Pee Brain Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 About two months ago in an address that few remember or got little coverage, the bushman said that the war on terrorism would be "massive and long". They knew then that the only way to keep GDP up (along with the bushman's approval rating) was through huge increases in government spending -- and that spells WAR. I also happened to notice over the last couple of days more talk of Americans making a "sacrifice" and that to me means Joe-6 and the middle class are about to get it in the neck again. Count on a long slow decline in the standard of living. It's coming guys. It's coming. well, at least the iraqis will have clean water and reliable power Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phatbubble Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 well, that went well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pee Brain Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 A truly unique indicator is posted on George Ure's Urban Survival site: "A Seattle area reader sends this note: I count lost cat ads in the Seattle Times Classified section almost every day. Generally only 3-4 gone. Just before the Nisqually quake, Feb. 2001 there were 13 cats listed as lost. Today is the first time since then I have counted 13 cats missing, Saturday, ?Sept 13. I am getting my emergency kit topped up, more water and putting gas in the car. The think tank says in their part of the Northwest, they are hearing about what are described as 'earthquake clouds' - so we will see. ?Earthquake clouds generally form right over the fault line that is about to move causing the quake, so if you're in the Northwest, look to the skies for signs. ?Look grey on the bottom and white on the top, and can be 100+ miles long and several miles wide, depending on the fault." quake prediction message board the posters sometimes add a follow-on post with 'HIT' in the title. unusual reading. Spent the day with Fokker Sr. yestiddy, and was remarking to him that I've begun to increasingly lust for "interruptions", be they power or other service outages, whatever. A kind of EOTWAWKI thing. Before beginning to seriously follow the news, I used to remark that doomcriers have always been numerous, and always appeared to be whackos... seems that I've been edging closer in that direction. HIT... i remember being a kid during power outages, and how fun it was to light candles and talk and just....be....in the dark living room or wherever. especially if there was a blizzard and you could go outside and check out the whole endarkened neighborhood. something magical about it. nobody wants isabel in their hood, or people stuck in nyc elevators for 10 hrs, or whatever....but i'm convinced there's a part of us that yearns for that experience as something beyond a nihilistic 'let's go off the rails' impulse. like as an opportunity to reconnect with the more profound and community-oriented parts of being alive. the subtleties lost in the noisy carnival of post-industrial urban life. i remember the sylmar earthquake - we were about 40+ miles from the epicenter. there was nothing funny about it. no intention to be frivolous in the slightest. only speaking to the feeling fokker mentioned. by the descriptions from people who've been through large earthquakes (i haven't), they seem to be more upsetting than any other natural phenomena/disaster as far as disrupting one's faith in their environment. like, you can always count on the ground under your feet. hey phat, i didnt mean it in that way. i had same thought when i emailed doc that i was in japan when a typhoon hit. i told him it was actually kinda "awesome", of course i was just a student and didnt have any property at risk. i wondered if he thought i was being insensitive about isabel. the sylmar quake was plain scary. my twin bed was dancing on the hardwood floors. my mom had these metal plates hung on the wall and they made a hell of a racket in addition to the earthquake's rumble. of course, i was real young, but that was still hairy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
machinehead Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 This weekend I'm reading a book recommended by PeeBrain, The Return of Thrift by Philip Longman. ("Thrift" was the hook for PB's Scottish DNA.) Longman applies his formidable rhetorical skills to Social Security (bear in mind he's writing in 1996): Once the checks clear, there is never any money left over. But months after the fact, government accountants will update a special ledger, or memo account, showing the difference, if any, between what the Social Security Administration has been spending for retirement and disability benefits and what the Internal Revenue Service has been collecting in payroll taxes. The last time I checked, the keeper of this ledger was Ronald Iroff. A friendly, bearded man in his forties who peers out at the world through bispectacles, Iroff works in an obscure back office of the Funds Management Division of the Financial Management Service, located in the Treasury Department building on Fourteenth Street in Washington, next to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. There, in a cubicle outside his office, sits an aging IBM-clone 386-chip personal computer, loaded with an antiviral program that runs as it is booted up and an off-the-shelf small business accounting program called Solomon III. Iroff and his small staff use the machine for many general office purposes, including updating the ledger periodically. They keep the ledger filed under its official Treasury Department code name, 20X8006, and store it on a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk, which is usually kept in a disk holder on top of the Hewlett-Packard monitor. This disk is the only reality behind what is called the Old Age, Survivors and Disability Trust fund. That was seven years ago. But I'm laughing my ass off: one floppy disk fails, and the OASDI trust fund is "gone with the wind." It was just a bleedin' ledger entry anyway! BWA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA .... Strawberry fields Nothing is real And nothing to get hung about Strawberry fields forever ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
