TODAY FROM AMERICA:

POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN CALIFORNIA:

1. A conversation:

H. “Am I special?”
P. “To me you’re special.”
H. “I know I am special to Pookie, but what about everyone else?”
P. “Everyone is special in his or her own way.”
H. “Yes, but am I special to Nikki, Mommy and Uncle Mask?”
P. “Well, I am sure you are.”
H. “Does that mean they will get me an x-box for my birthday?”

2. An Update:

Spring slowly floods into the foothills.

Nikki and SWAC arrived to celebrate H’s eighth birthday with Uncle Mask and I. Tsunami-like, their arrival shattered whatever daily routine we had established. Most victims of disasters hope things can be restored to the way it was once the crises is over. I suspect that is just wistful thinking. Nothing goes back to what it was.

JOEY’S NEW MYSTERY NOVEL:

ENTER THE DRAGON

Dragon’s Breath:

Brigid O’shaughnessey: “I haven’t lived a good life. I’ve been bad, worse than you could know.”

Chapter 6:

She looked back at me with a look of intense concentration that’s supposed to indicate truth follows.

“On the way over here I tried to think if there is anything more I have not told you when we met earlier today. I couldn’t think of anything except his, Mark’s, nervousness about the deal with Riley. Said it was big, really big. I don’t know much about that kind of stuff. I am just a small business owner and a part-time painter. He promised me a share.”

She went on, repeating most of the same stuff she told me earlier in the day except the paragraphs got longer and her eagerness to convince me of the truth of what she was telling me more apparent.

As she droned on, I began to feel sleepy. Whenever I felt a twinge of pain I thought about rolling a joint or asking her if she could score had some morphine . Didn’t. Took some more Tylenol instead.

Some people, especially those who read a lot of mystery novels, think that certain cops or detectives are pretty good at knowing when someone is lying. That’s bullshit. Nobody can tell when someone is lying to them, though a lot of people are convinced they can. Every peer-reviewed scientific study on whether someone can detect whether someone else is lying concludes that they cannot, even if like some cops or psychologists they are trained to detect lying. Except Secret Service officers. They seem to be able to do it. No-one knows why. I’m not a Secret Service officer or even a particularly good detective, so the best I could hope for is for her to say something contradicting something else she said. Even then, only very stupid people would say something inconsistent and not be able to explain it away when challenged. And as flakey as she may be, I don’t think Mavis is stupid. Sometimes one can catch a conflict between what someone says and something one knows or finds out later. But, that requires either a prodigious memory which I do not have or taking notes which I was not interested in doing since I was getting more and more drowsy and I still was not sure if by tomorrow I wasn’t going to chuck it all anyway and go away for a few days until everything blows over.

I asked if she ever ran into either of the Ton’s of Fun. She recalled that one night Mark, Lilly, and her rode to the SF ballet together in a limo driven by a tough looking big guy wearing a large silver ring with a square flat black stone embedded in the top. Said, Lilly told her one of her clients loaned her the limo. Mavis did not know the client’s name.

They had box-seat tickets for a performance of Copeland’s Rodeo choreographed by Simuin (even Copeland himself hated it). I asked if after the show they donned spurs and chaps back at her apartment. Again the bitch stare.

For about an hour or so we continued this chit-chat during which she finished gauzing and taping my jaw. While she was working on me, I slipped my hands around her hips and lightly grabbed her ass. She smiled a brief crooked smile and kept jabbering away. She responded to the pressure by leaning her hips closer until my nose almost touched her nipples. Felt my pants tighten considerably. I knew I was going to have to make a move before we both expired of exhaustion from beating around the bush. Instead I said, “look I am tired and sleepy. Let’s talk more tomorrow.”

She asked if I wanted her to make some dinner. Said, “no, too tired.”

She shrugged her shoulders put on her jacket and grabbed her helmet.

We walked towards the door. She said, “are you sure there’s nothing more I can do?” Answered, “no.”

Stopped, thought again, said, “Well, there is one thing. You can give me a blow job before you leave.”

The bitch stare, pupils shrinking to pin-pricks then disappearing all together.

I prepared my self for the slap hoping she would hit the side of my face away from the bandage.

Surprised. The bitch stare morphed into a broad evil smile like a time-lapse photo of a flower blossoming out of a bud. She dropped to her knees and I could feel her fiddling with my belt and zipper.

Thought, “It’s good to be a detective,” before giving it all up to the glorious oblivion of neuromuscular euphoria.

 
PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

Periodic Ruminations:

Several times in “This and that…” I have mentioned the 10,000 year subjugation of women by men. I have suggested that given the current precarious state of the world perhaps men, now that they thoroughly have screwed everything up, should tiptoe away and leave it all to woman to put back together. After all, we men already whenever screw something things up in our lives generally leave it to some women to clean up after. Of course, in that case, I suspect women often become quite pissed off.

As long as I am on the subject of pissed off women, what about this thing we call the woman’s “period?” The “Period” or similar euphemisms is that time of the month when many woman bleed profusely and feel in a lot of pain. If, as it have been described to me by a few woman whose experience is probably extreme, I try to put it terms a man might understand – it is like having your dick cut off in battle with a rusty sword. I suspect that if a man had to look forward to that once a month for most of his life, he’d be pretty out of sorts as well.

It is during this time that we men (and not a few women) believe that the woman is at a minimum irritable and at worse insane. As a result we try to tiptoe around this not quite human creäture. Or, in some ancient (and perhaps modern) cultures we tie her to a stake in something like a yurt in the woods until she comes to her senses. Or, as in my case and I am sure many other men, it allows us to dismiss anything a woman does we disagree with as an effect of her condition.

Suppose, that instead of being a period of incipient madness, that in the midst of the pain and discomfort what really happens is that a hormone is released allowing her to finally see clearly what God and man have done to her. That is what really makes her irritable and pissed off. Fortunately for us guys after the week or so of that clarity, the effect of the hormone diminishes and her mind once again becomes clouded. We then are free to continue on with our 10 millennial fraud.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. What “Occupy” is all about and what it really wants:

The Budget Act of 1974 defines tax expenditures as revenue losses attributable to provisions in federal tax law that provide special benefits to particular taxpayers or groups of taxpayers. Deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits and preferential tax rates on certain forms of income all are tax expenditures.

Note: The chart contains an anomaly that may be confusing. The top 20% receives 66% of the total tax expenditures. The top 1% receives about 40% of the top 20% tax expenditures and 24% of all Tax expenditures.

What this chart means is that the top 20% of income households receive 66% of government “welfare” payments in the form of tax expenditures not generally available to the remaining 80%. Those who “cheat” on their tax returns are “welfare cheats” in the same way as those who cheat on their food stamp allocations [except the former has a far greater impact on what the rest of us pay for than the latter]. Both take for their own use tax money we pay in to general government. Much tax expenditure goes to those who do not need it. Many lobbyists are paid a lot of money to secure increased tax expenditures for their already wealthy clients [or to prevent them from being reduced]. Very few, not so well paid lobbyists, are employed to secure increased food stamp allocations.

B. Low Effort Thinking:

The Huffington Post reported in February, a study published in the journal “Psychological Science” showed that children who score low on intelligence tests gravitate toward socially conservative political views in adulthood–perhaps because conservative ideologies stress “structure and order” that make it easier to understand a complicated world. Now there’s the new study linking conservative ideologies to “low-effort” thinking. “People endorse conservative ideology more when they have to give a first or fast response,” the study’s lead author, University of Arkansas psychologist Dr. Scott Eidelman, said in a written statement released by the university. Does the finding suggest that conservatives are lazy thinkers? “Not quite,” Dr. Eidelman told The Huffington Post in an email. “Our research shows that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism, not that political conservatives use low-effort thinking.”

For the study, a team of psychologists led by Dr. Eidelman asked people about their political viewpoints in a bar and in a laboratory setting. Bar patrons were asked about social issues before blowing into a Breathalyzer. As it turned out, the political viewpoints of patrons with high blood alcohol levels were more likely to be conservative than were those of patrons whose blood alcohol levels were low. But it wasn’t just the alcohol talking, according to the statement. When the researchers conducted similar interviews in the lab, they found that people who were asked to evaluate political ideas quickly or while distracted were more likely to express conservative viewpoints. “Keeping people from thinking too much…or just asking them to deliberate or consider information in a cursory manner can impact people’s political attitudes, and in a way that consistently promotes political conservatism,” Dr. Eidelman said in the email.

The study was published online in the journal “Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.”

The above appeared in:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/07/conservative-politics-low-effort-thinking_n_1410448.html. I have slightly changed the wording in an effort to make it more readable.

C. Finland Schools:

Finnish children don’t start school until they are 7.

They rarely take exams or do homework until they are well into their teens.

The children are not measured at all for the first six years of their education.

There is only one mandatory standardized test in Finland, taken when children are 16.

All children, clever or not, are taught in the same classrooms.

Finland spends around 30 percent less per student than the United States.

30 percent of children receive extra help during their first nine years of school.

66 percent of students go to college.

The difference between weakest and strongest students is the smallest in the World

Science classes are capped at 16 students so that they may perform practical experiments every class.

93 percent of Finns graduate from high school.

43 percent of Finnish high-school students go to vocational schools.

Elementary school students get 75 minutes of recess a day in Finnish versus an average of 27 minutes in the US.

Teachers only spend 4 hours a day in the classroom, and take 2 hours a week for “professional development”.

Finland has the same amount of teachers as New York City, but far fewer students.

The school system is 100% state funded.

All teachers in Finland must have a master’s degree, which is fully subsidized.

The national curriculum is only broad guidelines.

Teachers are selected from the top 10% of graduates.

In 2010, 6,600 applicants vied for 660 primary school training slots

The average starting salary for a Finnish teacher was $29,000 in 2008

However, high school teachers with 15 years of experience make 102 percent of what other college graduates make.

There is no merit pay for teachers

Teachers are given the same status as doctors and lawyers

In an international standardized measurement in 2001, Finnish children came top or very close to the top for science, reading and mathematics.

And despite the differences between Finland and the US, it easily beats countries with a similar demographic

Neighbor Norway, of a similar size and featuring a similar homogeneous culture, follows the same strategies as the USA and achieves similar rankings in international studies.

 
TODAY’S QUOTES:

“Republicans claim to be pro market, but they are in fact pro business.”
Robert Waldman

“The sequester, many people don’t know what it is, but it sounds stupid and cruel, so they think it’s a Republican thing.”
James Carville.

TODAY’S CHART:

Californians appear to be a happy lot. The closer one gets to Louisiana the more miserable one becomes it seems.

 

 

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

Related articles

• * Obama’s Stupendous, Spectacular, Sequestration Tour, Ch. 2 [satire] (hardnoxandfriends.wordpress.com)
• Obama chooses first woman Secret Service director: officials (Reuters) (newsdaily.com)

A small group of activists walked past “No Trespassing” signs at Martin’s Beach as sheriff’s deputies stood by. Former Bay Area Congressman Pete McCloskey was among the protesters.

“The issue is that the people of California have the right to go to a public beach. You can’t shut it off. This gate is wrong. It’s illegal,” said McCloskey.

[cbs-audio url="http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/nyc.podcast.play.it/media/d0/d0/d1/d2/dD/d7/dE/12D7E_4.MP3" size="" download="" name="City College Students Want City Hall’s Help To Fight Campus Closures, Teacher Layoffs" artist="KCBS’ Anna Duckworth Reports"]

McCloskey’s law firm, along with the Surfrider Foundation, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the property’s owner. The group claimed the lack of access violates the California Coastal Act.

Nearby resident Mike Wallace supports their effort. “I taught my kids how to surf out here years ago and I’d like to see them be able to get back and access the beach before they go off to college,” Wallace said.

Before taking his surfboard out to sea, surfer Joao DeMeceado said, “It’s a very [well] known spot, especially in the summer. Not only the families that go down there, but surfing, there’s a lot of reefs.”

While San Mateo Sheriff’s deputies monitored the protest, no arrests were made for trespassing.

Before the land changed hands in 2008, the previous owners charged a small fee for access.

Joan Gallo, the attorney representing the landowners, had not responded to KCBS’ request for comment as of Thursday afternoon. However, in an earlier interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, the attorney for the land owner doesn’t dispute the beach is public. She said the road is the issue, which the pervious owner charged a small fee to use.

The attorney said the owner has the right to set his own terms for its use, especially considering the cost of maintaining the road, providing bathrooms and the cost of liability insurance.

(Copyright 2013 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

Attorney Eric Buescher with Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy said Wednesday that a group plans to meet at 10 a.m. in support of a lawsuit filed against Martin’s Beach 1 and 2, LLC filed Tuesday.

The lawsuit claims that owners failed to obtain a coastal development permit for the new gates and restrictive signs that prevent the public from accessing Martin’s Beach Road, in direct violation of the California Coastal Act.

Located a few miles south of Half Moon Bay, Martin’s Beach is a semi-circular stretch of sandy beach surrounded by high cliffs. Prior to its sale in 2008, the area was open to the public for a small parking fee.

[worldnow id=8604604 width=480 height=360 type=video]

Led by former U.S. Rep. Pete McCloskey, Buescher, the Surfrider Foundation and surfing attorney Mark Massara, the lawsuit seeks to open the gates at Martin’s Beach, allowing vehicle access.

“Some people have walked around the gate and say it’s quite a hike to walk to the beach. A few surfers say you can walk a mile south and paddle up a mile to the water—but you’re pretty tired once you get there and you still have to get back,” Buescher said.

Five people have been arrested and cited for trespassing but the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office dropped the charges beginning in February.

“The natural resources of the state of California belong to the people of California and can’t just be available to the people who can afford to buy all the property around it. You can’t just buy something around a public resource and declare it yours,” Buescher said.

Buescher said he hopes this can be a clean and fast process that will have the beach open to surfers come late summer.

“There are three questions we have to answer: Was there a permit; did this change the intensity use of the public beach and were there structures taken up or down that required a permit,” he said.

According to publicist Lee Housekeeper, working with those who filed the lawsuit, the group plans to breach the barricade and will access the road to the sandy shores.

“Those who go over the wall do so at their own risk—power to the surfer’s people,” he said.

Calls for comment made to attorneys for Martin’s Beach, LLC, were not returned.

(Copyright 2013 by CBS San Francisco and Bay City News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

Attorneys for the Surfrider Foundation filed the lawsuit against Martin’s Beach LLC in San Mateo County Superior Court.

“This case is clear and simple,” Mark Massara, an attorney for the foundation, said in a statement. “The property owner failed to obtain legally required permits for the gates and their actions to cut off access to a beach that has been open to the public for almost 100 years.”

The suit claims the owner of Martin’s Beach is violating the California Coastal Act by blocking the only access road from Highway 1 to the shoreline, which is public.

[worldnow id=8604604 width=480 height=360 type=video]

But the question of whether the private owners have a legal obligation to provide the public with beach access is one the courts will have to decide. The site is also home to about 45 bluff-top cabins on long-term leases.

Prior to the Martin’s Beach company purchasing the land, the road had been open to the public for a fee. The previous owner had operated a concession business at the beach, and so had a financial interest in maintaining and staffing the access road.

But the new owner, who bought the 53 coastal acres for $37.5 million in 2008, closed the road after deciding it did not want to operate the concession business, said Joan Gallo, the landowners’ attorney.

The Surfrider Foundation claims the owner needed to receive permission from the California Coastal Commission before closing the road.

The closure issue gained more widespread attention after five surfers were arrested for trespassing. The criminal case was later dropped.

Gallo said her client looks forward to the courts providing clarity on who should be responsible for operating any public access.

“They closed it with the hope that the rights of all the parties could be determined, and that’s what we’re hoping for,” Gallo said. “We want the courts to decide.”

While the beach is considered public under the California Coastal Act of 1976, the courts will decide whether the owner of the private land and its access road is obligated to continue providing access.

California’s coast is littered with cases where private landowners have blocked public access to the coast.

In the most famous example, film and music mogul David Geffen battled for decades to block public access to the beach in front of his Malibu compound. In 2007 he finally changed course and a public easement was added to his property.

Nancy Cave, who handles enforcement in the region for the California Coastal Commission, said she could not comment on the lawsuit, but noted the court’s decision will be important for helping sort out the future of access to the site.

“This is an important case to us,” Cave said. “The issue of public access is an important issue under the Coastal Act.”

(Copyright 2013 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/

TODAY’S FACTOID:

2008: The US Federal Reserve in its efforts to stave off a depression during 2008s financial crisis, loaned $1.2 trillion to an assortment of US and foreign banks, an amount “more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the US for the decade through 2010.”

Interestingly, that $1.2 trillion according to Bloomberg, is “about the same amount US homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages.” Nevertheless, it’s the “Wall Street aristocracy,” as Bloomberg labels them in a bit of welcome class warfare, that got the massive bailouts.

Mama, don’t let your children grow up to be cowboys, tell them to become bankers instead.

TODAY’S NEWS FROM THAILAND:

a. Chief of Police – Musical Chairs: It seems the existing Secretary General of the National Security Council who is due to be replaced by the disgraced Chief of Police, himself superseded by an ex in-law of the fugitive ex Prime Minister of Thailand, Thaksin the Terrible, is furious at this turn of events. As well he should be since he in turn will be transferred to an “inactive position.” in the office of the new Prime Minister, who herself is the younger sister of Thaksin the Terrible. The inactive position apparently is one in which one gets paid but has nothing to do. The soon to be replaced Secretary General said that he would prefer to be transferred to the position of permanent secretary of another ministry so that he would have something to do beside coming into the office now and then to collect his pay check. Princess LuckyGirl‘s Deputy said that it would be inappropriate for the Secretary General to be transferred into an “active” position in the new government, since before he became Secretary General he was in charge of the agency responsible for putting members of the party of the new government in jail.

Members of the opposition party including Abhsit the Unready, the recently defeated Prime Minister but still head of his party, said it was unfair to hold the Secretary General’s prior position against him since he was, “Only doing his job.”

Princess LuckyGirl, upon hearing about the soon to be transferred ministers threat indicated that she would be open to meeting with him if she could spare the time from her busy schedule of running the country. She added that, in any event transfers of officials are the responsibility of the appropriate cabinet secretaries. The next day the cabinet met and transferred the disgruntled bureaucrat anyway.

It should be noted that the incoming Chief of Police has a master’s degree in criminal justice from Eastern Kentucky University in the US.

I hope this now ends this whole sordid business.

b. Red Comedians: Yoswaris Chuklom also known as red comedian Jeng Dokjic was made assistant secretary to the Interior Ministry.

I do not know what this means, but I guess everyone could use a good laugh now and then.

c. Passport follies: The United Kingdom which recently privatized its passport and visa offices world-wide no longer provides passport renewals for its citizens in Thailand and other countries.

Hooray for privatization.

d. Gambling with the story: Given the brouhaha over illegal gambling, one of the recipients of my “This and that…” posts has pointed out that during the period when the predecessor of Princess LuckyGirl‘s party was in power, before it was removed by judicial decision or coup, I do not remember which, the prime minister at the time, who was not Princess LuckyGirl‘s elder brother Thaksin the Terrible (3T) proposed legalization of gambling, (restricting the number of casino’s in BKK to five). He announced that he intends to give the Thai people their right to gamble if it is the last thing he did. Gambling was not legalized. He soon died of cancer.

Rumor has it the casino’s were to be awarded to 3T or friends of 3T or relatives or whatever.

e. Red Villages: The newspapers report that several hundred “red villages,” villages populated by “Red Shirt” members have been created in Northern Thailand.

What does this mean? Are they like new subdivisions? Why would anyone move there?

POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN THAILAND:

The afternoon Monsoon rains still drench the country flooding much of it.

