Personal Musings category archive

Every three months I do two things:

• Catch up with my filing.
• Swear that I won’t wait three months next time.

Continuity is a wonderful thing.

I do not know whether it would be good policy, but, oh! man! it would be fun to watch Wall Street bankers try to pay for their golden privies on GS-17 salaries and have to face annual performance evaluations from persons who really don’t like doing evaluations and do them with one eye on the budget and no eyes on performance:

There is a simple alternative, which can be called “bank rationalisation” in order to avoid the “n” word. Under this scenario, the government would take possession of insolvent banks. This is not interference with the market. It is the market. Bankrupt banks go out of business, but due to their importance to the economy, we can’t let them be tied up in bankruptcy proceedings for years.

Dealing with the matter all at once can both allow for a quicker fix to the financial system and also ensure fairer treatment of bank creditors. First, the shareholders of bankrupt institutions must be forced to eat their losses. However, we may not want to honour all the debts of the banks at 100 cents on the dollar, which has been current practice.

Activists of any stripe focus on trivialities so as to distract people from what’s going on and twist the public discourse.

That’s what the Republican fuss over family planning money in the stimulus bill was all about: distracting people.

Full disclosure: Unlike some, I don’t have a position on Tom Daschle’s tax problems. I don’t approve. I don’t disapprove. And I’m too lazy to research them.

I’ve screwed up my taxes a couple of times, and each time I thought I had them right, so perhaps my perspective differs from that of persons who have always filed a Form 1040-EZ and never had to file a Form 1040 Schedule SE.

Some Guy with a Blog suggests taking a larger view:

More below the Fold. Warning: Language

And a game that is not decided in the first quarter is not one of them.

John Cole found it necessary to take an aspirin to protect his heart.

Back to my regularly scheduled reruns.

The competence of sports broadcasters is the reciprocal of the number of sports stations.

Facts are starting to trickle out about the woman who, with the help of implanted embryos, bore eight babies last week.

Now, I’m not going to get involved in any discussion of the morality of fertility drugs, in vitro fertilization, or stuff like that there. For one thing, I haven’t thought it through, because I’m well past the age when stuff like that could conceivably (as it were) affect my daily life. For another thing, it’s just not worth the effort.

But this sentence at the end of the article in today’s local rag caught my eye:

Forty-six physicians and staff assisted in the deliveries of the six boys and two girls.

I know persons with serious health problems who refuse to go to the doctor because they have lousy or, indeed, no health insurance.

Something about that makes my nerves jangle.

Addendum, That Evening:

According to the Times of London, Mama wants to go on a Magical Money Tour.

A dog is man’s best friend. Except when it is man’s most annoying friend.

And there’s no looking forward to the empty nest.

(Wanna dog? Free shipping. Tranquilizers are on you.)

One of the appalling things about modern American conservatives is that so many of them seem to be nasty, unpleasant, hate-full persons.

My brother gave me a cane for Christmas.

No, not because he thinks I’m decrepit. Though he probably does, because I am.

Because he knew I enjoy making useful things of wood and would admire the quality of the woodwork. It’s gorgeous. (Really, follow the link and look at the samples. I think the one he selected is number five.)

I needed it today.

The rain that was forecast to follow the snow yesterday never got beyond a drizzle, so it did not wash away the snow. When the temperature dropped below freezing over night, it just added a nice little one-inch layer of ice on top.

Then, when the temperature nudged above freezing in the morning, a silly little millimeter of water formed on top of the ice.

I had nature’s own Slip ‘n Slide for a front yard.

I needed the cane to walk down the little hill (about a four-foot drop) between my house and the street without falling on my–er, never mind.

(I have another cane that is more functional. Unscrew the handle and it holds five shots of whatever you want to put in the little test tube thingees. I recommend whiskey. It never goes bad. Great for Independence Day fireworks shows.)

One can only hope.

It is somehow fitting that the ranking Republican representative from Lala Land is Jerry Lewis.

Wonder whether he’s popular in France?

In California, a Christian school wins an appeal affirming its right to expel students for homosexuality.

The case is troubling, not least because there was no evidence of homosexual behavior, except for “my word against your word” claims.

More below the Fold

I just heard John “Boner” Boehner gassing about tax cuts on Marconi’s Magic Box in a story about the economy.

Among other things, he said that “government cannot fix this problem.”

Why the hell not?

Government–most specifically Republican government–created it.

Addendum:

Krugman dissects the lies. A nugget:

. . . (W)rite off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

I know that politics (with a small “p”) are part of running any large organization.

The way I look at it, it’s “politics” when your position loses and it’s a “process of negotiation and compromise” when your position wins.

Compromise may not be a pretty thing.