baby_bear Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Someone posted in the last few days about a possible play with insurance companies because of the hurricane, mentioning Allstate among others. One of my sis-in-laws works for them. I asked her if they were anticipating a bad hit from the storm and she reminded me that they changed their homeowner policies because of the last few years of storms (I now remember skimming a huge addendum to our policy about changes). She was pretty confident that they won't be affected by Isabelle. FWIW edit--just realized there might be a misperception factor at work taking the stock down, so the reality of the situation is probably not in play. I guess we'll find out soon enough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phatbubble Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Justice brags about using the Patriot Acts against more than just terrorists if we could just incarcerate everyone, everything would be fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GregFokker Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Lady Fokker sez Machinehead's a babe... Rut ro! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
summoner Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Stoolizens I need your help...never took a finance course in my life ...that alone should tell you something....have been scanning insider trading patterns ..planning my buys for my IRA acct.... Found a CO. with 5 million shares outstanding, over the course of the last 12 months insiders have purchased 4.4 million shares with no sells...what would that imply...looking for a buyout, trying to take private? Any accountants out there that could set me straight...TIA Will post my findings re insider accumulation Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
depends Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Does anyone remember hurricane Hazel? I was just a boy of 14 in Upper Darby PA. We spent one day and night in a shelter at the school. The wind was fierce and caused a lot of damage. It went clear up to Toronto with winds in the 70 mph range. This Isabele is no joke, except for the part about the WH. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RockLedge Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Grocery stores in the Philadelphia area are reporting a run on frozen chip steak, Italian rolls, onions, and cheese Whiz. Widespread shortages, and some panic reported. Governor Rendell promised to investigate reports of price gouging by some corner stores in S. Philadelphia. Uhh oh... better batten down the scrapple. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RockLedge Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Lady Fokker sez Machinehead's a babe... Rut ro! I don't want to be around when Bare reads that... Now I know why Mousey is always so happy. Doc & Machine, you too! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
machinehead Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Lady Fokker sez Machinehead's a babe... Rut ro! Chere mademoiselle: je suis un homme gard?. Mais je vous remercie tout de m?me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phatbubble Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Does anyone remember hurricane Hazel? ?I was just a boy of 14 in Upper Darby PA. ?We spent one day and night in a shelter at the school. ?The wind was fierce and caused a lot of damage. It went clear up to Toronto with winds in the 70 mph range. ?This Isabele is no joke, except for the part about the WH. anybody read isaac's storm, about the hurricane that leveled galveston around the turn of the century? gripping. the internecine squabbles of the u.s. weather service and the unavailability of modern-day meteorology resulted in the thing hitting florida with some destruction and then vanishing. it was assumed that no storm could do anything but pass north along the eastern coast of the u.s., and the public was told that it'd dissipated somewhere off the carolinas or someplace. it hadn't. it crossed the gulf and gained a grotesque strength. the waves grew in size along the texas beaches, and families took their kids down to watch the unusually heavy surf as it kept getting bigger and bigger. at nightfall this category 5 hurricane with 200 mph winds ripped into galveston with no warning of any kind. the wind and storm tide were so fierce that they leveled the shoreline and then pushed the destroyed structures inland and actually scraped several city blocks clean with a 3-story wall of moving debris. at least 8,000 people died. then the thing moved inland, over oklahoma, up through the midwest, over the great lakes and new england, across nova scotia, and out into the atlantic. it was still a hurricane when it hit the fishermen out on the grand banks almost two weeks later. where is it....here it is: Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
purdymouth Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Chere mademoiselle: je suis un homme gard?. Mais je vous remercie tout de m?me. Un affichage merveilleux de l'humilit? et de la grace. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soup Posted September 14, 2003 Report Share Posted September 14, 2003 Spot on,imo. "In his September ?Richeb?cher Letter? a final section title stands as ?No Foundation for Recovery? which was the result of banter back and forth, pushing a title to the top. For fully three years the US consumers, leaders, and bankers have systematically resisted the natural process of cleansing excesses and rectifying imbalances. Far from it. Instead, the trade deficit has increased. Corporate balance sheets are every bit as much loaded with debt. Household balance sheets are burdened by greater debt. Financial speculation has produced a Treasury bond bubble, a mortgage bond bubble, and its flipside housing bubble. A consumption bubble continues unabated, fed by debt. Capital investment is lacking in the face of idle antiquated mfg plant. Economic structures are horribly out of balance, perhaps to a greater degree than in 1999 and 2000. We talk incessantly about a recovery without preparing for one. With little thought, we await a knee-jerk reaction to federal stimulus and monetary stimulus, without the results. Instead of questioning why the last two years of stimulus failed, we prescribe even more extreme measures of the same, inviting disaster. We have no foundation for anything but a more monumental bust, this time led by the much larger bond markets." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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