During the Monsoon season, a series of low pressure areas stabilize just north of Thailand and I guess most of South Asia. The lows act on the atmosphere like lower elevation does on water. The warm wet air from the Indian ocean flows over South Asia toward the low pressure areas and drops its moisture as it rises into the mountains. Climate change models conflict as to whether we will see increased rains or movement of the stationary lows producing increasing drought. I suspect seasonal variation simply will be accentuated with more precipitation from the warmer ocean evaporation during the Monsoons and even greater heat and less rainfall during the dry season in the interior.

I continue to plan to come back to the US at the end of this month. It seems that my return through Italy and the East Coast has been cancelled, so I will fly directly from Bangkok to either LA or SF. I have no idea where I will be staying since I have not been made a party to Hayden’s schedule.

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

“Conjecture,” Vince opined. “It is all conjecture. I do not know if I was asked to return because of any perceived abilities I may have or some more nefarious reasons. I have heard both theories. And, while I admit the latter is probably more reasonable, I haven’t the slights idea what the nefarious plot could be — although there have been several bizarre alternatives seriously suggested. For example, does this all have something to do with the reason Sam took his life and his wife died in what to some is a suspicious accident? Or, does it have something to do with “Red Star” or a shadowy group referred to as “The Brethren?”

“Red Star, “interjected The Great One. “That’s the little fraud Sam and the management committee pulled on the rest of the partners, that I and others were furious about and why I tried to get the lot of them thrown out and a new committee elected, but then you came along and simply dispensed with the existing committee. A lot of us believe that you were brought aboard simply to stifle our little rebellion.”

“Do you?”

“Well, to some extent. Not in so many words or even consciously. Let’s face it Vince, you may see yourself as spokesmen for the downtrodden and talk a good game, but no one knows if you have any administrative skills whatsoever. You remind me a bit of Hamlet. You cannot act unless you are sure beyond a doubt.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. But even Hamlet once he was sure, acted decisively.”

“Yes, and everyone died. That’s what worries me.” She hesitated a moment then continued, “But, Red Star, is there more there than just stealing some profits from the other partners? There’s a rumor that the Federal Government is investigating.”

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

a. Where did that come from?

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot and then once a day it was taken and sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were “PISS POOR,” but worse than that were the really poor folk, who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot, they “DIDN’T HAVE A POT TO PISS IN” and were the lowest of the low.
The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be.

b. Department of, “I could not resist passing this on”:

It was reported last week by the Military Times that Marines are no longer allowed to fart in Afghanistan, as this is considered very offensive by the Afghan people.

For those of you interested in gaseous digestive residue, attached is one of America’s founding fathers’ take on the matter:

“Permit me then humbly to propose one of that sort for your consideration, and through you, if you approve it, for the serious Enquiry of learned Physicians, Chemists, etc. of this enlightened Age.

“It is universally well known, That in digesting our common Food, there is created or produced in the Bowels of human Creatures, a great Quantity of Wind.

“That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the Atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid Smell that accompanies it.

“That all well-bred People therefore, to avoid giving such Offence, forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.

“That so retained contrary to Nature, it not only gives frequently great present Pain, but occasions future Disease, such as habitual Cholics, Ruptures, Tympanies, &c., often destructive of the Constitution, & sometimes of Life itself.

“Were it not for the odiously Offensive smell accompanying such Escapes, polite People would probably be under no more Restraint in discharging such Wind in Company, than they are spitting, or in blowing their Noses.

“My Prize Question therefore should be, To discover some Drug wholesome and not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common Food, or Sauces, that shall render the Natural Discharges, of Wind from our Bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreeable as Perfumes.

“That this is not a chimerical Project, and altogether impossible, may appear from these Considerations. That we already have some Knowledge of Means capable of Varying that Smell. He that dines on stale Flesh, especially with much addition of Onions, shall be able to afford a Stink that no Company can tolerate; while he that has lived for some Time on Vegetables only, shall have that Breath so pure as to be insensible to the most delicate Noses; and if he can manage so as to avoid the Report, he may any where give Vent to his Griefs, unnoticed. But as there are many to whom an entire Vegetable Diet would be inconvenient, and as a little Quick-Lime thrown into a Jakes will correct the amazing Quantity of fetid air arising from the vast mass of putrid Matter contained in such Places, and render it rather pleasing to the Smell, who knows but that a little Powder of Lime (or some other thing equivalent) taken in our Food, or perhaps a Glass of Limewater drank at Dinner, may have the same Effect on the Air produced in and issuing from our Bowels? This is worth the Experiment.

“Certain it is also that we have the Power of changing by slight Means the Smell of another Discharge, that of our Water. A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreeable Odour; and a Pill of Turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets. And why should it be thought more impossible in Nature, to find Means of making a Perfume of our Wind than of our Water?

“For the Encouragement of this Enquiry (from the immortal Honour to be reasonably expected by the Inventor), let it be reasonably considered of how small Importance of Mankind, or to how small a Part of Mankind have been useful those Discoveries in Science that have heretofore made Philosophers famous. Are there twenty Men in Europe at this Day, the happier, or even the easier, for any Knowledge they have picked out of Aristotle? What comfort can the Vortices of Descartes give to a Man who has Whirlwinds in his Bowels? The Knowledge of Newton’s Mutual Attraction of the Particles of Matter, can it afford Ease to him who is racked by their mutual Repulsion, and the cruel Distensions it occasions? The Pleasure arising to a few Philosophers, from seeing, a few Times in their Life, the Threads of Light untwisted, and separated by the Newtonian Prism into seven Colours, can it be compared with the Ease and Comfort every Man living might feel seven times a Day, by discharging freely the Wind from his Bowels? Especially if it be converted into a Perfume: For the Pleasures of one Sense being little inferior to those of another, instead of pleasing the Sight he might delight the Smell of those about him, & make Numbers happy, which to a benevolent Mind must afford infinite Satisfaction. The generous Soul, who now endeavours to find out whether the Friends he entertains like best Claret or Burgundy, Champagne or Madeira, would then enquire also whether they chose Musk or Lilly, Rose or Bergamot, and provide accordingly. And surely such a Liberty of Expressing one’s Scent-iments , and pleasing one another, is of infinitely more Importance to human Happiness than that Liberty of the Press, or of abusing one another, which the English are so ready to fight & die for.

“In short, this Invention, if compleated, would be, as Bacon expresses it, bringing Philosophy home to Men’s Business and Bosoms. And I cannot but conclude, that in Comparison therewith, for universal and continual Utility, the Science of the Philosophers abovementioned, even with the Addition, Gentlemen, of your “Figure quelconque” and the Figures inscribed in it, are, all together, scarcely worth a FARThing.”

Ben Franklin, presentation to the Royal Collage.

c. What Adam Smith really said:

“The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.”
Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations Book IV, Chapter VII, Part II, p. 615]

d. Testosterone Chronicles:

“A few years of big profits from risky derivative bets drove Wall Street traders crazy from testosterone poisoning. So it’s not really alpha males who blew up the global economy, it’s just a bunch of guys who overdosed on naturally produced steroids.”
Andrew Leonard, How Testosterone Poisoning Wrecked the Economy, SALON 5/19/2009.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

Barbara Stanwyck: “We’re both rotten!”

Fred MacMurray: “Yeah – only you’re a little more rotten.”
Double Indemnity (1944)

TODAY’S CHART:

Is God punishing Texas? It’s about time.

TODAY FROM THAILAND:

A. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN THAILAND:

WINNIE and I

I walked in the blazing heat of the Bangkok sun to the health club today; heels striking the pavement heavily, shoulders hunched, head down checking the sidewalk in hopes of avoiding falling through a hole into one of those inky black and disgustingly dangerous sewers that were at one time canals. My neck jutted out parallel to the ground like that of a turtle or a chicken as I walked. Plodding along, I, as old men often do, ruminated through the parched grasses of memory. I surprised myself by finding I had become fixated on Winston Churchill.

No, not the balding, rotund, cigar smoking, alcoholic, bigot who many believe won World War II single-handedly despite the death of millions of allied soldiers and the unlimited aid of American industrial might, as well as the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of mostly non-white colonial serfs who gave up their lives at the request of the Free French generals in order to liberate a nation most of whose population had settled down happily and comfortably under the tyranny of the SS. No, not him, but Winston Churchill (of some number, I think III) a scion of an American offshoot of the legendary British family who attended Fordham College with me back in the late 1950s and early 60s.

Fordham was a Catholic, Jesuit run university located at a place called Rose Hill in the Bronx at the edge of a large Italian ghetto. Winnie, as he was called, enrolled at this second-rate Catholic university instead of ivy coated halls of Harvard or Yale to which his ancestry and wealth entitled him, because his fanatically Catholic mother insisted that he bide his time under the watchful eyes of the Jesuit order before receiving the rewards due a Churchill.

There was no question in anyones mind, least of all Winnie’s, that he was destined for great things. In addition to his name and heritage, he was clearly one of the five or six smartest students at the university. He also was tall as befitted a child of the nordic-germanic races as opposed to we much shorter celtic and mediterranean types that peopled the campus. He was blond, blue-eyed and handsome in a pretty sort of way. The only blemish on his appearance that I could recall was his blade thin nose that erupted from his face like a knife after slicing through a round of camembert. For someone who came from a race of either bulbous or beak-like probosci, Winnie’s nose simply appeared unimpressive to me. His nostrils were so narrow I wondered how he got enough air through them to survive. I half suspected that he had a bottle of compressed oxygen secreted nearby and would now and then slip out for a nip, like a Bowery denizen would nip at a bottle of Thunderbird encased in a brown paper bag.

However, what mostly set Winnie apart from the rest of us, and if you would have asked me at the time the rest of humanity, was his abiding belief that what was good for Winnie, was… well, all that really mattered. Now this did not mean that Winnie was mean or callous; no not at all. If an old woman walking in front of him on the sidewalk tripped and fell, Winnie would not hesitate to stop and help her up. And in response to the old woman’s expression of thanks, flash his broad smile as though her gratitude was his due. Of course, if the old woman tripped and fell into a puddle of mud, he would most likely walk right by. Wouldn’t anyone?

Anyway, in our senior year, many of us took the LSAT examination required for those of us planning to go on to law school. That year they introduced an additional day of exams directed at testing our general knowledge. When the results came back I scored 800 out of 800 on the general knowledge portion of the exam which was the highest in the school (Winnie was second but far behind me) and obviously no one in the State of New York had gotten higher since that was as high as the scoring system went.

Now I scored so high on this exam not because I was particularly smarter than anyone. I was not. My scores on the other two days or the exam proved this since they were barely adequate to get me into a second-rate law school. No, it was that my reading regime and obsessions with factoids gave me an advantage. That and the fact that this portion of the exam was multiple choice and I firmly believed that anyone that could not get at least 90 percent right on a multiple choice test, even if the test were in a foreign language that you did not understand, was mentally deficient.

Nevertheless, I was sort of pleased with the results. Not pleased enough to tell my mother, but pleased enough to hope some of the young women around campus would hear about it and think that I was interesting enough to date. This was the end of the 50s after all. Alas, it never happened.

As I contemplated my forlorn hope, I received a message from the Dean of Students requesting I come immediately to his office to discuss the results of the LSAT exam. Now, I do not remember how the message was delivered. This was after all before computers and mobile communication. I guess it was the usual method of communication available at the time; another student shouting at me as I walked across campus, “Hey Joe, the Dean wants to talk to you about the LSAT right away.”

So off I went with the hope of some official recognition that would intrigue the girl of my dreams.

Now, it is important to understand Jesuit management as laid down centuries ago by the order’s founder Ignatius of Loyola, a frustrated Basque ex-solder who because of an injury suffered in battle could no longer do what he knew best, kill people, decided to apply his soldierly skills on behalf of the Pope and make war on people’s minds. His management system required that the head guy (it had to be a guy) must be beloved. So his job was to say in public only things that made people happy and made them love him. His second in command had to be the prick and do all the dirty work. It was essential that the prick was deeply loathed by everyone so that the head guy looked even better by comparison.

At Fordham, as far as I knew, the second in command was the Dean of Students (actually I may have his title wrong it may have been the Dean of Discipline, but whatever).The Dean of Students was a prick.

I entered the Dean’s office. Although outside it was a bright spring afternoon the office was gloomy, curtains drawn. A small lamp on the desk provided most of the light. The room was furnished with that dark almost black wood furniture in that gothic style that Catholic religious of the time seemed to like so much. Winnie was there, sitting in a chair off to the side in an elegant upper class slouch, his knife nose pointed towards the ceiling a few feet behind the Dean’s desk. His face absent its usual slightly supercilious smile, his blue eyes blazing with annoyance or anger or something else that I could not guess at.

I took a seat before the Dean. The chair was one or those uncomfortable, tall backed, wooden chairs with twisted columns holding up a cross-piece of dark reddish-brown wood about a foot above my head. The wood slat had a lion’s head carved into it to go with the claws on the base of the chair’s legs. A similar much larger set of claws held up the Dean’s desk.

The Dean a man of average hight, with a round face and eyes that peered out at you through slits. Slits not so much like the epicanthic narrowed eyes of Asians but simply slits through which one could not see the eyes behind, only blackness. He wore a black cassock and a shawl of some sort. He leaned forward and asked in a low nearly inaudible voice, “Do you know your marks on the General Knowledge section of the LSAT exam?”

“Yes, father,” I responded.

“Who do you think you are,” he continued in that same low voice? “I know all about you. You never come to class. You do not complete your assignments. Your grades are barely even mediocre. What right to you have getting a higher mark than those students like Winston here who work so hard?”

Now, Winnie did turn in his assignments and I did not. That is so. But if truth be known, his attendance record was not all that much better than mine.

Anyway, I did not get to say anything, because with a flick of his hand the Dean dismissed me.

“Thank you, father,” I mumbled. I got up, passed Winnie who now had a broad leer on his face and I left the room.

I felt neither good nor bad, neither humiliated or angry, but only concerned about how I was going to go about meeting girls now…. After all I was barely more than a teenager, the Sixties actually did not begin in earnest until at least 1965 and no one really smoked dope except musicians. (to be continued)

NOTE: The above, I am sure you all recognize was written as entertainment. Although the events were as described, Winnie as I knew him then was far more complex and sensitive than I describe him here, as I hope so was I. The Dean of Students, however was a prick and will always be a prick.

As long as I am on the subject, why is it OK to call a man a prick but not OK to call a woman a cunt? Who decides these things anyway? I am sure that in the all girls Catholic schools of the time the nun counterpart to the Dean of Discipline (or Students or whatever) was a cunt and was so referred to as by any student that had run afoul of her.

B. NEWS STRAIGHT OR SLIGHTLY BENT:

1. Add Insult to Infamy:

The alleged escort at the center of the Secret Service scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, gave an exclusive interview to Today on NBC, describing the accused agents, among other things, as “stupid,” “idiots” and as having left “their duty behind.”

The 24-year-old Dania Londono Suarez told NBC that the Secret Service agents seemed accustomed to soliciting women, saying the three men who approached her were not shy, drinking vodka “like it was water” and as having shown off their bodies while they danced.

“I don’t know how Obama had them in his security force,” she added.

(Showing off their bodies while they danced? Don’t you think Obama is carrying this gay thing a little too far?)

2. Stars Fall from the Sky, Dewey LeBoeuf

It was of interest to me to read of the collapse of the mega law firm Dewey LeBoeuf. Dewey LeBoeuf was created out of the merger of long time Wall Street entrenched law firm Dewey Ballantine and the LeBoeuf firm (both firms included the names of a number of other attorneys in their titles as part of the compulsive ego gratification that accompanies the practice of law. Alas, those names are mostly gone from memory now; at least they are from mine.)

When I first got into the law racket about 45 years or so ago, Dewey was among the 4 or 5 most powerful law firms on earth and as such they believed their success depended upon prohibiting women, catholics, jews, black people, anyone who had not graduated from Harvard or Yale Law Schools, and a host of others from joining their partnership ranks. Anyway about 10 to 15 years ago, in addition to allowing some of those undesirables to join them as partners and having their brains beaten in commercially by those previously rejected attorneys who opened their own firms or joined those more amenable to their aspirations, like LeBoeuf, they lemming-like got carried away by the urge to merge or die that was so prevalent at that time and began looking for a match. Eventually they found LeBoeuf who was also trolling the streets.

While I sat on the management committee of Sheppard Mullin, a medium-sized California-based law firm, we were approached by both Dewey and LeBoeuf, each offering to lift up their skirts if we lift up ours. I and several members of the management committee had already decided to expand, but our preferred approach was to seek practice groups or firms with compatible practices in specific markets where we (our existing practice groups) wanted to be. I and I am sure some of the other committee members rejected the urge to merge for size and market weight that most large firms believed would lead them to untold wealth and power.

Anyway we looked into both Dewey and LeBoeuf and concluded that they were, among other things, already in decline. In Dewey’s case because, in part, the arrogance instilled by their previous prominence caused them to reject both practices and people their founders disdained and as a result life and fortune passed them by. LeBoeuf’s situation, if I remember correctly, was their thoughtless pursuit apparent business opportunities that failed to pan out. So, we rebuffed their advances.

Eventually they found each other, merged and did reasonably well at a time when anyone with a shoeshine box could do well and ultimately failed because despite their pretense of infallibility, they refused to recognize that the blind belief in their own talent is no substitute for appreciating that in general the times change us and not us them and the best we can do is adjust or hope we get lucky; and anyone can do that.

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

I previously have written here and in my blog posts, the observation that we are witnessing a basic change in the world’s economic activity, beginning first in the so-called more developed nations.

In the 1700s economic’s as we tend to think of it was based primarily on understanding trade and the incipient industrial advances contributing to its growth. This was the time Adam Smith and his followers attempted to describe what they saw. By the Nineteenth Century industrialization spawned socialism and its reaction as an attempt by the emerging self identified élite calling themselves economists to illustrate the situation as they experienced it. Being addled by their own theories, they still relied on the analysis of Smith et.al. but added “updates” to attempt to preserve the theory and hopefully more accurately describe the situation as they found it. Few if any (Marx excepted) recognized the circumstances were totally new and may have required a completely new theory, analysis and description. After all, trade was no longer the driving force, production and consumption was.

In the Twentieth Century things changed again. The central focus of the “economy” morphed from production and consumption to getting people from here to there in order to produce or consume. It could be argued that the major portion of economic activity throughout most of the century was dependent upon transportation, not as merely the means of moving goods to market but the major driver of economic activity; in effect its purpose. The economists adjusted their old theories steadfastly refusing to recognize the fundamental change of everything.*

We are now facing perhaps another basic upheaval in economic activity. Social media and mobile communications have made transportation less central to ones life. Vehicle miles per person is steadily decreasing.

As a result, economic activity based upon getting people from here to there is also contracting. To a great extent that is what is exacerbating the current economic turmoil (if not its cause). We are entering a new economic age. Once again most economists fail to recognize it.**

* Note: Between the 1960s and about 2010 some commentators have suggested that there may have been another fundamental shift; from a transportation economy to one based upon the exchange of financial instruments. It arose because there appeared not to be enough industrial and transportation projects to sop up all the money that had been created. So, gambling on itself seemed to be a reasonable way to continue choosing winners and losers. This era appears to have been born and now be dying right before our eyes. It may have been either an exceptionally short-lived shift in the world’s economic foundation or merely a transition between two generations. In my opinion it is probably the latter.

** Note: Should this most recent pattern change fail to mitigate the effects of climate change, expect the next so-called “paradigm shift” to focus on remedial actions to limit the effects on the environment from the carbon byproducts and waste produced by the industrial and transportation economies bringing with it a new economic template. Economists at that time will still try to preserve their theories and will tell you that essentially nothing has changed in their analysis. Not only will they be wrong, but they still will not be able to predict anything of any importance to anyone with any greater accuracy than the flipping of a coin.

