsible.” In 2007, as in 1987, investors rushed for the exits not because of external events, but because they saw other investors doing the same.

What made the market so vulnerable to panic? It wasn’t so much a matter of irrational exuberance — although there was plenty of that, too — as it was a matter of irrational complacency.

After the bursting of the technology bubble of the 1990s failed to produce a global disaster, investors began to act as if nothing bad would ever happen again. Risk premiums — the extra return people demand when lending money to less than totally reliable borrowers — dwindled away.

For example, in the early years of the decade, high-yield corporate bonds (formerly known as junk bonds) were able to attract buyers only by offering interest rates eight to 10 percentage points higher than U.S. government bonds. By early 2007, that margin was down to little more than two percentage points.

For a while, growing complacency became a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the what-me-worry attitude spread, it became easier for questionable borrowers to roll over their debts, so default rates went down. Also, falling interest rates on risky bonds meant higher prices for those bonds, so those who owned such bonds experienced big capital gains, leading even more investors to conclude that risk was a thing of the past.

Sooner or later, however, reality was bound to intrude. By early 2007, the collapse of the U.S. housing boom had brought with it widespread defaults on subprime mortgages — loans to home buyers who fail to meet the strictest lending standards. Lenders insisted that this was an isolated problem, which wouldn’t spread to the rest of the market or to the real economy. But it did.

For a couple of months after the shock of Feb. 27, markets oscillated wildly, soaring on bits of apparent good news, then plunging again. But by late spring, it was clear that the self-reinforcing cycle of complacency had given way to a self-reinforcing cycle of anxiety.

There was still one big unknown: had large market players, hedge funds in particular, taken on so much leverage — borrowing to buy risky assets — that the falling prices of those assets would set off a chain reaction of defaults and bankruptcies? Now, as we survey the financial wreckage of a global recession, we know the answer.

In retrospect, the complacency of investors on the eve of the crisis seems puzzling. Why didn’t they see the risks?

Well, things always seem clearer with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, even pessimists were unsure of their ground. For example, Paul Krugman concluded a column published on March 2, 2007, which described how a financial meltdown might happen, by hedging his bets, declaring that: “I’m not saying that things will actually play out this way. But if we’re going to have a crisis, here’s how

Labels: Coulter, Edwards, Flood, Krugman