Nevertheless, it is often a necessary thing. If you cannot take two steps forward because the current is too strong, one step forward is good. (Some of my fellow lefties haven’t figured that out yet, but that’s another blog post.)

But sanctioning the denial of truth is beyond the pale of civilized conduct and beyond the pale of the Gospel of Love.

Wonder how well that odious telly vision show Flip This House will do in the ratings this year when the real estate market seems to be flying on a bling and a prayer?

In this dismal real estate market, lots of people think so, provided that the plastic is a figurine of St. Joseph.

Local shops that sell religious paraphernalia are reporting phenomenal sales of tiny statuettes of St. Joseph – the earthly father of Jesus and the patron saint of the home and house sellers – to real estate agents and homeowners.

As long as I can remember–and I am older by the minute–the Governors of many states have had the right to fill a U. S. Senate vacancy pending the next regularly scheduled commercial interruption election.

It’s worked just fine–not great, but okay.

Despite the fulminations of the Washington Post–which has over the past eight years demonstrated in its editorials a disturbing tendency to miss the point–the kerfuffle over New York’s Caroline Kennedy and Illinois Governor Blagomumble’s (insert mandatory “alleged” here) flea market does not impeach that method of filling out a Senatorial term.

All it does it impeach Caroline Kennedy’s pretensions and Governor Blagomumble’s conduct.

The Washington Post looks at why Chapter 11 Bankruptcy isn’t working any more. Companies are giving up reorganizing and, instead, giving up the ghost.

Virtually every large company that filed for Chapter 11 in the past year intended to reorganize. But Sharper Image, which went bankrupt in February, couldn’t come up with a viable plan for its gadget stores and began to liquidate them in June. (The brand still lives on the Web.) Linens ‘n Things, which filed for bankruptcy in May, planned at first to close 100 stores. But when it couldn’t find a buyer, it decided in October to throw in the towel. Whitehall Jewelers, which filed for Chapter 11 in June, began selling off the family jewels in August. Clothing store Steve & Barry’s filed for bankruptcy last summer and tried to reorganize before giving up and going for liquidation. Mervyn’s, the California department store chain, filed for Chapter 11 in July and in October said it would start liquidating its 149 stores. And so on.

Now, I’m not familiar with Mervyn’s, Steve and Barry’s, or Whitehall Jewelers.

I am familiar with Circuit City and have mentioned them here probably more times than I ever went into one of their stores (which was twice). At least in my little Circuit City store, they had a lousy selection unattractively arranged.

I am familiar with Linens ‘n Things and Sharper Image. Their selection ranged from the over-priced to the useless to the over-priced useless. Heck, Sharper Image made Brookstone look like a five and dime (Brookstone, for all it’s expensive, does sometimes have useful stuff that you just can’t easily find anywhere else).

In bad times, customers don’t buy over-priced unnecessary junk. Heck, they don’t even buy over-priced necessary junk.

I am not an economist (though I do have some economic training), and I’m guessing Bed Bath and Beyond is probably shaking in its bed bath and beyond slippers.

These are not times when persons are going to buy $120.00 coffee makers.

These are times when persons buy house brands, not brand hype.

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

Via (with miswording and misattribution) Gene Weingarten, who was doing it off the top of his head, and got the wording a little wrong, while capturing the essence, and attributed it to FDR Benjamin Franklin.

While you’re at it, read Weingarten’s column from Sunday.

Not.

“Responsible journalists” are so busy patting themselves on the back that they keep forgetting to get the damned story.

The press wonders why newspapers and traditional media are failing financially.

In other words, they wonder why fewer persons are willing to pay for their product.

Has the press considered that their consistently missing the story may have something to do with it?

Persons don’t like to pay for a defective product.

Why would the Department of Homeland Security want to look at my picture of a magnolia tree?

From the stats (emphasis added):

URL: /weblog/?m=200604
Date: 2009-Jan-23 15:53:32
Referer: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://pineviewfarm.net/graphics/magnolia.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.pineviewfarm.net/weblog/%3Fm%3D200604&usg=__dPjKV009qCbCCtyjW80S–urFL0=&h=497&w=435&sz=222&hl=en&start=20&tbnid=rZe-p23wXqEhYM:&tbnh=130&tbnw=1
IP: 204.248.24.163
Host: sbcp4.dhs.gov
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; DHSI60SP1001; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1)

One would think they could find better things to do with our time. Not, of course, that I ever surfed the web while at work.

(Frankly, I think it should never had been created. Congress blew that one. And, if it had to be created, it should have been called the “Department of Domestic Security.” “Homeland” sounds too much like “Vaterland.“)

“Whois” information below the fold.

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