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

On the Edge: Stories about the Creation and Early Years of California’s Monumental Coastal Protection Program.

Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Areas (ESHA)

Recently I have been involved in a series of email exchanges with Norbert, and environmental scientist Michael Vasey who is writing a paper about the genesis ESHA regulatory policy of the California Coastal Commission that has become so controversial. It has been fascinating watching their meticulous exploration through innumerable documents and interviews exploring almost 40-year-old memories to try to piece together how a concept that was originally ignored ultimately became so prominent a part of the coastal regulatory program.

It should be pointed out however, that at the time the Coastal Plan and the 1976 Coastal Legislation, environmentalism as we have come to know it was in its infancy. Novel ideas and concepts were constantly being thrown around as people struggled with how to deal with the negative environmental and social effects of development.

While preparing the Coastal Plan, the emphasis that had come down to us from previous efforts was to focus on what was uniquely coastal. After all the coastal zone was simply an area designated for special regulation not imposed elsewhere. So for all intents and purposed we tried to identify those “resources” that were essentially coastal. For example, beaches along the ocean could be considered “coastal” along with the dune systems surrounding them. A bunch of sand buried a mile or so inland under some turf generally would not considered a coastal resource. Just because something someone thought was valuable but had not relation to the coastal zone other than location and appeared other places inland would not be considered a coastal resource to be subject to the heightened regulatory regime being imposed along the coast unless one could demonstrate other things that “connected” it uniquely to the coast.

Carrying this out further, simply a natural process or flora or fauna habitat that would be impacted, but existed in abundance elsewhere outside of the coastal zone was not considered in need of unique coastal protection policies no mater how sensitive they may be, unless it could be demonstrated that there was some unique coastal value involved.

Take the buried sand, undoubtedly someone somewhere would for whatever reason want to have the Coastal Commission preserve it from alteration due to development. During the early days we, the Commission staff would require some convincing evidence that there was some unique coastal value involved and not simply something to be used to halt a development proposal.

Similarly some developments were considered dependent upon the Coast, such as ports and marinas and the like. If they were to go anywhere they had to go on the coast and so they were coastal dependent. Other developments did not have to be sited on the coast and could be accommodated inland. So where a non-coastal dependent development would impact coastal resources it could be denied. On the other hand in the case of a coastal dependent development one have to make value judgements between coastal dependent development and natural coastal resources. In most cases with coastal dependent development, at least in the Coastal Plan there was an assumption that, for a number of reasons, they would in most cases ultimately be built. So it was important that in these cases the analysis was not simply mitigation of coastal resource impacts but avoidance of impacts on other resources deemed significant as well.

It could be argued (and it was) during the development of the plan that an extractive resource located in the coastal zone was more or less coastal dependent (the Commission went through contortions in their attempt to bring flexibility into the process, even to the point of adding something called “coastal related” into the analysis).

So with reference to development of the ESHA, it could be argued that off shore oil was coastal dependent (or related) because it had to be extracted in the zone. So also were the necessary associated facilities, pipelines and the like. On the other hand, refineries did not have to be located in the coastal zone. In some cases it may have been less expensive if they were but that was not a necessary determinant. Similarly with power plants, which although at the time there was a strong economic argument for siting them in the Zone they were clearly not considered coastal dependent.

Because everyone was loath to flatly prohibit any particular class of development in the Coastal Plan and the recognition that large industrial facilities like power-plants and refineries have far greater direct and indirect impacts than say housing, the Coastal Plan evolved from identifying coastal resources and fashioning appropriate policies to protect them to developing rules dealing directly with large industrial development. The Coastal Commission staff believed that in those cases the evaluation be more comprehensive; sort of like a coastal oriented EIR. It is thus policies in the Coastal Plan dealing with large industrial projects that Norbert discovered the first glimmerings of ESHA, a concept almost devoid of coastal resource focused analytical content.

THE NAKED MOLE RAT CHRONICLES and JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

REDACTED

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

TODAY’S FACTOID:

Since John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1961, job growth under Democratic presidents has out-gained that under Republicans by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis. During that period, non-government payrolls grew by almost 42 million jobs under Democratic presidents, compared to 24 million when a Republican party member was in power.

Yes, but Bloomberg as everyone knows is a socialist tool and all these jobs went to lazy black people and illegal aliens [and now homosexuals]. As we know from respectable unsigned posts on the internet this has all been orchestrated by Communist Muslim jihadists to take away our guns and liberty and to destroy Christianity.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. What “Occupy” is all about and what it really wants:

How Wall Street works and why is has become merely a means of massively transferring wealth from the investor (capitalist) to those who control the transactions (parasites).

Hedge Funds:

According to a recent report:

Hedge fund fees are egregious by any measure. The normal 2% management fee and 20% incentive fee have resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth from clients to the hedge fund industry. According to the report pretty much all the profits earned by hedge funds in excess of the risk free rate have been consumed by fees.

The report then points out:

“Hedge funds have garnered 28% of investor profits, although treasury bills averaged 3.2% over this same period so even using their own numbers reveals that in fact fees took 64% of the returns in excess of the risk free rate. This is for the hypothetical, equally weighted portfolio begun in 1994. It also ignores netting — winning hedge funds charge an incentive fee whereas losing managers don’t offer a rebate. By treating the industry as one giant hedge fund it ignores the fact that whenever an investor holds some losing hedge funds his effective incentive fee will be higher than the typical 20% of profits.” (Simon Lack)

In another comment Lack continues: “…in aggregate all the money ever invested in hedge funds would have been better off in treasury bills…”

As far as those unlucky investors whose hedge fund investments performed worse than the hypothetical investor, fees have consumed all the profits.

The chart below shows how much of a hedge fund profits are skimmed off by the funds managers:

B. E.L. Doctorow: “Primer on Unexceptionalism.”

PHASE TWO

If you’re one of the conservative majority of a refurbished Supreme Court, rule that corporations, no less than human beings, have the right under the First Amendment to express their political point of view. To come to this judgment, do not acknowledge that corporations lack the range of feelings or values that define what it is to be human. That humans can act against their own interest, whereas corporations cannot act otherwise than in their own interest. That the corporation’s only purpose is to produce wealth, regardless of social consequences.

This decision of the court will ensure tremendous infusions of corporate money into the political process and lead to the election in national and state legislatures of majorities of de facto corporate lobbyists.
POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT:

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/
TODAY’S QUOTES:

A. Attributed to Carl Sagan:

“They laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

B. Green Bay Packers football quarterback Aaron Rogers on what he looks for in his centers and why he really likes Jeff’s butt:

“So those are the two things you look for: butt height and sweating. Jeff’s doing really well in both categories. … Low sweat ratio and solid butt height.”

C. From a submission by Dana in Stickman’s Blog. Stickman’s Blog focuses on the diseased underbelly of Pattaya, the Outskirts of Hell (Sent to me by Gary who lives in the center of it all):

“Thailand has three seasons: rainy, hot, and center-of-the-sun deathstar hot. It is the deathstar season now. Dogs are laying in the middle of the road hoping a car drives over them.”

TODAY’S CHART:

Further evidence that the age of the “Revenge of the Vagina” is upon us. It’s about time.

TODAY’S CARTOON:

When will we realize that if we do not take care of one another, no one will?

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

Pattaya (the Outskirts of Hell) taken from Gary’s window. Another reason to prefer Hell to Paradise.

Related articles

• Winnie and I: Part I (papajoesfables.wordpress.com)

2011: The cost of solar cells, the main component in standard panels, has fallen 21 percent so far this year, and the cost of solar power is now about the same as the rate utilities charge for conventional power in the sunniest parts of California,
Bloomberg Reports.

TODAY’S NEWS FROM (THAILAND) AMERICA:

a. America.

American neighborhoods with better transportation options have far more discretionary income than the average American family or those who live in the outer, “Auto-dependent” suburbs.
CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS.

An average family earning $40,000 per year can save over $4000 per year by moving into a transit oriented development. They can then use that money to pay off the debts that they incurred to the banks that persuaded them modern economics can violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics and grow forever. The bankers will be pleased with your choice.

b. Thailand:

Reports in American newspapers indicate that Thailand is considering prohibiting the tattooing of images of the Buddha on to the skin of foreigners. Apparently it will still be ok for Thai citizens to continue to adorn themselves with the sacred image.

POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN (THAILAND) CALIFORNIA:

Hayden and I spent a lovely but brief weekend with and Norbert and Stevie Dall at their home in Sacramento. Next week Hayden and SWAC are leaving for Italy to stay there about six weeks before returning to California so I will not get to visit with him again until I myself return sometime in September.

I took the Capitol Corridor Amtrak train from Sacramento to Richmond California where I transferred to BART for the remainder of my trip back to San Francisco. The Capitol Corridor has free internet connection. The last time I had taken the train along this route was about a decade ago and the rail-car I rode in was mostly deserted. Today the car was full.

The procedure yesterday was a success and now I am recuperating at Annemarie’s house.

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

Chapter 21 (continued):

Vince returned to reviewing the files taken from Sam’s secret office. He had told himself that he would familiarize himself with the contents and then destroy those files containing blackmail, illegal or embarrassing material. That was a bit of a lie. He was actually curious to see what Sam had collected. After reviewing a number of the files, he dismissed any intention he may have had of destroying them when it became apparent how useful they would be during his upcoming meetings with many of the firms clients. He also could recognize how valuable they could become in any attempts to keep certain disruptive partners in line.

At about 3am, feeling exhausted he curled up on the office sofa and fell asleep with the conflicting angels of conscience buzzing in his mind confident that the evil angel of convenience will prevail as usual. About an hour later, the annoying bells of his cell phone, chiming out some samba tune that he could almost identify, woke him. He did not recognize the number and although convinced it was a wrong number decided to answer it so as to enjoy the release of pent-up tension while he screamed at the miscreant for waking him up.

“Mr. Biondi?” said a gruff voice on the other end.

“Yeah, who the hell is this calling at this hour?”

“My name is Mooney, Deputy Sheriff Mooney of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office. Do you know a Mrs. Stephanie Coign.”

Suddenly more awake and trying to grasp what was happening Vince said, “Yes, has anything happened to her officer?”

“Well, I am here at Devil’s Slide and we have just removed a body from the wreckage of an automobile that we assume from the driver’s license we found on her that she was the driver.”

“Oh my God!”

“We also found on the body, a piece of paper containing this number along with your name.”

This announcement was followed up with a rapid series of questions about his relationship with Stephanie and when he saw her last. When, at last, Vince tried to get his own questions answered he was met with the request to appear at the office of the Sheriff as early in the morning as he could make it.

After they hug up, Vince lay back in the darkness, unable to get back to sleep while hundreds of unanswered and unanswerable questions danced through his mind along with the demons of guilt and fear. He waited for dawn. When her fat, sticky, rose-colored fingers finally crept through the blinds and caressed his face, he began to make his phone calls.
PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

a. Eponymous laws:

Archie’s law — In petrophysics, relates the in-situ electrical conductivity of sedimentary rock to its porosity and brine saturation. Named for Gus Archie (1907–1978).

Who would have thought? Good for you Gus, or is it Archie? I usually dislike people with two first names, but using Gus and Archie together I like. Mrs. Archie’s maiden name was Melinda Gus and his father’s name was Archie Archie. They originally wanted to name him Archie Gus-Archie but common sense prevailed and they settled on just Gus Archie. Good job, Mr. and Mrs. Archie!

b. Trenz Pruca’s Aphorisms, Apothegms, Epigrams and Maxims ( http:/trenzpruca.wordpress.com/):

“You must be a Republican if you believe that the earned income tax credit that benefits the lowest wage earners in the nation is an unwarranted redistribution of income, but lowering the capital gains credit on unearned investment income is not.”

c. From God’s Mouth to your ears:

“Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you a holy day, a sabbath of rest to the Lord: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death. Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day.” (Exodus 35:2)

In other words, according to God, on the sabbath, freeze your ass off in darkness or die.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”
John Locke, Chapter 5 Second Treatise of Government.

BONUS QUOTE:

“He who warned uh, the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed…”
Sarah Palin on Paul Revere’s famous ride.

In an effort to clarify her statement La Palin later explained:

“Part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there that ‘hey, you’re not going to take American arms, you are not going to beat our own well-armed persons individual private militia that we have.’”

She blamed her previous answer on the media, saying it was a “gotcha question.”

(In fact, before he could ride very far and ring anyone’s bells, Paul Revere woke up so many British soldiers that they promptly shot him for disturbing the peace. As a result, the revolution was cancelled. God save the Queen.)

I apologize, but here I must end with a quote from John Stuart Mill, a contemporary of John Locke who observed that:

“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”

A. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN THAILAND:

The heat wave continues here in Thailand. Today, however, is somewhat overcast. That could signify the coming of the rains bringing cooler air and the breaking of the drought.* Cordt has moved back to Chiang Mai and David has returned to Qatar.

SWAC has reported that Hayden is doing poorly in school and requires a tutor. I suspect that now that he has reached seven years old, the effects of his many abandonments are manifesting themselves in his personality and performance. Nevertheless, SWAC intends leave him again in two weeks. This time he will stay with Joey. She will then be sending him to spend his summer in San Diego with the man he hates while she decides where she wants to live next year. She has suggested to me that she may like to move to San Diego, as a change of pace. She has asked Joey to abandon his business in the US and move to Thailand and open a pizza shop in her bar. I have heard that he is considering it.

On a more positive note, I am pleased that Norbert’s activities documenting the events surrounding the drafting and the passage of the Coastal Act of 1976 put me back in touch with Jerry Smith. Jerry Smith for whom I worked at the time, was the California State Senator who was the principal author of that monumental piece of legislation and who successfully shepherded it through the legislature. Despite the fact that he was a freshman legislator with no seniority, he nonetheless rescued the legislation from defeat and masterfully maneuvered it through the hostile political morass that was the State Legislature. Sadly, he has been all but forgotten by those self-identified environmentalists who had little if anything to do with the process. These same environmentalists nevertheless later flocked to honor, as saviors of the coast, some of those who most tried to weaken the program.

Anyway, Jerry after serving eight years in the California Legislature, was appointed a judge in the California Court of Appeals and following retirement from the bench commenced an entirely new career as an accomplished and successful bronze sculptor. The sculptures are in bronze not Jerry. (Sculptors in marble can only chip at it while those that work in bronze pour away.)

It seems as though this has been a week for re-connecting with legislators, I knew during my time in government service. Because of my involvement with my sister’s innovative education internet site, I needed to contact Jack O’Connell, a former legislator who became California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction.

I first met Jack when, as a young man in his twenties, he was elected to the California Legislature as assemblyman from Isle Vista in Santa Barbara County. He was notable for every weekend taking a folding card table and a couple of folding chairs and setting them up in various shopping centers in his district in order to conduct constituent services directly. After a few terms in the Assembly he served in the State Senate before being elected to the post of Superintendent of Public Instruction. Jack’s enthusiasm and guilessness made working with him a pleasure. I supported him as much as I could.

To round things out, Terry Goggin, another ex California assemblyman has written from New York City where he has relocated in order to run his burgeoning restaurant business. His newest (second) restaurant in the City called Preserve24 has been designed by his son, the well known sculptor Brian Goggin. As Terry describes it:

“The design of Preserve24 is really, really good. It’s an Alice and Wonderland art installation: Argentinian inspired coffee cafe; live 24 hour bakery, cellar theater kitchen, restaurant and pub bar all rolled into 6,000sq.ft. on two levels, in the rock’in, roll ‘in lower Eastside. Its next to a 7 shows a night music venue. The design uses found objects, like 100 year old fishing skiffs; very old tenement doors in a paneled “Door Wall” ; tables made out of recycled old growth wood; and old grand pianos (as a back bar for the pub). We are carrying out in practice a green sustainable ethos, unlike hypocritical Starbucks et al.

…but the real sizzle is using the PR from the crazy design (and an ancient ice reliquary with 100,000 yr. old preserved Arctic ice)…

It will all come to a head In 2013 when the 6 tons of 9ft x 4ft ancient ice, carved from a Greenland iceberg, will come to NYC on a wooden sailing schooner (a real “Tall Ship”) through the Verrazano Straights right to the foot of Broadway. It will then be put on a horse-drawn wagon, and transported in a parade up Broadway to P24. We think it might draw some attention.”

PT Barnum would love it. I hope the food is good. I expect everyone reading this who finds himself in NY to stop into his new restaurant or into SPRIG his existing one, and write a review.

*Since that was written it has rained, cleaning the air and cooling things down a bit.…

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

Just before the end of the Nineteenth Century through their mouthpieces, neoclassical economists, the élite classes came up with the greatest coup of ideas to justify their existence since the Devine Right of Kings.

Prior to that the classical economists beginning with Adam Smith and his contemporaries, observed that all production required three things. Land, Capital, and Labor. For example take a brick factory. The building and oven needed to create the bricks are the “capital” – the owners are the capitalists. The people making the bricks is the “labor” – the people doing the actual work. The Land the factory occupies and the clay used to make the bricks is the “land” – the owners of the land are the “Rentiers”. Any money made by selling the bricks is then divided up between these three groups: the rentiers, the capitalists, and the workers.

According to Adam Smith only two of the three groups made any real contribution to the production process. The workers contributed their time. The capitalists contributed their capital, but is now used and worth less than before. The Rentiers contributed their land, but have lost nothing. Once the manufacturing of the bricks is done, they get their land back and it is still worth the same as it was before. Any income they made by renting out their land was made without work, and without risk to their assets. There is a word for someone who only takes, but doesn’t give back: a parasite. Smith and those who carried on his work used the nicer term, Rentier. This is where the phrase “economic rent” originates. It originally described a no value added landlord.

Adam Smith and his contemporary classical economists existed in a time where the noble families of medieval Europe were still the large landowners. The nobles had just turned into Rentiers. Because they owned the land, they were able to rent it out to capitalist and workers and claim a portion of their profits and wages by charging “rent”. They were able to do this without ever working. It was unearned income.

Much of the work done by economists from Adam Smith until the late Nineteenth Century was all about finding and identifying “rent-seeking.” These classical economists didn’t want to overthrow capitalism, they wanted to free it from the “rent-seeking” parasites.

Then along came the so-called “neoclassical” economists. The neoclassical economists and their élite supporters, perhaps terrorized by the growing popularity of Henry George and his theories, decided to begin treating land and capital as the same. If land is treated as capital then the concept of rent can effectively go away and those who reap what Smith referred to as “unearned income” suddenly became “Capitalists” and their unearned income became “profit.”

“Rent-seeking” is not just “ownership of the land”. It can take several shapes. Rent-seeking is any income that is unearned. An alternative definition is “profit without a corresponding cost of production”. “Economic Rent” can come from ownership of land and just “renting” it out for money. It can also come from collecting so much capital that a firm now has a monopoly and can set the price independent of supply and demand considerations, It can be from government monopoly granting, control of other “land” like our rivers, broadband spectrum, or “mineral rights” of land. It can come from control of financial assets like capital gains, dividends, and interest on loans (especially usury). It can also come from political favors from the government.

Once the neoclassicists removed the entire concept of “rentier” from economic analysis, and eventually political, conversation, it was all capitalism and capitalists in their world.

Now when some people object to the obscene profits made for example on Wall Street (e.g., derivatives) specifically that portion that is the unearned income of the rentiers, they lack the vocabulary to properly express what is happening. Instead, the mouthpieces (Lawyers, lobbyists, economists, etc.) of those making the unconscionable amount of unearned income try to make it look like those complaining are railing against capitalism itself or against businesses in general. Often, however, the criticism of the “excesses of capitalism,” are actually an objection to the parasitic rentiers that are hurting the true capitalists as much as the workers.

“Wealth creation” by debt leveraging – that is, asset-price inflation – was celebrated as a post-industrial economy, as if this were a positive and natural evolution. But in reality it is a lapse back into a rentier economy, and even into a kind of neofeudalism.

When a company has a monopoly and can charge whatever they want, that’s not being a capitalist or an entrepreneur, that’s being a “Rentier.”

When oil company’s make “windfall profits” as the price of oil goes up, that’s not profit, that’s “economic rent.”

When a drug company can keep the government from negotiating lower prices, that isn’t capitalism, that’s classic “rent-seeking” behavior.

Much of the money made on Wall Street is nothing but pure rent-seeking. Companies lobbying for tax loop holes is just more unproductive rent-seeking.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of influential economists are still neoclassical and don’t believe land and rentiers exist. They can try to deny their existence, but when the top 1% of the country make more money in one night while they are sleeping then most will make working at their job for 6 months, it’s hard to deny their existence. It’s unfortunately that our intellectual class “lost” these words and concepts from the mainstream discussion.

One could argue history is repeating itself. 200 years ago, the conservative vs. liberal mantra was that conservatives were fighting to keep the power of the nobles and large landlords intact. The liberals were the ones trying to free themselves politically and economically from their control. Today it’s the same. Conservatives are fighting to maintain the privilege of the Rentiers by pretending to defend capitalism itself. And once again, liberals are fighting to free the market from the parasitical Rentiers.

Recently the economic commentator Michael Hudson wrote:

“The classical free market economists endorsed taxes on unearned income: land rent and natural resources, monopoly rent and financial privilege. These categories of income have no counterpart in a cost of production undertaken by the rent recipient. The more that governments can shift the tax burden on to land and property, the lower housing prices will be – and the less governments will need to tax labor by income and sales taxes.

Bankers back anti-government ideology because they want to obtain all of the untaxed rental revenue as interest. So taxes that otherwise would be paid to the government will be paid to the bankers. The result – what you’re seeing today in Europe and North America – is an economic grab that is in many ways like that which gave birth to European feudalism. But this time around it is financial, not military.”

(Note: Most of this is an adaptation of a blog written by someone else with which I agree. I decided to revise it for “This and that….”)

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES, THE NAKED MOLE RAT CHRONICLES and JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

Renewed for another season.

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

TODAY’S FACTOID:

1992: the Japanese government relinquished possession of 20,000 Korean noses it had been holding on to for almost 400 years. Stored in the Okayama Nose Tomb, the pickled noses were originally brought to Japan as war trophies by samurai, paid a bounty for each nose they hacked off. Although the noses have been returned, a further 75,000 Korean ears remain–shipped over in barrels of brine and now deposited within Kyoto’s Mimizuka Ear Mound. Needless to say, the abducted appendages form a major bone, or more precisely cartilage, of contention in Japanese-Korean relations.

It gives a whole other meaning to Marc Anthony’s oration in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”

The Okayama Nose Tomb and the Mimizuka Ear Mound? Are they major tourist stops? Well, what did you do on your trip to Japan?

Perhaps Terry’s son Brian may find in it inspiration for a sculpture or a theme for a restaurant. Something called “Feet.” Wait a second, someone already tried to place a sculpture of a foot on the SF waterfront. It probably would have had better luck if they buried a bunch of feet under a mound of grass, “The SF Foot Mound.” Then across the street someone could open a restaurant called “Foot Mound Restaurant.” I am sure it has been done already, probably somewhere in Japan.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. What “Occupy” is all about and what it really wants:

1. Isn’t it time we consider what really occurs when we severely cut taxes of the rich?

2. We need to do better than this:
a. In 1970, 65 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods”. By 2007, only 44 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods”.
b. According to a recent report produced by Pew Charitable Trusts, approximately one out of every three Americans that grew up in a middle class household has slipped down the income ladder.
c. In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
d. The poorest 50 percent of all Americans now collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.
e. The number of Americans that fell into poverty (2.6 million) set a new all-time record last year and extreme poverty (6.7%) is at the highest level ever measured in the United States.
f. According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation.
g. America has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities a day over the last 10 years. During 2010 it got even worse. Last year, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day shut down in the United States.
h. Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low-income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.
i. Most Americans are scratching and clawing and doing whatever they can to make a living these days. Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.

B. Testosterone Chronicles:

In China, a 42-year-old man was reportedly killed last week during a fight over a parking space when a 41-year-old woman squeezed his testicles until he collapsed and died.

C. A high point in the annals of science:

In a recent study in Science magazine the question was asked, if you buy two items for a total of $110 and one item was $100 more than the other what was the cost of the other item.

The conclusion drawn from said study is that those who answered $10 are more intuitive people, folks who “think with their gut,” like George W. Bush and others who are reportedly “fun to have a beer with.”

Meanwhile, the $5 peeps solve their problems analytically, thinking a bit more deeply about the problem, not just jumping to conclusions.

It should be pointed out, this isn’t a problem with two answers, nor is it a Rorschach test. $5 is really the only answer, if you’re worried about answering correctly. So, instead of “intuitive” and “analytical,” the more accurate phrasing should be “right” and “horribly, stupidly wrong.”

POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT:

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/

Is Mitt Romney the Antichrist?

It should be noted the every candidate in the Republican Presidential primaries endorsed by God lost to Mitt Romney, a man who wears magical underwear and makes his dog ride on the roof of his car.

Another reason to vote for Pookie for President. He is the only candidate endorsed by God still running. Also, he does not have a dog and no one would call Pookie’s underwear magical.

VOTE FOR POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT ON THE NO PARTY PARTY PARTY TICKET IF YOU REALLY WANTS GOD’S GUY IN THE OVAL OFFICE. POOKIE TALKS TO GOD ALMOST AS OFTEN AS POOKIE TALKS TO HIMSELF.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

OK I admit it. How could I refuse to post a quote by Rutherford B. Hayes if I came across one? How many of you reading this even knew we had a President named Rutherford B. Hayes? How many of you thought he looked like this? How did he eat his oatmeal in the morning?

Hayes, the 19th President of the United States, was a Republican at the time the Party was considered the reform party and the Democratic Party the party of northern scoundrels and southern bigots.

Hayes was a reformer who began the efforts that led to civil service reform and attempted, unsuccessfully, to reconcile the divisions that had led to the American Civil War fifteen years earlier. He ardently supported civil rights laws to protect the newly freed slaves from reprisals at the hand of the defeated Confederate leadership and the Democratic Party.

His approach to the emerging conflict between labor and capital can be summed up in the following quote:

“The strikes have been put down by force; but now for the real remedy. Can’t something [be] done by education of strikers, by judicious control of capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish the evil? The railroad strikers, as a rule, are good men, sober, intelligent, and industrious.”

He was elected President in a disputed election in which he actually garnered fewer electoral votes than his opponent, but, in a political compromise, was awarded those electoral votes that had been challenged. The so called “compromise” ended reconstruction by removing the remaining Union military administration from the South. This enabled the Democratic Party to gain absolute political control in the South for almost 100 years until, as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the segregationist Democrats abandoned the party for the Republican Party, occupying that Party’s right-wing until it was able to drive the reformers and moderates who controlled the Party out and establish the long sought victory for the South in the Civil War that they could not win on the battlefield.

In his later life Hayes continued his reformist activities writing in his diary:

“In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many. It is not yet time to debate about the remedy. The previous question is as to the danger—the evil. Let the people be fully informed and convinced as to the evil. Let them earnestly seek the remedy and it will be found. Fully to know the evil is the first step towards reaching its eradication. Henry George is strong when he portrays the rottenness of the present system. We are, to say the least, not yet ready for his remedy. We may reach and remove the difficulty by changes in the laws regulating corporations, descents of property, wills, trusts, taxation, and a host of other important interests, not omitting lands and other property.”

Making Rutherford B. Hayes a presumptive precursor of the “Occupy” movement.

TODAY’S CHART:

Another chart that I have no idea what it means. I assume they are trying to show that Democrats are good for business. Maybe, but no one believes the Dow is an indication of either a nations economic health or business growth. It measures what a bunch of people with too much money think about 30 overly large businesses will do sometime in the future. For most of us economic health means a well paying job. On the other hand, private sector jobs actually have increased under the last few Democratic Presidents while they have fallen during the Republican administration. Ironically, public sector jobs have increased during the antigovernment Republican administrations while they have fallen under the Democrats until now 100% of the job losses since the lesser depression began in 2007 can be blamed on the reduction of the number of governmental employees that occurred under Democratic administrations.)\

TODAY’S CARTOON:

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

Is there anything happier than a child with a gun?

A. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN CALIFORNIA:

So, last night, at bed time, I continued telling the series of stories to Hayden that I had begun about two years ago. The stories concerned the adventures of Danny (Hayden’s alter ego) and his trusty pony Acorn (who Hayden now and then rides whenever we visit Bill and Naida’s ranch).

Danny was resting at an oasis in the desert following his besting of “The Old Man Under the Mountain.” With him were his two friends; “The Black Knight,” a gorilla (Whose alter ego cuddly toy shares my bed) who is “The World’s Strongest Knight” and rides a white horse with brown spots like a cow and is called appropriately “White-brownie or Brown-whitey,” and; “The White Knight Who Used to be ‘The Old Man who Dressed Like a Beggar’ and was The Worlds Most Powerful Magician,” until Danny, in the throne room of the Green Castle, defeated him in a duel of magic aided by “The Monster Who Lives in the Closet and Who Now Lives in Acorn’s Saddlebags,” and turned him into a mouse. In order for Danny and The Black Knight to escape from the dungeon of the “Old Man Under the Mountain,” Danny, again with the aid of “The Monster who lives in the Closet but Now Lives in Acorn’s Saddlebags” turned him from a mouse into a young handsome human except with less magical power so that his full name now became, “The White Knight Who Used to be an Old Man Dressed Like a Beggar and the Worlds Most Powerful Magician Until he was Turned into a Mouse and Then into A Young Man who was Not a so Powerful Magician.” The White Knight rode a black horse named, “Blackie.”

They had just finished dinner and were drinking their milk while staring into the campfire when a troop of musicians and actors who were camping nearby came by and offered to put on a performance for the famous Knights.

The knights agreed that they would enjoy that and the chief musician tuned up his Lute and began his song by introducing his main protagonist a skinny boy of indeterminate age named “Heimlich.” Heimlich lived in a not so great but good enough castle in a dreary country somewhere that was always foggy. Heimlich was sad because his father, who was called Pruneberry the King of the Castle (and, if truth be known, King of little else) had just died. In addition almost before the body became cold or whatever it is body’s become after its inhabitant dies, his mother Natasha Dewlap married Heimlich’s uncle, Julius Caesar (we both thought that was a very funny name).

Anyway, Heimlich and his friend (who strangely did not have a name but it could just as well been something as ridiculous and Guildenstern or Rosencrantz or even Miracle Max) one evening, for some unknown reason, decided to go the cemetery to visit the site where Pruneberry was buried. Along the way they came upon a pile of bones and a skull. Heimlich thought the skull reminded him of “Mortimer” his old kindergarten teacher.

Anyway Heimlich’s friend decided to return home after they discovered the bones because he was a sensible lad and was creeped out by the bones and Heimlich’s weirdness. Heimlich went on by himself.

When Heimlich arrived at the gravesite, a Ghost popped out and said, “Heimlich I am your father, Pruneberry and I was killed by Natasha Dewlap and Julius Caesar who put poison up my nose while I was asleep.”

At this point Hayden asked me “How can a ghost speak after he died?”

“A keen observation,” I acknowledged. “That is why Heimlich did not believe him and went back home.”

The next morning, as coincidence and fairy tales have it, a group of traveling actors came by the castle and asked Heimlich if he would like to have them perform a play. Maybe, Heimlich, thought, if they perform Pruneberry’s death like the Ghost told it in front of Natasha Dewlap and Julius Caesar one of them would be reminded and say something like, “Say that looks familiar,” and Heimlich would then know what the Ghost said perhaps could have been true.

And so, the traveling players put on the show and at just the right moment, Julius Caesar turned to Natasha Dewlap and said, “Say Natty does this look familiar to you?” At which point Heimlich became furious and drove Natasha Dewlap and Julius Caesar out of the castle where they were forced to live in a tent and sell apples and rutabagas to passers-by.

Hayden then asked me, “What are rutabagas?” I said, “I did not know.”

Heimlich, thereafter spent every day alone in the little castle in that dismal country with his furry white cat named “Snowy,” looking out of his window and down upon Natasha Dewlap and Julius Caesar trying to sell their apples and rutabaga to passers-by, except for once a year when the troop of actors came by and they had a party. The End.

I then told Hayden that the actors would perform another tale that I would tell him about tomorrow (I was already working on a children’s version of King Lear). But, Hayden asked me if Danny was ever going to go back home to visit his mom who lived in the cottage by the “Deep Dark Wood,” before setting out on another adventure. He thought it would be a good idea if he did.

I told him that Danny told the musicians that he would not listen to the story because he needed to get a good nights sleep so that tomorrow he would be well rested for his trip back through the “Deep Dark Wood” to visit his mom.

B. 2012 Predictions:

In December I made a bunch of predictions for 2012 that I sent to a few of you. Now with the first quarter of the year almost compete, I thought I would see how those conjectures are doing. In my previous post, I discussed my predictions regarding the American Presidential election, Control of Congress, US Economy and Europe. Here are a few more:

Stocks:

December prediction: Do not buy Bank stocks: Here’s a little overview of the year-to-date performance of some of the major global banking stocks on December 29, 2011, before the opening bell: BofA:-60.38%; Citi: -44.76%; Goldman Sachs: -46.41%; JP Morgan: -23.03%;Morgan Stanley:-45.24%; RBS: -50%; Barclay’s: -34.32%; Lloyds: -63.02%; UBS: -29.33%; Deutsche Bank:-28,55%; Crédit Agricole: -56.04%;BNP Paribas: -37.67%; Société Générale: -59.57%

These are just some of the Too Big To Fail institutions. And while your governments have enough faith in them — or so they want you to believe — to prop them up with trillions of dollars of your money, investors are fleeing them, even if they can expect them to be propped up further.

That doesn’t just say something about confidence in the individual banks, it shouts loud and clear from the rooftops on confidence in the banking system as a whole, and indeed on governments’ ability to continue bailing them out. In other words: bailouts don’t build confidence, they are taken as a sign that trouble’s on the way. There is little evidence they will reverse this trend in the short to medium term.

In fact, as a small investor, avoid stocks altogether.

March update: Despite general bull market over past few months, prediction remains the same for Bank stocks. Also, continuing volatility of the market still makes it a scary place for small investors. The recent bull market advance will continue in fits and starts through the summer campaign season as the administration tries to quiet any market turmoil. Thereafter all bets are off.

Medical Insurance Industry:

December prediction: By mid year the large private insurance companies will determine whether or not they can expect to escape the profit-to-care ratio caps in Obamacare (the only part of it that matters to them). If not (and I predict that neither Romney nor Obama will substantially change that) the trickle of companies fleeing the industry today will become a flood. Unlike some prognosticators, I do not believe it will ultimately lead to a single payer system. Instead, real insurance people, rather than financiers, will take over much smaller companies and live within the profit constraints, enjoying limited competition and spending their lobby dollars strengthening their market control position and slowly chipping away at the profit constraints.

March update: Prediction correct except the Investor owned companies have already begun preparing to depart. In the long run expect the industry to be dominated mutual policy owner controlled companies or various non profits alongside the government organized options provided for under Obamacare.

Campaign contributions:

December prediction: The loss of campaign contributions from insurance companies hysteria about Obamacare could be a disaster for the Republican Party reducing a major campaign donation source. It will force them to rely even more on their other major sources, the natural resource industries, a much reduced financial services industry and the military industries. The associated parasite industry (economists, lawyers, lobbyists, consultants, think tanks) dependent on their largess will also shrink further diminishing the Party’s coffers as they, following a brief desperate period of trying to salvage their gravy train, come to their senses and put their money into finding new sources of revenue in which to ply their doleful trades.

March update: Prediction wrong. New sources, represented by super-pac’s have more than replaced any loss. However, the suggestion that the Republican financial base is shrinking in terms of number of interest groups remains valid.

Super Bowl:

December prediction: Patriots v Saints. The Saints defeat the Packers then overcome the Niners in the NFC championship game and go on to beat the Patriots in a surprisingly low scoring game, 28-24.

March update: Actual,Patriots v Giants, Giants win an even lower scoring game 21-17.

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

The following is a rough draft of a portion of my impressionistic observations accumulated during my involvement in coastal matters. I would appreciate any feed back you may think appropriate since I will probably publish it in a blog or two.

On the Edge: Stories about the Creation and Early Years of California’s Monumental Coastal Protection Program.

The 1976 California Coastal Program in the Legislature: Sheep in wolf’s clothing or the art of the dealing.

In early 1976 the California State Senate, Resources Committee rejected SB 1579 containing the most controversial portion of the California Coastal Program*, the proposed regulatory regime intended to govern development in California’s 1500 mile long Coastal Zone.

Following that defeat the environmental leaders intimately involved in the legislation (Including John Zierold, lobbyist for the powerful Sierra Club) settled upon a minor piece of legislation, authored by a little known freshman Senator, Jerry Smith a Democrat from pro-environment suburban Santa Clara County, that had already passed through the State Senate in which to resuscitate the coastal protection legislative efforts (SB 1277).

SB 1577 had failed in the State Senate primarily because of the opposition of several liberal Democratic Senators including David Roberti, a powerful Democratic State Senator from Los Angeles. Their public rational included their fear that regulation of the coastline would cause escalating land costs creating an enclave for the rich and freezing out the poor and middle class from living and enjoying the coast. In fact, their position depended to a great extent on the fierce opposition to coastal regulation by the building trades unions, strong campaign contributors to the Democratic Party.

Roberti had demanded additional protections for low and moderate housing within the Coastal Zone as his price for voting for the bill. Several of the leaders of citizen groups that supported Coastal Protection legislation, but who also believed that the legislation was deficient in this regard, worked with members of the Coastal commission’s Senior Staff to prepare the requisite amendments which were then given to Roberti. He offered the amendments in committee and Beilenson accepted them. Roberti voted against the bill anyway sending it down to defeat.

Interestingly, Peter Douglas, a consultant to the assembly Natural Resources Committee angrily opposed the amendments, insisting “social issues don’t belong in environmental legislation.” Mel Lane the Chairman of the Coastal Commission echoed this opinion and furiously accused one of the citizen leaders of, “Killing my Coastal Act.”

A few months previously, I had left my position as Chief Counsel to the Coastal Commission to join Smith. I became Chief Consultant to the Select Committee on Land Use Management Organizations, created by the Senate Rules Committee at Smith’s request in order to enhance his environmental credentials. Also with my appointment, Smith hoped to improve his chances to play a significant role in the Coastal Program legislative process that would otherwise be denied him because of his lack of seniority.

Almost a year prior, the California Coastal Commission adopted the California Coastal Plan completing a three-year process begun by a 1972 citizen passed initiative called “Proposition 20″ that set up the Coastal Commissions in order to create a plan to govern development of California’s 1500 mile coastline. Following the adoption of the Plan several members of the senior staff were concerned that most of the Coastal Commissioners believed their job was done and now the future of Coastal Protection was solely in the hands of the California State Legislature. Those concerned staff believed, however, that such a hands-off approach would inevitably lead to the defeat or emasculation of the Plan in the hurly-burley of power politics in which he with the most money at risk often prevails. Most of the senior staff were experienced enough to recognize that complex and controversial matters such as the Coastal Program, in the legislative context, tended to be dealt with as a series of broad compromises and tradeoffs among those with the greatest economic interests at stake. The hands off attitude of the Commissioners, they believed, would leave the program to which they had dedicated three years of their lives without a knowledgable advocate in the private negotiations where most legislative activity gets done.

In addition, the staff recognized that the only legislative staff member in Sacramento that one could point to as having an interest in the passage of coastal protection legislation was a man who appeared to them to be so limited in knowledge and competence that he rarely was entrusted with much beyond observing and reporting on the Commission’s activities.

During the three-year coastal planning process, the much of staffs experience with this legislative aide amounted to little more than receiving periodic warnings from him of political catastrophe should the staff actually attempted to protect a resource that offended one or another of the capitol’s more aggressive legislators. In addition, the staff had the clear impression that his goal was to eliminate most of what was in the plan and replace it with what he called the “coastal essence,” that reminded most of them more of a noxious odor than a regulatory program. It had been said that Peter Douglas (the same person who would later so vociferously oppose the inclusion of social issues into coastal protection legislation) had never met a political objection so small for which he would not be willing to surrender someone else’s interests.

To make matters worse, the Chairman of the Commission, its Executive Director and Chief Planner as well as the aforementioned Douglas favored a simple bill that would continue the Commission as it was with watered down authority and jurisdictional reach containing vague references to the Coastal Plan that the public had labored to fashion trough innumerable hearings over the previous three years.

As a result, these members of the Commission Staff along with those community based so-called citizen advocates who also had devoted much of their lives during the past three years to developing the program, decided it was necessary that they somehow become directly involved in the legislative process, not simply as cheerleaders but as active participants defending their own interests in the Plan. These activists were a diverse lot including the Coastal coordinator of the establishment Sierra Club, Joe Edmiston, a group of teenagers from the bay area energized by the encouragement to participate in Commission business as well as many others some of whose activities on behalf of local community, social justice and environmental concerns eventually led to distinguished careers in politics, finance, government and business.

We evolved over time a few basic overriding strategies and precepts upon which we would move from the planning and administrative process of the Coastal Commission to the legislative wars. Among these precepts were:

1. The need to have our own model legislation that reflected the Plan precisely, so that all would know not only the specific provisions that interested them, but everything else and how it all fit together. In other words these mostly novice citizen lobbyists would become, not simply interested supporters appearing at hearings with signs and slogans, but participants pushing their own particular interests as well as their common ideals. They would flood the halls of the Capitol and be as knowledgeable in the process and the specifics of the legislation as any of the legislators, legislative staff or their opponents and often more so.

2. An informal rapid communications among those involved, rapidly apprising them of everything that could affect the process was created. The informal network among the activists that already existed and had existed for a while formed its basis. The Commission staff increased their direct participation and often kept the rest informed of fast changing events.

3. The placement of a senior member of the staff in a position in the State Capitol that allowed that person to take an active and daily role in the negotiations and control the drafting of any amendments to the bill.

As for the model legislation, I persuaded the executive director to allocate funding to a husband and wife lawyer team to draft a prototype bill. The staff instructed them to include as much as possible of each and every provision in the Coastal Plan. Bill Boyd, a member of the Commissions senior staff, was chosen to work with them to assure the final product met our goals. Although the resulting draft effectively reflected the provisions contained in the governance element of the Coastal Plan that I had written, the Executive Director and Chief Planner had managed to eliminate the substantive policies elements and replace him with vague references to the Coastal Plan document. A meeting among the environmentalists and the Executive Director to discuss the draft was met with the strong objection, by Joe Edmiston and others to the absence of the Plan’s substantive policies, and resulted in the inclusion of what would ultimately become Chapter 3 in the final bill.

Meanwhile I had agreed to leave the Commission staff and try to find a way to work into the legislative process. I was the likely choice since, I wanted to do something different, approached political conflict as war by other means, and most of the staff welcomed relief from my mercurial and often overbearing management style. So I joined Smith.

As it turned out the Democratic leadership and John Zierold chose the liberal warhorse, but diffident State Senator, Anthony Beilenson. He and his able, but inexperienced assistant, Gail Osherenko, consented essentially to insert the staffs model bill into the proposed legislation.

Meanwhile, Smith, Zierold and I agreed to work a minor piece of environmental legislation through the Senate so that, should the main legislation fail, it could be resuscitated in the other house thereby keeping it alive. This was not an unusual parliamentary ploy for major legislation. It allowed a bill defeated in a committee of one house to be revived, moved through the more obliging chamber and brought back to the entire membership of the original chamber for “concurrence” in the other chambers amendments thereby avoiding the recalcitrant committee and hopefully increasing the legislation’s chances for passage.

The defeated legislation was amended into Smith’s bill that had already passed the Senate and was awaiting action in the appropriate Assembly committees.

The first thing everyone involved agreed was that the legislation required a principal co-author who was a powerful member of the Assembly. Assemblyman Charles (Charlie) Warren was chosen. Smith and I, who had hoped the Speaker of the Assembly McCarthy would agree to be co-author were not overly enthusiastic about this. Warren, although a powerful member of the Assembly was considered by most as somewhat of a loose-cannon with touches of megalomania. His aide on coastal matters was the afore-mentioned Peter Douglas. Smith, members of the senior staff as well as many within the environmental community and I feared that Warren and Douglas would attempt to wrest control of the bill and weaken it. Fortunately, both were also generally considered a bit lazy.

As the previous bill moved through the Senate prior to its defeat, Osherenko and I attempted to neutralize Douglas by assigning him the job of editing the amendments that Osherenko or I had negotiated. Again Bill Boyd was selected to work with him to make sure that what we had won in negotiations was not lost in the drafting.

The first order of business was for the two principal authors to meet and agree on the provisions of the bill that would appear in the first committee. A day or two before the meeting Smith and I met to develop our negotiating strategy for that meeting. We had learned that the main thrust of Warren and Douglas’ expected demands was directed to what most of us considered would be emasculation of the legislation by among other things:

1. removing all jurisdiction regarding Coastal Agriculture,

2. eliminating the substantive policies and replacing them with the “coastal essence,” and

3. reversing some of the hard-won agreements with several interest groups, such as the League of California Cities, that had in response to the agreement removed their opposition to the legislation releasing several legislators to vote for it.

(Also see note below)

Now before proceeding, some comments on a few of the negotiation tactics we had developed and implemented to move the bill along. They were:

1. To negotiate with each interest group opposed (Both public and private), separately and technically. (Almost every significant interest group had a staff member assigned to the technical negotiations. For example, the ever-present and indefatigable Bill Boyd was assigned to the League of California Cities.)

2. To try to focus the discussions on procedural issues and away from substantive ones.

3. To use the complexity of the bill and our superior knowledge to our advantage.

Smith and I discussed our approach to the coming negotiations with Warren and Douglas. In regard to the Coastal Agricultural policies and jurisdiction, the coastal zone boundary had been proposed to be extended many, many miles inland of the Coastal Zone that had been created by the initiative. Within that zone, essentially Commission planning and not permit authority would apply. We had always considered this to be one of the most vulnerable provisions in the Plan. Nevertheless we were committed to obtaining a substantial offset were we to be forced to surrender it. Now Smith and I were presented with two supposed environmentalists, Warren and Douglas who, despite the fact that throughout the movement of the predecessor legislation through the Senate the Coastal Agriculture provisions resisted attack, insisted on its unilateral surrender in a private meeting.

Smith and I assumed that this demand was a function of Warren’s ego. He was the author of another piece of legislation whose goal was to protect California’s Agriculture from urban encroachment. We were prepared to argue that, the provision in the proposed Coastal Act had not been under severe attack by any group with which we could obtain a global settlement, and that passage of protection of coastal agriculture could help and not hinder his legislation, especially should his bill include subsuming Coastal Zone agriculture into the less severe state-wide agriculture protection legislation (And we suggested this option to him at our meeting). Nevertheless we assumed that Warren wanted no competition for the title of “Protector of California’s Agriculture,” and that would be the price of his support.

As for the settlements we had eked out with the League of Cities and others, that Douglas apparently was so opposed to, what we had negotiated, in keeping with our strategy, was in our opinion essentially procedural relief and not a substantive weakening of the legislation. Also, although we tended to be dubious about the standard economic model that said that development would move from areas with more stringent regulation to those areas less restrictive, if it were correct, movement of development pressure from undeveloped areas into already developed ones was a staple of environmental planning. Douglas appeared not to understand this.

Nevertheless, we were confident the accommodation would be proposed again in the first committee hearing, so agreeing with Douglas at the meeting had no adverse consequences that we could see.

As for the substantive provisions of the proposed legislation we would stand firm for their retention as payment for the other two concessions.

That evening, I prepared on a yellow legal tablet a list of inconsequential demands, should the discussion require additional give and take, but we considered them all give-a-ways should the meeting go as we expected.

In fact they did go as suspected. Douglas came in with an extensive memorandum justifying their positions. After presenting his conclusions, he and his memorandum were mostly ignored. Warren seemed to lose interest in prolonging the discussions once we agreed to his demands on the agriculture policies and appeared to be eager to move things along and avoid arguing over some the technical proposals in Douglas memo. Following our feigned unhappy acceptance or the demand to eliminate the League of Cities accommodation, he rapidly agreed, over Douglas’ objection, to retain the substantive policies and the meeting rapidly ended. Douglas was requested to memorialize the results of the meeting which he did with his usual penchant for self-aggrandizement.

The legislation containing the agreed upon amendments then went into the hearing process before the two Assembly Committees where, as we intended, the League of Cities amendment was re-proposed and Smith accepted it without objection. Thereafter the most significant changes to the legislation occurred during a marathon 13 hour hearing in front of the Assembly Committee on Ways and Means. At this hearing, the official maps delineating the significantly expanded Coastal Zone were displayed along the back wall of the Committee room. Having declined an opportunity to review the maps in detail, the Committee directed those with issues regarding the jurisdictional maps meet with Zierold and the ever-present Bill Boyd and try to work them out. This resulted in an orgy or fluttering maps and flying magic markers and Zierold and Boyd negotiated almost every inch of the jurisdictional line during those 13 hours. In keeping with our standard practice Boyd’s superior knowledge and our approach of giving nothing without getting something in return, the final maps had for the most part surrendered some inland urban areas in return for massive extension of jurisdiction in some rural counties. When offered an opportunity to review the final maps the Committee demurred, and so the legislation passed out of the Committee and through the Assembly. No significant changes occurred until after being brought back to the Senate floor it languished until the last moment intervention of then Governor Jerry Brown.

Note: Douglas while working as consultant to the assembly natural resources committee during this period shepherded hearings in that committee that emasculated the Commissions authority over developments conducted by other agencies of the State explaining that it was politically expedient to do so in one fell swoop and not continue the agency by agency negotiations the Commission staff was already conducting with promising results. For example Osherenko and I in negotiations with the Energy Commission represented by Richard Maullin an extremely disagreeable man whose arrogance far exceeded his abilities, we agreed to give up the Commissions permit by permit, in return for the ability of the Commission to designate areas where power plants could not be sited. In my opinion a sensible compromise given the complexity of power plant permitting addresses many issues outside of the Coastal Commission’s preview. This was however not Douglas position. He held the curious position that one can best save the coast by surrendering it. In any event due to the hard work of Boyd and other Commission staff members we were able to retain most of the accommodations that we had previously negotiated.

* The California Coastal Program had three parts:

1. Funding for the State’s parks and wildlife agencies to purchase those lands where no development should occur. This was accomplished by the legislature placing a bond act on the ballot, that was passed by the people, to fund this acquisitions.

2. The creation of a coastal environmental restoration and public access agency called the Coastal Conservancy.

3. Passage of the California Coastal Act containing the policies by which future development in the coastal zone would be regulated.

THE NAKED MOLE RAT CHRONICLES AND JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

Removed for rehabilitation.

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/ Robertson

TODAY’S FACTOID:

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

What “Occupy” is all about and what it really wants:

POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT:

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/

1. “The Six Steps” that Fox employs to create national controversies:

STEP 1: Conservative activists introduce the lie.
STEP 2: Fox News devotes massive coverage to the story.
STEP 3: Fox attacks other outlets for ignoring the controversy.
STEP 4: Mainstream outlets begin reporting on the story.
STEP 5: Media critics, pundits praise Fox News’s coverage.
STEP 6: The story falls apart once the damage has been done.
From the Fox Effect.David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt.

2. Pat Robertson says oral sex is ok:

In an appearance on the 700 Club, Pat Robertson claimed oral sex is a sin only if the people engaging in it feel it is so.

Good for you Pat. Now does this also apply to contraception and voting for Democrats?

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“There are two sustainable ways to make money in finance: find people with risks that need to be carried and match them with people with unused risk-bearing capacity, or find people with such risks and match them with people who are clueless but who have money. Are we sure that most of the growth in finance stems from a rising share of financial professionals who undertake the former rather than the latter?”
Brad De Long

TODAY’S CHART:

TODAY’S CARTOON:

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

A. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN CALIFORNIA:

There is some good news. It seems that Bill Geyer may survive. According to Naida he is breathing on his own again and is conscious but will still need some dialysis for a while. Unfortunately he is unable to walk and will need to remain in a skilled nursing facility.

As for me, I feel more and more inadequate in dealing with a growing seven-year-old. I never believed I had much of an aptitude for parenting.

On the other hand the warm weather during the last few days has brought out the spring colors in the neighborhood.

B. 2012 Predictions:

In December I made a bunch of predictions for 2012 that I sent to a few of you. Now with the first quarter of the year almost compete, I thought I would see how those conjectures are doing. In my previous post, I discussed my predictions regarding the American Presidential election and control of Congress. Here are a few more:

1. US Economy:

December prediction: Experiences a mild rebound. Among other reasons because:

a. As money floods into US treasuries on account of the perceived lack of “safe” alternatives, it alleviates pressure to deal immediately with public and private debt allowing for some minor stimulus actions by the administration, such as;
b. encouraging an escalation of inflation both “natural” and government induced, and;
c. there may be a slight temporary improvement in trade balance.

The economic upturn will reverse by years end (but not in time to effect the presidential race) and the nation should sink into another recession, because:
a. the European crises will get worse and the US administration no longer has a political reason to prop it up ,
b. the value of the dollar will rise eliminating any balance of trade benefits and
c. inflation will surpass deficits as the focus of Republican wrath.

March update: None. The mild upturn the nation currently is experiencing has been stronger that expected. No reason to alter downturn prediction has appeared.

2. Europe:

December prediction: The area’s financial system will limp along until about early February due to money flooding into the banking sector from the UCB and others that staves off immediate collapse. The collapse nevertheless occurs but in relatively slow motion as the technocrats, who created the problem in the first place and are now in almost absolute charge, begin to realize their error and start to act. There, however, is no reason to believe it will not be too little and too late. American intervention contributes to slowing the collapse. Nevertheless, the European financial system and economy eventually collapses. As evidence of this Gordon T. Long, in a report called Collateral Contagion, lifts a hitherto little known part of the veil:

“There are approximately $55 trillion of banking assets in the EU. This compares to only $13 trillion in the US. Bank assets in the EU are 4 times as large as in the US.
In the US, debt held by the bank is smaller because retail deposits are a primary source of funds. EU banks use wholesale lending and, as a consequence, the debt held by banks is close to 80% versus less than 20% by US banks.
Wholesale bank lending in the EU approximates $30 trillion versus only $3 trillion in the US, a 10 X differential.
Wholesale lending is fundamentally borrowing from money market funds and other very short-term, unsecured instruments. The banks borrow short and lend long. It all works until short-term money gets scarce or expensive.
Both have occurred in the EU and this recently placed Dexia into bankruptcy, forcing it to be taken over by the Belgian and French governments. The unsecured bond market fundamentally closed in the EU in Q3 2011, as fears mounted that an EU solution was not forthcoming.
Assuming $30 trillion of loans is spread over three years, EU banks have a requirement for $800 billion a month of rollover financing for wholesale lending outstanding.”

March update: No change. Prediction remains spot on. The Greek bailout is no bailout at all, only an attempt to slow the financial debacle, while newly imposed stimulus policies (imposed by the very people who delayed them in the first place) are given time to work on the general economy. The effectiveness of the intervention may force me to alter my prediction.

(to be continued)

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

My most recent discussion of my observations of events during legislative deliberations on the Coastal Act are undergoing final edits.

THE NAKED MOLE RAT CHRONICLES and JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

Site renovation.

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLEs:
See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

TODAY’S FACTOID:

2012:

First ever actual photograph of atoms vibrating within a molecule.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

What “Occupy” is all about and what it really wants:

POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT:

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/

Pookie’s platform includes a minimum of $600 million over the next 4 years in budgetary savings by immediately ending the following welfare programs:

1. Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies.

There appears to be no conceivable impact on the nation’s oil and gas supply by removing these subsidies. Estimated Savings over next 4 years: $80 billion.

2. Deferment of Taxes on Income of US controlled Corporations Abroad.

This subsidy seems to have little public benefit and only encourages offshoring of American jobs. Estimated Savings over next 4 years: $200 billion.

3. Accelerated Depreciation on Equipment:

This is most often used by companies to avoid taxation entirely. It should only be allowed (as it was originally) as part of temporary stimulus legislation to encourage companies to purchase equipment during recessions. Estimated Savings over next 4 years: $140 billion.

4. Deduction for Domestic Manufacturing:

This deduction is simply a direct subsidy to companies. It is welfare pure and simple and has no place in the tax code. Estimated Savings over next 4 years: $75 billion.

5. LIFO (Last in First Out) Accounting:

This is simply a method to hide true profits. Estimated Savings over next 4 years: $25 billion

6. Agribusiness Welfare:

Another unnecessary welfare program. Estimated Savings over next 4 years: $25 billion.

7. Allow Government to Negotiate Prices for Medicare:

A direct subsidy to providers. Estimated Savings over next 4 years: $75 billion.

8. Annual tax break for drug companies direct to consumer advertising:

Why should we pay for drug company marketing to us? Estimated savings over next 4 years: $20 billion.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“If you have two guys on stage and one guy says ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”
Roger Ailes President of Fox News (1988)

TODAY’S CARTOON:

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

Odds and ends:

(Yesterday was one of the two free days in my new calendar during which one can do whatever they want. I hope you enjoyed yourself.)

The day before yesterday was Valentine’s Day. I trust it all worked out for you.

It rained as I wrote this, so I spent the day in my room and worked a bit. I have now completed the entries of “This and that…” from January through March 2010 into my blog of the same name. They can be viewed at “This and that….”

A few days ago my grandson Aaron cooked dinner. He barbecued several different kind of meat. It was quite good. He was proud of himself.

Here is a photograph of the Villa in Umbria that we are considering renting for the family vacation during spring of 2013. What do you think? It is located a few miles from a little village with the quaint name of, Bastardo. The town grew around an inn and stabling station in the 17th or 18th centuries, and was once known as Osteria del Bastardo, or “Bastard’s Inn.” For some reason the village’s residents are reputed to be quite proud of that name.

News from Thailand:

As I mentioned in a previous post, notwithstanding capturing a muslim terrorist and finding thousands of tons of explosives in BKK, the Thai government furiously condemned the US travel advisory to her citizens traveling in Thailand. The Thai’s steadfastly maintained that there is no evidence of terrorist activity aimed at tourists in the country.

Yesterday in BKK, an Iranian man carrying hand grenades tried to flag down a taxi following the detonation of explosives in the man’s lodging, leaving him injured and bloody. The Taxi driver refused, the Iranian threw a hand grenade at him which bounced off the car exploded and blew off the throwers legs.

Darwin is at work again.

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

In my last post I mentioned my current infatuation with the stand up comic appearing on late night cable TV named Louis (not the Fat Louis but the bald one with a fringe of red hair). I thought it would be amusing to some of you especially those lacking the pleasure of late night US cable TV if I relate one of the episodes.

It seems Louis had gotten a job appearing in the lounge of the Trump casino in Atlantic City. His act consisted primarily in warning the customers who tire of his act and walk out, not to gamble and lose their money in the casino, insulting “The Trump” and telling his audience to fuck off. Later the casino manager read him its policies prohibiting such behavior and insisted he agree to avoid it in the future or be fired. He refused and resigned.

That evening he attended the performance of the ancient (she must be approaching 100 years old by now), widow humped, marble faced comedienne, Joan Rivers, headlining in the casino night club. He went backstage after the performance to tell her how much he enjoyed her show. She invited him to “hang out.” They went to her suite in the casino hotel for drinks and to talk. When Joan learned that he had quit his job, she went off on a riff about how people in their business did not quit and went on at length about her own career ending with the question, “Do you know how many blow-jobs I had to give to get where I am?” Finally in response to the crone’s panegyrics about their profession, he became overcome with passion and tried to jump her aged bones. She resists him, arguing that she is old enough to be his great-grandmother. She later, however, relents and leads him off to the bedroom warning him not to tell her daughter because, “She still believes her mom is a virgin,” and informing him that she is up for anything but, “sado.”

Could Seinfeld top that?

_________________________
Now I owe everyone an apology. Louis who goes by the moniker Louis C. K. is more well-known than I thought. He just won the Grammy for “Best Comedy Album” beating out Weird Al Yankovic (who may be outrageous but also is definitely not funny). Obviously living in the jungles of Thailand has severely limited my exposure to modern American culture.

Apparently Louis recently self published a new album on the internet and made $500,000. He rewarded each person who paid him five dollars to download the album with the following personal message:

“Hi. This is LOuie. It seriously is me. Im even going to leave the O stuipdly capatalized because who would pay an intern to do that?? Okay so you bought the thing with my fat face on it and you clicked the button that said i could email you. And i know that now you are thinking “aw shit. Why’d i let this guy into my life this way?” [sic].

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

The first meeting of the California State Coastal Commission.

The meeting was to be held in Southern California. Despite living in the State for almost three years, I had never been to Los Angeles, or for that matter south of Big Sur, so I looked forward to the trip almost as much as to the meeting.

Joe Bodovitz and I flew on PSA. As we passed over the LA basin, I looked out of the window and saw something puzzling. I could see the grid streets running off into the horizon and the freeways, but diagonally crossing the northernmost section of the basin from the ocean almost to the mountains was something large and grey, like a giant freeway with no cars.

“What is that?” I asked Joe.

“The Los Angeles River,” he replied.

I was stunned. Coming from the Northeast where the rivers were broad, even the smallest brooks had water running through them as well as vegetation littering their banks until they disappeared under some urban detritus, a cement river was beyond imagination. I sat back and thought, perhaps things were the same back east, but the great northeastern forest hid the ravages of human occupation like polite conversation masked the violence of normal economic pillage. Here, I thought, nothing was hidden, rape was out in the open. No one needed to hide behind a veneer of civilization or the abstractions of financial paper. I thought it was cool.

I do not remember the conduct of the meeting too much except that whenever a new agenda item began, Joe would inquire of me in a whisper to tell him what it was about. As I whispered back, something wonderful occurred. I could hear my words come out of Joes mouth literally as I spoke them, but transformed into things of elegance and beauty. I was stunned. There are many talents abroad in the world, but this I thought was transcendental. To be able to instantly transform bureaucratic dross into poetry, to me ranked right up there with creating sublime music from pieces of thin over-varnished maple, cat gut and horsehair.

The Commissioners themselves were pretty much as one would expect representatives of the establishment would be. A basically relatively self-satisfied lot with almost no particular axes to grind other than to be cognizant of and responsive to the wishes of their appointing authorities and otherwise act in a public-spirited, but not too spirited, manner. Except for Jeff Frautschy, a scientist from Scripps Institute that seemed to have almost a monopoly on those making a living from studying coastal processes and teaching them to those hoping to also achieve tenure at the Institute, who I always suspected saw himself as the guardian of that monopoly. Ellen Stern Harris was another Commissioner who slightly varied from the norm. As far as I could tell at the time, she seemed to be a wealthy matron from LA’s West Side who occupied herself by playing at politics and pursuing whatever causes were dear to her heart, in this case the coastal environment. She represented that species of upper middle class cause oriented women that were beginning to transform the Democratic Party.

The unquestioned leader of the Commission was Mel Lane, publisher of Sunset Magazine, the quintessential California magazine for those hoping to acquire enough money to make their homes and gardens pretty enough to photograph and to vacation at elegant pseudo-rustic resorts like the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. (to be continued)

THE NAKED MOLE RAT CHRONICLES:

1. Chronicles:

The soldiers nosed about waiting for word from the Queen on the creatures request. The healer moved closer, rubbed her body against the creature’s, nosed it to make it more comfortable and then moved a short way off.

“What is your name,” Gladys IV asked gruffly. Gladys IV was one of the larger females and one of the leading contenders to replace their aging Queen once she dies of grows too feeble to reproduce. She was also the captain of the Queen’s Own Guard.

“Gorys XIV,” he whispered.

By now every member of Barrow Burrow sensed the alien smell of the intruder and all wondered if this marked the beginning of an attack by a marauding clan looking to take over the tunnels.

The soldiers cautiously had surrounded Gorys to inhibit either his escape or his movement deeper into the burrow. Other soldiers had cautiously nipped in and out of the breach checking for predators or to see whether Gorys’ had come alone or was accompanied by a band of marauders.

Workers had begun squeezing into this stretch of tunnel, climbing over or crawling under the others as they began to go about their business of closing the breech.

Gladys IV discerned the tremor and the subtle eddies of tunnel breezes indicating someone rushing through the tunnel towards them, isolating them from all the other breezes, tremors and smells that surrounded her. She recognized the distinctive odor of Glabtorix II the Queens eldest consort and recognized how agitated the Queen must be to risk him rather than one of the other workers.

Glabtorix II squeezed by the mass of seething soldiers and workers and without a glance at Gladys IV said to Gorys, “What do you want?”

“The Queen, the Queen, danger, I will only speak with the Queen,” Gory’s wheezed.

Glabtorix II stared for a moment, scratched the ground to inform the Queen, than waited a moment more and said.

“Bring it along then. Carefully. Gladys, take your cohort back to guard the Queen. Others will transport it.”

2.Heterocephalus G awards: Awarded to those who most contribute to paving the way for the rise of The Naked Mole Rat.

To Calvin Breisner, creator of the Cornwall Alliance and a self-declared “expert” adviser on environmental maters to conservative and right-wing religious organizations for opposing the new animated film, “The Lorax” about a tiny creature created by “Dr. Seuss” who “speaks for the trees” and fights environmental degradation. According to Breisner:

“What you’ve got there is the mixing of taxpayer dollars into the promotion of a clear ideology that has a particular religious flavor to it,” the Cornwall Alliance spokesman concludes. “And frankly, I think that this is a violation of the separation of church and state.”

Way to go Cal.

JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

RED STAR: Chapter, Vince gets a surprise (continued).

Light is not the fastest thing in the universe. It is the operation of the mind when faced with the conflict between ones rational mind and emotions in situations like that now faced by Vince. Often in these cases the pressure is so great both ones mind and emotions shut down as they did with Vince at the restaurant earlier in the evening. In the moment between realizing what it was that he saw and Isabella’s almost imperceptible shrug and lowering of her eyes in preparation to bending down to retrieve her discarded pajama bottoms, he experienced something comparable to the Lincoln-Douglas debates over his soul. His militant liberalism went to war with his long suppressed adolescent fears; the strident demands of childhood with the social mores of adulthood while some bizarre chivalric ideals lay ready to ambush all to assuage his overwhelming panic.

Before she could get beyond whispering, “I expected as much,” he had crossed over to her, wrapped his arms around her shoulder and said, “I wanted you from the moment I saw you come into my office. An now, I have you and a little bit more.”

He prayed she could not hear the screams of the disintegrating pieces of his psyche.

The next morning he awoke in her bed. She was gone but a tray containing hot coffee and a bagel with lox and cream cheese lay on the table. He guessed Lina must have just brought it in. He did not move but let his mind wander over the images of the most amazing, frightening and disturbing night of his life.

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

TODAY’S FACTOID:

19th Century:

Some late 19th-century authorities and physicians believed very sincerely that any woman who was interested in having a man perform oral sex on her was a sadist, and any man who complied was dangerously passive and submissive. Performing oral sex on women, they believed, was a “gateway drug” that led inevitably to ever more depraved acts of submission, and could possibly drag men all the way down to what they saw as the bottom of the heap, making them into the kind of men who provided oral sex to other men.

20th Century:

Though men and women have engaged in various forms of non-intercourse sexual activity since time immemorial, the idea that there was a necessary opening act to sexual intercourse called “foreplay” is something we owe to Sigmund Freud and a handful of other psychologists and medical types around the turn of the 20th century.

Today:

Never mind the question of whether there’s such a thing as distinctively “gay genes” or “gay brains”; we don’t even know if there’s such a thing as straight ones. Physical and biomedical science have yet to define or even confirm the empirical existence of heterosexuality… no one’s ever even tried.

This means that scientific research being conducted on the question of what makes people gay is being done without a properly characterized control to compare with. That’s bad science.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

1. What “Occupy” is all about and what it really wants:

The wealthiest Americans have collected the bulk of the past three decades’ income gains. The share of national income of the richest 1% more than doubled between 1980 and 2008: from 8% to 18%. The richest 1% now makes an average US$1.3 million of after-tax income (compared to US$17,700 for the poorest 20% of US citizens). During the same time, the top marginal income tax rate dropped from 70% in 1981 to 35% in 2010. This is not only perceived as unfair and a harbinger of social unrest but may have exacerbated the effects of those perceptions and fears by diminishing the potential for sustained growth as shown in the following chart:

2. The real reason why local governments often have to raise taxes or revenue or go bankrupt (Hint, it is not from spending on social programs, education or public security):

The first generation of suburbia was built on savings and investment, but the second was built and maintained using tons of borrowed money – we are now in the third cycle.

(The above chart applies to countries also. What we build and pay for with debt [whether public or private] generally has not included accounting for replacement costs or operation and maintenance beyond the infrastructure’s estimated life cycle, which as a rule is less than the payback period on the bonds used to build it in the first place. This would be like borrowing for your weeks food agreeing to pay it back in installments over two weeks, then borrowing the following weeks food on the same terms hoping that somehow the nourishment can be converted into increased earnings. The syndrome compulsive gamblers suffer resembles this.)

“POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT”

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/

“President Obama is for income equality. That’s socialism. It’s worse yet, it’s Marxism.”
– Des Moines Register, December 20, 2011

TODAY’S QUOTES:

1. “The Intuit shall inherit the earth.”
Peter Grennel

2. “There is no ‘Tree of Life,’ life more resembles a cancerous tuber.”
Collaboration with PG.

3. “The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors.”
Adam Smith “Wealth of Nations”

4. “Spinoza was the first to argue that the Bible is not literally the word of God but rather a work of human literature; that “true religion” has nothing to do with theology, liturgical ceremonies, or sectarian dogma but consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor; and that ecclesiastic authorities should have no role whatsoever in the governance of a modern state.”
–Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise

TODAY’S CHART:

TODAY’S CARTOON:

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPHS:

1.

2.

A. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN SAN FRANCISCO:

I begun to search the City for quiet cafe’s that offer free wi-fi connection, located two; Mama’s in the Excelsior district on Mission Street and; Cinqe Terre on Van Ness near Pine. Both are old style coffee houses, slightly run down and thankfully lacking the insistent Bohemianism of similar places or the efficient spanking industrialism of SB and its wannabes. Mama’s claims some connection to the arts and three or for evenings a month offers poetry readings and the like, while during the day it caters to a few latino locals who periodically drop in. Cinqe Terre, on the other hand, is owned by an Italian immigrant and offers a number of vaguely italian sandwiches and a few deserts imported from Italy.

My evening television fare at Jason’s house had been broadened from the usual diet of reality shows and movies with WWII sized body counts, to include something called Louis to which I am becoming addicted. Louis is a stand up comic who headlines at a basement comedy club in NY’s Greenwich Village. His claim to fame is that his brand of stand-up is even less funny than Jerry Seinfeld’s. It fact it is relentlessly unfunny. He produces short videos of his adventures for cable TV (sort of more interesting, amusing and visual version of “This and that…”) which are also unfunny but almost rise to poignant. It is sort of what we used to call humor (like the humor that used to appear in New Yorker magazine which was unfunny too).

My ex daughter-in-law and I went to dinner at my sister and her husband’s house in the Berkley Hills in order to discuss our planned family trip to Italy next spring. My sister, who works on education initiatives for a high-tech company described some of the innovations in social media being developed. Several posts ago, I mentioned the potential economic effects of our inevitable move from a physically mobile society to an electronically mobile one. What she described seemed likely to take us a long way closer. All in all we spent a pleasant evening, mostly discussing family history and swapping those stories one or another of us had not heard before and many that we had.

The day before yesterday, I moved from my son Jason’s apartment to my daughter-in-law’s home where I have use of the bedroom during her and her husband’s one week jaunt to Paris and then on to Venice to experience Carnavale and frozen body parts. Attending Carnavale being one of those things I imagine Anne envisions as an early start on her bucket list.

Today, I walked along Cortland Street the main drag of the slowly gentrifying Bernal Hights neighborhood to have lunch at the local overpriced sandwich shop. Along the way I purchased a discounted copy of Jonathan Franzen’s semi-autobiographical work “The Discomfort Zone”(2006) and began reading it as I wolfed down a hot pastrami sandwich and washed it down with a glass of ginger lemonade. Franzen is one of that new breed of writers (like Bolano) that believes modern fiction is essentially the author’s memoir.

Like most modern fiction deemed “serious” ever since the 1950s, it deals with resigned acceptance of alienation. That is why I stopped reading serious fiction in favor of genre, like mysteries, science fiction and fantasy. I hate reading about resigned acceptance of alienation. To me alienation should be approached with a sense of the absurdity of the mental derangement that so often prompts it or with pure fury at the injustice that may have engendered it.

Anyway, he does come up with a few quotes worth repeating. As you know I am obsessed with collecting quotes. Sort of like Don Neuwirth who used to carry a notebook everywhere with him in which he copied things he heard or read that appealed to him; much like collecting stamps. I, on the other hand, always feel an unstoppable compulsion to move those quotes immediately from my possession and, welcome or not, into the consciousness of others.

In writing about his flight from his childhood home in St. Louis close to the nations geographic and demographic center to its fringes on its coasts Franzen observes:

“…so the country as a whole has fled the center economically, ending up in a system in which the wealthiest one percent of the population takes in sixteen percent of total income [up from eight percent in 1975]. This is a great time to be an American CEO, a tough time to be the CEO’s lowest paid worker. A great time to be Wal-Mart, a tough time to be in Wal-Mart’s way, a great time to be an incumbent extremist, a tough time to be a moderate challenger. Fabulous to be a defense contractor, shitty to be a reservist, excellent to have tenure at Princeton, grueling to be an adjunct at Queens College; outstanding to manage a pension fund, lousy to rely on one; better than ever to be bestselling, harder than ever to be mid-list; phenomenal to win a Texas Hold ‘Em tournament, a drag to be a video-poker addict.”

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

On the Edge: Stories about the Creation and Early Years of California’s Monumental Coastal Protection Program.

Off to join the Crusade (continued).

Now the question Bodovitz addressed to me could be interpreted in two ways; was I an accomplished writer or was I literate. Choosing the later so as not to begin the relationship with a flat-out lie, I responded, “Quite well actually.”

Two days later I found myself sitting in one of the empty and not quite fully constructed offices, drafting the Commission’s interim regulations, agenda for its initial meeting and appeal forms. I had been hired as a graduate legal assistant, a classification that fell outside the normal civil service hiring procedures and for which I qualified by having spent at least two years in law school.

I no longer recall if the first appeals of projects approved by the regional commissions set up by the initiative were heard at the initial State Commission meeting or at a later one. I will assume that it was later because I cannot see how it could have been the first meeting since we had not adopted the interim regulations containing appeal procedures yet. Also, although I drafted the appeal form, I do not recall involvement in development of the coastal development permit application forms and so will assume they had been developed by the regional commission staff.

My theory of writing regulations was based upon the reality that since everyone games whatever they perceive limits their objectives anyway, simplicity and directness were best. It later became obvious to me that most entities, public or private, adopt procedures and regulations primarily to benefit the staff that administers them. That is, to use the regulations to shield them from making specific difficult decisions or to design them to reduce workload responsibilities (e.g., research).

The initial regulations were only few pages long and directed at how to simply get the project application into the Commissions hands, basic time lines and the few special rules for the conduct of hearings required by the governing law and not included in Robert’s Rules of Order.

There also had been no forms drafted yet for appeals of approval of those claiming to be exempt from the Commissions jurisdiction. I tried to keep them to one page or two, limiting, in the case of appeals, the information required to basic items, such as the identity of the appellant and the project, trusting the regional commissions file to provide the starting point for any staff analysis. In other words I wanted to make it as easy as possible to get the things into our hot hands. I did not want things going away because someone, applicant or concerned citizen believed the process appeared to be too daunting. To me this approach was not just an exercise in governmental simplification and responsiveness but was also a means of control.

As so, we began, as did I and moved inevitably toward the first meeting of the State Commission.

THE NAKED MOLE RAT CHRONICLES:

1. Chronicles:

To the citizen’s of Barrow Burrow, perception of their world differed substantially from that of those species that relied upon the dictatorship of sight; on unobstructed straight line transmission of information through lenticular organizers into the neural apparatus governing the essential awareness necessary for the survival of most living things. Those living in Barrow Burrow and those in other burrows “saw” instead, a web of impressions unaffected by those mere physical impediments that obstruct one’s line of sight; much like those Polynesians “saw” the islands beyond the horizon.

Everyone in Barrow Burrow, “saw” almost everything, the rushing of the soldiers through the tunnels, the workers already digging cross tunnels so that the breached area could be cordoned off and filled without interruption to the burrow network, and the creature lying there barely moving.

Arriving at the breech, the first soldier nosed toward the intruder sniffing and poking it.

“Help me to your queen it pleaded weakly. I have a message from the northern burrow runs. You are in danger.”

2.Heterocephalus G awards: Awarded to those who most contribute to paving the way for the rise of The Naked Mole Rat.

To Rick Santorum for having said on the Rush Limbaugh Show, on June 8, 2011:

“There’s a variety of factors that contribute to the earth warming and cooling, and to me this is an opportunity for the left to create — it’s a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm.”

JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

RED STAR: Chapter, Vince gets a surprise (continued).

Offended at her rejection, Vince blurted out, “What don’t I understand? The weird little war, you and Russell have me involved in?”

“No, not that, although you involved yourself. It’s just… our relationship… you do not understand,” she said her eyes though maintaining the implacable level almost expressionless gaze seemed to soften along with her voice.

The hormonal, intellectual and emotional tripartite war that fogs rational sense compelled him to persist in his assault. “What do you mean,” his voice rising? “This body-guard thing, is that it? Another man, maybe? Whats going on?”

She stood for a moment her face tightened, than softened as if she were debating with herself and reached a decision. She turned, put down the drinks, walked to the dimmer switch on the wall, turned down the lights to what Vince interpreted as a romantic glow and returned to stand, expressionless a few feet away from him.

He started to move toward her, stopped as she held out her hand palm out vertical to the ground.

Without taking her eyes off of his she removed her robe and let it slip to the ground. She slowly, mechanically unbuttoned her pajama top and dropped that to the ground also.

He could see her almost too perfect breasts partly shadowed in the diminished light.

Not moving her head or her eyes, she loosened her pajama bottoms allowing them to fall and lie bunched at her feet.

Vince had been virtually mesmerized by her stare. He now removed his eyes from hers and allowed them to begin their descent taking in her body. He was hard as he passed his gaze over her breast and nipples. He could feel his breathing quicken as he continued down, then stopped, froze. His breath stopped, the blood rushed away and he shrunk. There was something else.

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

TODAY’S FACTOIDS:

2012: February.

CHEERS to February! For the shortest month, it sure packs a lot of goodies in it. Highlights: More daylight, Super Bowl Sunday (Patriots by 3. Hundred.), Waitangi Day in New Zealand, Heritage Day in Canada, Valentine’s Day, Cordova Ice Worm Day, Mardi Gras, blessed comic relief at the CPAC convention, George & Abe’s awesome mattress sale, Black History Month, Charles Dickens Day, the Oscars, and tomorrow is Groundhog Day. Plus there’s only one Republican debate this month. And best of all, if you make it through the first 28 days you get the 29th FREE! Now that’s what I call FAB-uary!

–From Bill in Portland Maine.

13th Century AD:

Rabbits first introduced into Ireland.

1969-2009 wage decline:

According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-snyder-economic-collapse-2012-1#ixzz1lGGTZuaJ

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

What “Occupy” is all about and what it really wants:

1. You may not like paying taxes, but shouldn’t those with the greatest share of income and wealth pay their fair share.

2. This is not change we should live with:

The United States has the fourth-highest inequality level in the OECD, after Chile, Mexico and Turkey. Inequality among working-age people has risen steadily since 1980, in total by 25%. In 2008, the average income of the top 10% of Americans was 114 000 USD, nearly 15 times higher than that of the bottom 10%, who had an average income of 7 800 USD. This is up from 12 to 1 in the mid 1990s, and 10 to 1 in the mid 1980s.

“POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT”

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/

And so it continues:

The Conservative Political Action Conference at which all the major Republican presidential contenders will speak, as well and prominent Republican members of Congress is co-sponsored by several organizations including “Youth for Western Civilization” whose founder, Marcus Epstein, was arrested and pled guilty to a hate crime after karate chopping a black woman on a street while calling her a “nigger,” and who is reputed to have strong ties to European Neo-Fascist organizations (according to People for the American Way).

TODAY’S QUOTE:

Brain Candy:

<

“There are two types of Republicans: millionaires and suckers.”

(Phil T Duck)

“Because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”
Terry Pratchett

“There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”
–Leonard Cohen

“By evening’s end, they had melted into an indistinguishable mass of privatizing, tax-cutting opponents of Sharia law. “
–NYT on 2nd Republican debate

“If corporations are people, then I want to see some birth certificates and talk to their parents.”
(Onomastic)

“Newt’s not a conservative. It’s just that conservatives assume that someone so mean and hateful has to be one of their true believers and not just an awful person.”
(Inland)

“Got Social Security? Thank a Democrat! “
(Fury)

“Dear Congressman West: Check your watch — it’s been 15 minutes.”
(here4tehbeer)

“On the Internet, nobody knows if you’re a dog… but everybody knows if you’re a jackass.”
(stevemb)

TODAY’S CHART:

TODAY’S CARTOON:

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

My mom at 94 in Mendocino taken by my sister. When after posing mom and taking the picture, my sister showed her the resulting photograph and inquired if she liked it, our mom responded, “My sandwich got cold.”

On the subject of moms, this was sent to me by Phillip:

POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN CALIFORNIA:

During the train ride from Sacramento to San Francisco, I continued to work on my comments to the draft Seismic Safety Commission report. Once I realized that the consultants failed to review existing California disaster recovery programs to determine if the state already offered post event recovery assistance to business, I began to do the research myself.

I spent the night at my son Jason’s apartment. It had been my granddaughter Amanda’s birthday a few days ago and I had brought her some presents and was rewarded with a big hug.

The next day, I had lunch with Peter in a deep dish Chicago style pizza place that had just opened in Noe Valley. Later we watched the first half of the Superbowl, at first in the bar in which years ago I was a partner (perhaps my only investment that ever made money) and later a few doors away where we watched the game and listened to the Sunday Live Jazz performance featuring Pete Voukavich. For some reason at about half time, I began feeling exhausted so I returned to Jason’s apartment to rest and watch the rest of the game. The NY Giants won in the last few minutes as they seem to have done in each of their previous six games.

In the evenings, I spend much of my time being introduced to the puzzling wonders of reality television, including scenes of crazed cooks attempting to make the bizarre tasty; tattooed men and skinny girls in what appears to be moderately insane and dangerous activities including the gastronomic pleasure of swallowing things like live cockroaches and; moronic bearded men usually from the Southeast portion of the US (including Texas) killing anything that moves usually, but not necessarily, with a shotgun and then cooking (or not) and eating it. There appears to be a direct connection in the American psyche between violence and food with at best a brief side-trip into sex and wealth.

In between these bouts of visual lunacy and mayhem, Jason and I talk. For the first time in our lives we tried to avoid the father-son communication barriers. We told each other things we had never shared before. He mentioned how devastated, as an eight year old, he was when we learned of Jeanne’s death. “I wanted her to be my mother,” he said and began to cry. He recalled how brave and kind she was. He told about how difficult it was to be sent to an all black school and having to fight and defeat the schools biggest bullies to survive. And much much more I never knew. He recounted some of the things he had done as a child that enraged me at the time and admitted they were intentional. For what reason? To get my attention? A cry of loneliness and desperation perhaps?

At night lying in bed, I thought about how much I have missed out on; how much the tensions between fathers and sons drain out of both lives.

Today, it rained slightly. Perhaps this means that winter is finally beginning. In the Bay area, winter is usually marked by almost daily drizzles beginning in about October and ending at the end of March or so. This year like much of the rest of the world we are experiencing a year without winter.

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

Off to join the crusade.

I rarely ever apply for anything. I assume that I will be turned down and am unwilling to endure the self loathing that follows. I did not apply for either college or law school but rather showed up in the dean’s office the day before registration and talked my way into one of unfilled slots.

So I went directly to some State office that managed the civil service exam process and asked them what I had to do to get hired by the Coastal Commission. They told me that I did not qualify even for an interview since the application criteria limited employment to experienced “planners” only. They explained that they were looking for landscape architects or urban planners.

Now at that time I knew very little about planners of any kind. I guess they must have existed in NY but I could not recall ever meeting one and assumed it was something California-ish. Now, a landscape planner or architect I surmised had something to do with flowers and trees in parks, sort of what “the Olmsted” did. An urban planner, that was something else again. I, of course, was aware of those who had the authority and political power to tear down large areas of major cities in order to impose their esthetic, military or dynastic objectives on the community. People like Pope Sixtus insisting he and the other worthy Romans of the Baroque Age have unobstructed views of monuments of their choosing up and down the central city’s thoroughfares; or, Baron Haussmann executing Napoleon III’s obsession with grandeur; or even L’enfant’s proposal for the development of the vacant land designated to become the nations capital. All had the power, will and national wealth behind them to do what they will, but what did that have to do about stopping some motel developer from peeing on John’s garden of stunted trees and flesh eating plants?

I was pretty annoyed, not only at being rejected, something I had learned to expect, but also because I could not even get an interview to talk my way in. It appeared to me to be quite silly to so restrict who gets hired. It seemed destined to have little to do about preserving the coast or the environment and more to do about producing a coffee table book about it. And, certainly almost nothing to do with protecting the “Jughandle Creek Ecological Staircase” from ruin.

So the day the Commission was slated to commence operations, (I think they were to begin on March 1, 1973, or February, I do not remember which) I found myself standing in front of the building in which their new offices were located preparing myself to make my pitch.

At that time San Francisco’s main thoroughfare, Market Street, was torn up to construct the tunnels that would carry the new regional transit rail line (BART) through the City as well as several of the City’s trolley lines in hope that, by removing most public transportation from the main thoroughfare servicing the commercial hub of the City and adding some landscaping along the sidewalk, the street would somehow evolve into the Champs Elysees of California; a dream that was destined to fail, lacking the will, power, unlimited funding or imagination necessary.

The area in front of the California Coastal Commission (as the new governmental entity created by the initiative to carry out its objectives was called) had been torn up as part of the beautification portion of the Market Street renovation. Sickly looking Sycamores, not all that much larger than John’s pygmies and certainly no more attractive, stood forlornly in their burlap root sacks every 30 feet or so waiting to be buried in the unforgiving soil beneath the holes in the sidewalk opened to receive them.

This area of the City at that time could best be described as downtrodden commercial. The building itself was a small nondescript two story office building whose previous tenant had fallen on the dreaded hard times. The Commission’s offices were located on the second floor.

As I pushed through the door and entered the office, I observed that the tenant improvements were far from complete. The walls of the future individual offices were just metal stripping still awaiting sheet-rock. The occupants were clearly visible through the spaces.

There were just three people working there at that time. In one office sat an older gentleman whose name I no longer remember and who I eventually learned had been a naval officer and also had worked in state government and supposedly knew a lot about the ins and outs of the movement of paper and forms among the various governmental entities upon which, whatever governmental effectiveness one expected of an agency, stands or falls. A tall, rather imposing and efficient looking middle aged woman (I have forgotten her name also), who told me she was the private secretary to the Executive Director. She had relocated with him from his previous position with an agency that earlier had been created to do in the Bay of San Francisco things similar to what the initiative proposed along California’s coast.

Through the walls I could see the third person, the Executive Director himself, Joe Bodovitz, a man I, at that time, knew nothing about other than his name as revealed in a name plate sitting in its holder on the secretary’s desk. His office was tiny and irregular. He had black framed glasses, was slender, wore a striped white shirt and a yellow tie.

I walked into his office and decided to get right to it and I said something like:

“The personnel people tell me that it will take about a month or so to get any of your permanent employees hired. You have to begin meetings and promulgating regulations before they show up. You and your secretary alone will have a hard time doing that. I used to be a practicing attorney in New York, perhaps I can help until then.”

Then he did something that surprised me, but which I learned later was a common habit of his, he grabbed the bottom of his tie and began running it through his fingers. After a moment or so he inquired, “Can you write?”
(to be continued)

THE NAKED MOLE RAT CHRONICLES:

1. Chronicles:

To those working in the tunnels nearby it was no more than a slight lightening of the comforting gloom followed by the tremors of the earth giving way and something living falling and heavily striking the tunnel floor soon followed by the stifling wisps of oxygen rich air and the stench of an alien presence. As the tremors reverberated through the burrow, all work ceased as each citizen stopped what they were doing and turned towards the source of the tremors that they each felt climb out of the burrow walls, through the hairs of the sensitive down covering their bodies. All chatter ceased.

Like the Polynesian navigators of another time lying silently at the bottom of their dugout canoes, eyes closed, feeling the subtle shifts of the oceans swells until a picture emerged in their minds of islands and reefs far beyond the horizon, each resident of the burrow sensed the scene playing out in the far off tunnel. Then the chatter began again, now centered on the event and the burrow’s reaction. This was followed by the shuffling of hundreds of feet; the age old signal of danger.

The Queen, looked up from the lessons she was giving to her latest brood, then heaved her great bulk out of the royal chamber and began shouting to her soldiers, pushing them with her great head until phalanxes of soldiers from throughout the burrow began to move toward the breech.

She stopped, felt with every sense she had. Above the chatter and shuffling she could feel that the creature whose heavy breathing and weak heart beat was not a Rufus dragon or another terror out to ravage the community, but seemed like one of the people, alien but recognizable nonetheless. She butted one of the soldiers rushing by to a standstill and instructed him to tell the others that if it is not a predator to let her know what it is before doing anything.

2. H. Glaber fellow travelers:

E.B. Kim and others who unravelled the Naked Mole Rat’s gene sequencing.

According to Nature Magazine, the gene sequences revealed:

“…unique genome features and molecular adaptations consistent with cancer resistance, poikilothermy, hairlessness and insensitivity to low oxygen, and altered visual function, circadian rhythms and taste sensing. This information provides insights into the naked mole rat’s exceptional longevity and ability to live in hostile conditions, in the dark and at low oxygen. The extreme traits of the naked mole rat, together with the reported genome and transcriptome information, offer opportunities for understanding aging and advancing other areas of biological and biomedical research.”

JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

RED STAR: Chapter, Vince gets a surprise (continued).

The cooling water in the bath woke him up. He looked around, a bit dazed and stared a moment puzzled at the mug balanced at the edge of the bathtub. Somehow he had finished drinking the liquid in it. Although deep down the chill from the water made his body ache, he felt somewhat more relaxed and calm than when he got into the tub however long ago.

He walked to the shower stall, rinsed himself off lingering in the hot water until it restored the warmth to his bones. Then he moved to the sink, searched around, found mouthwash and a deodorant stick, but no shaving paraphernalia. He gargled and applied the deodorant, put on his robe, walked out of the bathroom through the bedroom and down the short hall into the main room. There he found Isabella sitting on one of the sofa’s in front of the faux gas fireplace reading what looked like a report of some kind.

Her hair was hidden beneath a turban like thing and she had changed into satin beige pajamas and a matching thigh length robe. She looked stunning to him and he sensed movement in his groin as he stood there and silently watched her.

As though she sensed his presence, she suddenly looked up, smiled and said, “Oh there you are, finally. I was afraid you had drowned. I was about to go in and check on you.”

She smiled warmly.

“No, I guess I fell asleep. Sorry it took so long.”

Her smile widened and her normally cold placid eyes he believed showed a little warmth and sympathy. He remained standing where he was.

“I hope Lina’s drink did you some good. It is supposed to calm one down. She and I concocted it after an assignment.”

“She…” he got out.

“Yes, she and her husband were partners with me in some operations in the Philippines.”

“Oh,… yes it seemed to work,” he said deflating slightly as he was reminded about his performance earlier in the evening. “Look I am really sorry for…” He only got that far before she broke in.

“Don’t bother even thinking about it. My sphincter lets go almost every time things get hairy,” she laughed. “It is what they do. It’s a pretty weak muscle. Hard to strengthen.”

“Yeah, but I panicked, you didn’t.”

She got up asked, “Do you want a drink?”

“Mineral water, if you have it.”

As she moved to the low cabinet that contained a wet bar, she continued, “Everyone panics, we are trained to hide it to gain time. We were lucky tonight.”

She opened the cabinet poured two glasses of Pellegrino sparkling mineral water into glasses added some ice then turned and walked towards him. “Strange though, they seemed inept, almost amateurish.”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said dryly.

She chuckled and held out a glass to him.

He didn’t know why, but he suddenly moved toward her, put his arms around her waist, pulled her against him and kissed her. Her hands being otherwise occupied, she pushed against him with her forearms, stopped, kissed him back hungrily, then shoved him away.

“Stop,” she said, “you have no idea about how things are.”

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

TODAY’S FACTOIDS:

2012: Racism, conservatism and intelligence?

A study, published in Psychological Science, showed that people who score low on IQ tests in childhood are more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and socially conservative politics in adulthood.

2012: Global warming is a socialist plot.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

Give us back our money you welfare cheats.

2. Department of abasement, apology and correction:

Ruth pointed out that Bloom’s Day occurs on June 16 and not in September (see my previous post). I do not know where September came from. I arrived in Europe on that trip sometime between late June or July. I stand before you repentant.

“POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT”

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/

We’ve seen this before department:

“Jewish activity collectively, throughout history, is best understood as an elaborate and highly successful group competitive strategy directed against neighboring peoples and host societies. The objective has been control of economic resources and political power. One example: overwhelming Jewish support for non-traditional immigration, which has the effect of weakening America’s historic white majority.”
— Kevin MacDonald, VDARE.com, Nov. 14, 2006

(VDARE is a White Nationalist website, run by Peter Brimelow, which frequently publishes the works of anti-Semitic and racist writers and is named after Virginia Dare, who is believed to be the first child of English parents born in the Americas. Brimelow, an immigrant from Great Britain, expresses his fear of the loss of America’s white majority, blames non-white immigrants for social and economic problems and urges the Republican Party to give up on minority voters and focus on winning the white vote. He also said that a New York City subway is the same as an Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting room, “an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored.”

Brimelow is a featured panelist at this years American Conservative Union’s Political Action Conference at which Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, McConnell and Bachman are scheduled to address the delegates. Will any of them denounce the anti-semitism and racism? Will any of them refuse to appear at an event that features a racist anti-semite? Don’t bet on it.)

TODAY’S QUOTE:

1. “People know what the news is. You’re not coming to cable news for news anymore. You’re coming for either validation of your opinion or you’re looking to find out what the other side is saying. It is analogous to the debates that break out on peoples’ Facebook walls. It’s almost like we’re social media, live. They’re just talking to each other. They’re just posting.”
Mr. Domal, [the vice president for eastern ad sales at Fox News].

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-people-dont-watch-cable-news-to-get-news-2011-12#ixzz1hmmP4DcW

2. “Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much.”
—Paul Krugman

TODAY’S CHART:

TODAY’S CARTOON:

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN CALIFORNIA:

Thanks to the generosity and quick thinking of Stevie and Norbert Dall (may they live long and prosper), I found a place to stay the night after arriving in Sacramento at about midnight. The next morning they picked me up and we drove to El Dorado Hills where we had lunch in a lakeside restaurant located in a vast shopping center designed to look like a traditional french village with parking.

After lunch they dropped me off at the house that I would be staying at to await Hayden’s return from school. SWAC arrived before he did and explained that instead of coming home, Hayden was spending the weekend at the apartment of SWAC’s friend Joey who the last time I was here she was furious with for calling her, in effect, a tart. He would return on Sunday morning at about the same time she leaves for the airport in San Francisco on her way to Thailand to remain there for about a month. Joey will drive her to the airport and then go on to Fresno to visit his family for a week leaving Hayden with me until he returned. Hayden then would resume living with him until SWAC’s reemergence. Although Dick, SWAC’s husband in whose house she lives (Dick lives at his mother’s home in Roseville), could have minded the boy for the week, he unfortunately had to go out of town for business and so the job fell to the default nanny, me.

Anyway, on Saturday we went to Joey’s house. Both Joey and Natalie were going off on separate errands and I was importuned to watch over Hayden and Joey’s two adopted boys for a few hours. The boys had constructed a rough treehouse in a gnarled chestnut tree located behind the apartments. I spent my time enjoyably watching the boys running back and forth from the tree to the apartment’s refuse bin, rooting out treasures to carry back and boost into the treehouse to enhance that mysterious ambience coveted by small boys.

Hayden decided he did not want to spend the night at Joey’s and returned with SWAC and me to Dick’s house where both Dick and SWAC spent an inordinate amount of time instructing me on my duties even though I had done them all innumerable times during my previous visits.

Hayden, himself, seemed to have advanced from the wounded neediness of the insecure child to the dreamy independence of the seven year old to whom the vagaries his life had become normal reality.

That night while trying to get to sleep, my mind drifted here and there as I tried to gain, if not understanding of things, the comfort of post hoc rationalization. I realized that since stopping my psychopharmacological drugs (happy pills), my tolerance for accepting circumstances that I find objectionable has diminished to at least what it was prior to beginning the medication regime. It is time for me to get on with things.

The following day, after SWAC left for the airport, Hayden, Dick and I visited with Bill and Naida at their ranch. Hayden rode one of the horses for a while. We then all went for a wonderful walk along the Cosumnes River to a rocky area downstream containing 19 or more grinding holes that Naida believes were made by the ancient predecessors to the indians featured in Naida’s novels that settled about a mile up river. Bill, who is still recovering from open heart surgery, heroically accompanied us. We stopped at the golf course club house for lunch and to give Bill the opportunity to rest and recover from the exertions of the hike.

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

The litigation:

Before coming to California, I had practiced law in both New York and Italy. In New York I amassed one of the longest streaks of consecutive victories in jury trials in the history of the state until that time. In Italy, I practiced International tax law, a subject I knew nothing about.

I had given up the practice of the law in favor of hippiedom when I migrated to California and, therefore, at that time was not a member of the bar. For that reason, with regard to any litigation affecting Jughandle Creek, I could only operate, more or less, as a volunteer clerk or unofficial paralegal. I worked with two distinguished and very good attorneys; an older man named, if I remember correctly, Ferguson and a young attorney, Dick Gutting (or Cutting, I no longer remember which). Ferguson was a well known volunteer of his time and efforts on behalf of environmental causes, while Gutting, although at that time an associate in a distinguished law firm, had set his sights on a career in the emerging field of environmental law.

Like I said they were very good attorney’s while I, even with my enviable record that might mark me as a successful advocate, was at best a mediocre attorney. Almost immediately disagreements arose as I prepared the first draft of the briefs to challenge the Environmental Impact Report on the proposed motel development at Jughandle Creek.

Before addressing the disagreements, a little background on the issues. A few years previously the California legislature passed a law requiring that prior to taking an action governmental entities prepare a study of environmental impacts that may flow from that action. The law was more or less modeled on a similar Federal law enacted at the urging of then President Nixon. At the time it was assumed that the requirement applied, like the Federal law, only to governmental projects. In California however a court subsequently had held that it applied to private projects requiring governmental authorization also. The Jughandle Creek litigation would be one of the first that addressed the issue as to what if anything was demanded of the governmental entity should the report indicate that substantial adverse environmental impacts could be caused by the project.

The law suit was dismissed at the trial court and was now on appeal.

The disagreement between those working on the brief was over, not only my ability to frame the legal agreement itself (which for this discussion we will skip over), but also the nature of advocacy itself.

You see during my career as a trial lawyer, I discovered that no matter how polished and convincing my presentation or how devastating my cross examination of opposing witnesses, whenever I questioned the jury following a verdict as to what it was I said or did that convinced them, they would say, “nothing” and insist that the facts themselves were overwhelmingly in my clients favor.

Confused, I demanded that my firm give me only those cases the other lawyers did not wish to try because they believed them to be losers. I still won and the juries still gave the same explanation for their decision.

I deduced from this many things, most of which are quite obvious. The most significant insight was that no-one likes to admit his or her actions were based upon the urging of others. I had stumbled on to this truism inadvertently and had conducted my advocacy accordingly. For example, I rarely cross-examined my opponents witness in an effort to damage his credibility since it risked juror dissatisfaction with the domineering lawyer putting words into the witnesses mouth. Rather, I would try to lead him into expanding his story so as to stretch the bounds of credulity.

The legal argument we were, in part, trying to make was over the technical and often arcane issue of divining legislative intent. You see, without some prior legislative authorization to do so, a governmental body is never obligated to act, even in the face of obvious substantial adverse impacts (with the exception of gross human rights violation). To do so whenever an adverse impact is perceived invites chaos. This is one of the fundamental tenants of the rule of law. Even the human rights exception relies upon the fiction that somehow these rights are fundamental and exist even if not written down and adopted by a legislature.

In the EIR statute no specific language existed that in anyway directed the local government to do anything once they had accepted the document.

I argued that the brief had to strongly highlight the significance of the damage (not really an issue in the litigation other than it was so) and that the legislature specifically provided a mechanism for uncovering that impact and failure to act on the information would render the legislative action futile (not really a legal argument) and then lay out the various legal arguments by which the appellate court could find a legislative intent to justify what I hoped appealed to the judges sense of equity.

Ultimately we agreed on some form of the above approach, the briefs submitted, the case argued and the judgement rendered in our favor. Alas, I was not there to savor the victory, my six year old son Jason, Jeanne and I had departed on a several month tour of Europe when the decision was announced. (To be continued.)

THE NAKED MOLE RAT CHRONICLES:

Chronicles:

The more I struggle with my attempts to fashion stories and tales fitting an imagined evolution of NMR’s unique society, the more frustrated I become. It is not simply some “Watership Down,” imagining a recognizable human culture reduced to fit little furry creatures that live in burrows. Nor is it like some fantasy author postulating some spacefaring Panthera Leo community. NMR society is alien to almost all recognizable mammalian cultures. I searched through hundreds of tales and stories hoping I could find one or more to adapt. None that I found was adaptable to NMR society. How does one write a tale if the sex and survival instincts are unrecognizable? Only the NMR queen seems to fit our archetypes. Yet, the other individuals in the NMR community lacking either sex drive, or competitive urgings, nevertheless seem to live relatively self directed social lives lacking among insectoid species.

Any suggestions??

JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

RED STAR: Chapter, Rachel (continued).

Without thought, Rachel threw herself into the car diving across the transmission hump separating the front seats seeking whatever protection from impending doom the automobile offered and hoping the hulking stranger’s self preservation instincts were somewhat higher then hers at this moment. He slid in behind her, miraculously inserted the key into the ignition without fumbling, started the motor and plunged directly ahead as two more bullets bit into her car and shattering the front window.

The automobiles tires struck the curb and the car lurched across the sidewalk, traversed the plaza, careened off a parking meter and sped off down the Embarcadero. He squealed around the first corner he could heading west throwing her body against the dashboard. He did not seem to notice. Then he zigzagged back and forth from street to street apparently believing it would somehow put off pursuit or make him difficult to find. They continued like this until arriving near the intersection of Van Ness and Mission Streets by the hulking Goodwill Industries store where he pulled over by an unoccupied meter. He placed his head on the steering wheel, breathing deeply, hands shaking.

Rachel silent until now said, her voice deep and cracking slightly, “City Hall’s a few blocks away. The police are there.”

He turned toward her as though just noticing her. His round face shiny with sweat. Blue eyes wide with fright. He dug into his pocket pulled out a business card and handed it to her. Said, “Here call me I will pay any damage.”

She almost screamed, “Are you nuts? We have been shot at, almost killed. You highjack my car kidnap me and you give me your business card and offer to pay for damage to my car. I want the fucking cops.” She realized she was beginning to lose it. Whatever hormonal cocktail her body had mixed to carry her this far was evaporating.

Her outburst, on the other hand, seemed to shake him from wherever he was at. His eyes cleared and what appeared to be the beginnings of smile played with his lips.

“You’re right. I am sorry. You saved my life. I cannot ever pay you enough.”

“I did not save your life. You attacked and kidnapped me and you are right you can never pay me enough.”


“Listen before we bring in the cops, let me try to explain what happened,” he pleaded.

Although clearly the large hulking man sitting across from her seemed at the end of his rope, she nevertheless was unsure, whether from fear or curiosity, to open the door and run to the police or to stay and listen. Curiosity got the better of her and she said, “Ok go ahead, but make it quick.”
(to be continued)

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

TODAY’S FACTOID:

2012: Child poverty in the US:

Child poverty is absolutely exploding all over America. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4% of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1% of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6% of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6% of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.

2012: Net worth:

According to an analysis of Census Bureau data done by the Pew Research Center, the median net worth for households led by someone 65 years of age or older is 47 times greater than the median net worth for households led by someone under the age of 35.

If you can believe it, 37 percent of all US households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.

2012: National Efficiency.

The US uses about 221 tons of oil equivalent to produce every million dollars of GDP, while the comparable number for Britain is 141, for France 170 and for Germany 164.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

B. : You might be a conservative if (by Bruce Lindner) [continued]:

8: You believe in putting American jobs first, except when president Obama rescued 1.5 million GM and Chrysler autoworkers, because that was socialism.

9: It angers you that you can’t communicate with the Mexican busboy at your local Olive Garden, but when you took a vacation to San Francisco’s Chinatown, you thought it’s quaint that so many Chinese-Americans are holding fast to their traditional language. Because that’s America!

10: You deny that the lunatic who tried to murder Gaby Giffords was a conservative, even though he targeted a Jewish, pro-choice, pro gay rights, Democratic Congresswoman.

11: You thought it was perfectly normal that every president in history had an untethered right to raise the debt ceiling when warranted, but when Obama asked the GOP held congress to do it, you thought it only natural that it be tied to cutting Social Security and Medicare.

12: When the new 112th Congress was sworn in, you swooned as they promised to focus on “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” But when they pivoted, and went after NPR, Planned Parenthood and gay rights, you cheered.

13: You accuse president Obama of raising your taxes to the highest point ever, even though they’re lower today than at any time since 1950.

14: You believe the wealthiest Americans are “job creators,” and they are — but it doesn’t bother you that all the workers in those positions are in India, China and Malaysia, and they’re doing the jobs that our fathers once did.

15: You believe gays are anti-American, because their lifestyle is a threat to the children… unless they’re married to Tea Party-backed presidential candidates from Minnesota.

2. : What “Occupy” is all about and what it really wants:


“POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT”

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/

The insufferable ignorance of the right:

My right wing correspondents are at it again. If you recall these are the same persons who among other things floods me with emails containing what no rational person one could possibly deny are racist images of the First Lady or the President and then when challenged deny, in high dudgeon, any racist intent insisting they were forwarding them because of its substantive and humorous intent.

A few days ago, I received a video of the very right wing Congressman King, calling for President Obama and Nancy Pelosi to leave the United States. Now not only would my correspondents probably shake with indignation (and probably did) at calls for W’s impeachment or for war crimes trials of members of his administration, but they go on to maintain that those who object to King’s statement are left wing racists because King is black. They forget that only 3 years ago, they nag their cohorts were apoplectic regarding the then candidate’s black pastor’s sermon that Blacks have had little benefit from the Constitution. They claimed their outrage was not racist in nature but indignation at the insult to America.

I mention it here, not because I am surprised or shocked, but to further indicate the level to which any sensible political discourse has fallen due to the pervasive nature of Faux Think and ditto-heads.

To again quote David Frum who remains a life-long committed Republican and thoughtful consultant to conservative causes:

“The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much.”

“But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.”

King subsequently recanted his outburst. I guess that proves he must be a racist also.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“We have now, it seems a National Bible Society, to propagate King James Bible, through all Nations. Would it not be better, to apply these pious Subscriptions, to purify Christendom from the corruptions of Christianity; than to propagate those Corruptions in Europe, Asia, Africa and America! “
John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson’s response:
“These Incendiaries, finding that the days of fire and faggot are over in the Atlantic hemispheres, are now preparing to put the torch to the Asiatic regions. What would they say were the Pope to send annually to this country, colonies of Jesuit priests with cargoes of their Missal and translations of their Vulgate, to be put gratis into the hands of every one who would accept them? and to act thus nationally on us as a nation?”

TODAY’S CHART:

TODAY’S CARTOON”

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

I left the Little Masseuse standing in the lobby of Savrunbhumi Airport in Bangkok and passed through customs and security. My flight to Taipei was delayed due to a maintenance problem and then, after we boarded, delayed some more until finally we were asked to return to the terminal for dinner. I had pizza and a coke.

We were then herded back onto the plane for our flight to Taiwan and my transfer to the flight to LA that had been held at the airport. The flight itself was no more uncomfortable than usual. I occupied myself by intermitting episodes of napping and viewing movies on the personal screen provided each seat on EVA. I saw a movie about a man, his son and robot boxing starring Hugh Jackman; a film, with De Niro about governmental assassins killing each other and, a story about Mossad agents in post-war East German kidnapping an ex-Nazi doctor wanted for war crimes, that goes horribly wrong. The last film starred Helen Mirren who for some reason always turns me on, a fact I am sure she will be pleased to know.

Arrival at LAX was a nightmare. Of all the international arrivals I have been through all over the world, this had to be perhaps the worst. At one point, having taken over an hour to work my way through passport control, I had gotten to the baggage carousel that, of course, was not the same one at which I was repeatedly advised my baggage would be deposited and retrieved my suitcase. I proceeded to where the signs informed me that the line for customs began. The line itself snaked about 3/4 of the way around the terminal. As I approached the end of the line, a woman, clearly an airport employee, dramatically and firmly attempted to wave me off from joining the end of the line located about two feet behind her. She insisted that I turn around and go back through the entire terminal, circle around the baggage carousels and approach the same spot from another angle, saying that this way was blocked. I ignored her and pushed my way onto the line while she scurried ahead to shoo away other travelers seeking to join the same line.

After almost another hour, I emerged, met Monty and proceeded to the currency exchange desk to exchange baht for dollars. They charged me a fee that amounted to almost one-third of the value of the money exchanged.

I slept the night at Monty’s house. The next morning, after breakfast, he and I went to the local High School to exercise. Torrence High School’s athletic fields have recently been redone in the modern style that passionately obliterates any form of natural life. The track was an attractive rust colored rubberized material, the field in shiny green Astroturf and the stand’s silver aluminum bleachers had replaced wooden ones.

Following our walks around the track eight or ten times, stretching and pushups on the Astroturf and a few very slow wind sprints, we took off to visit with Ben at his new apartment where I talked extensively and excessively on the subject I like most, me.

After leaving Ben in peace, Monty and I eventually ended up in a high end clothing store in Redondo Beach owned by Jimmy and imaginatively named “Jimmy’s.” Jimmy, who is originally from Pakistan, served us wine and mixed nuts and stories about growing up Muslim in Pakistan as a virtual orphan, gaining a scholarship to study in America, becoming wealthy, raising a family, and in the end, like Ben, Monty and I ending up as members of the M3WBNB Club. At least he still has a bankrupt clothing store where he serves good wine and mixed nuts.

The next day, it was off to meeting other members of M3WBNB regarding a South East Asia distributorship for a product called “Blue Cow,” a specialty drink that’s supposed to calm the drinker down as opposed to something like “Red Bull” which makes them crazy.

This was followed by a brief get together with Pete another member of the club, who in his previous life raced at Indianapolis and in the Baja 500. Pete was at the garage he leased in order to refurbish auxiliary vehicles that move containers around the nearby Port. He, Monty and I swapped stories about when we were somebody.

Then off to Union Station for the train to Sacramento that is scheduled to arrive in Sacto at midnight only to discover I had nowhere to stay for the night.

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

On the Edge: Stories about the Creation and Early Years of California’s Monumental Coastal Protection Program.

In the Beginning: an oft told story (continued).

Back at the cabin we ate a lunch of elaborate home made trail mix and some locally grown fruit while John explained how to, “use the techniques of the private real the estate market to protect resources.” It seems, he had managed to cajole many of his neighbors into selling him relatively low cost options to purchase their land. He raised the money for the purchase of the options from various endeavors including peddling “Jughandle Creek” Christmas cards. His goal was eventually to sell the options to the California Department of Parks and Recreation. Unfortunately the Department did not see Jughandle Creek with the same urgency and significance as John.

Nevertheless, John’s approach of using the private market to preserve nature impressed me a lot since, among other things, it indicated some creative thought regarding getting something done beyond simply pressuring government to figure it out and do it. This approach affected some of the implementation policies that several years later I wrote into California’s Coastal Plan.

Since I had already been hooked, the remainder of the afternoon was spent discussing, planning and plotting our strategy for preserving and protecting John’s beloved Staircase.

It was clear to me that John was a lover and while he, like any lover, believed he would fight to preserve from harm every strand of his beloved’s hair, he was not, a defender. The difference to me was that the defender operates more or less by the following rules:

1. If the conflict is severe, damage is inevitable. (The lover often cannot neither conceive nor tolerate of the slightest harm to his beloved.)
2. You cannot protect anything if you are dead. (The lover, on the other hand, swears he would give his life for his beloved, but in fact rarely does, and because of that is prone to rash and foolish decisions.)
3. The opponent has to know right down to his shorts that he is in the battle of his life.
4. The defender will be disposed of the moment those defended believe the threat is past. Any songs that will be sung will be sung only about the lovers or those who merely survived the enemy’s rout.

(If this all sounds a little Seven Samurai and the Magnificent Seven, it is.)

Anyway, eventually we began the defense using all the traditional methods; protests, demonstrations and the like (John had may allies and supporters he could call on) and I joined in. Then came the litigation.
(to be continued)

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

THE NAKED MOLE RAT CHRONICLES:

1. Chronicles:

I am sorry, I have run into a form of writers block over tales for Old George to tell about the “Dark Times,” in the NMR colony. If anyone has some simple plot suggestions of tales that fit NMR society I would appreciate it.

2. H. Glaber fellow travelers.

To, Paul W. Sherman, Stanton Braude and Jennifer U.M. Jarvis, who in the August 1999 Journal of Mammalology reported that there are no food fights among baby mole rats. Although unlike any other mammal, the Mole rat Queen births as many as twice the infants as she has mammaries, there is no problem because the normal greedy behavior of other mammal infants is absent and they willingly take turns sucking on a tit.

JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

RED STAR: Chapter, Rachel.

Rachel was a very attractive woman. Perhaps one would not consider her drop dead gorgeous, her nose was a bit too pointed, her hair an undistinguished shade of brown, her shoulders a bit too angular. Nevertheless these minor imperfections aside, from anyone’s perspective she was a very pretty woman. She was smart too. Having gotten her advanced degree in finance from Wharton, she spent a few years on Wall Street as an up and coming financier. But she was not especially happy doing what she was doing and when her mother got sick, she returned to San Francisco to take over the family’s flower shop on California Street near posh Pacific Heights and in the past three years opened a second outlet in downtown and transformed the small business into one of the cities leading event planning operations.

But still she was not completely satisfied. Her personal life, as it had been since high school, was pretty barren. She worked long hours and on her few dates she found that her brusk no nonsense manner and intellectual attainments put off most of her suitors. At 34 she had begun to accept the fact that in the long run she was destined to be alone. This in itself did not bother her too much. But there was a gnawing sense that she was somehow at fault in the paucity of significant relationships. No matter how much she told herself that she was an independent modern women making her own life, she retained a deep seated feeling that she was, in some way, failing.

This evening she had just finished dinner with her friend Janice who had left soon after dinner to hook up with a guy she had met a few days ago at Cafe Americano located a few blocks away. Perhaps, she thought that’s whats bothering her, she needed to get laid but instead she was going home like most nights to watch a little television, catch up on some work, review her investments, read a book and then go to bed.

It was a beautiful San Francisco night. She stood for a moment on the sidewalk in front of the McWerter building in which the restaurant was located and took a deep breath then began walking down Steuart Street away from busy Mission Street toward the little cul-de-sac into which Steuart Street ended where she had parked her car. As she walked along she could hear sirens wailing from somewhere toward Market Street. She thought that there must be a fire in one of the stores or office buildings on Market since so many sirens appeared to be howling all at once.

As she crossed Howard Street she fished out her keys from her pocked and jingled them absent-mindedly as she walk along toward the end of the Cul-de-sac. Her car was parked in the last space before the road ended. To her left toward the Embarcadero and the bay was a small plaza, a remnant undevelopable piece of land turned into a forlorn paper strewn park. To her right across Steuart, rose the 8 or so level parking garage that serviced the area, while in front of her the plaza narrowed as the Embarcadero slashed across in until it ended at the entrance to the new main offices of the Gap, a well known clothing manufacturer. She smiled slightly when she thought about one of the sayings she remembered from her classes at Wharton that went something like, “you could always tell when a company is about to fail; it is almost always soon after the leave the place that served them so well during their growth for their signature headquarters building that inevitably was built to feed the CEO’s ego.” She mused that that appeared to be happening to the GAP which had experienced dramatically declining profits almost ever since moving in.

She arrived at the car, pressed the unlock button on the key and opened the diver’s side door. Suddenly a large dark shape rose from in front of the car where it had apparently been crouched and hiding. Before she could react, she was grabbed flung against the side of her automobile and her keys snatched from her hand. The suddenness of the attack and the pain as her body struck the metal stunned her and she found herself dragged toward the door. She regained some control over herself and began to resist. Her attacker pushed and pulled her even harder, he was quite strong and he shouted “get in the car before we both get killed.” Just then she heard a loud sound like something exploding and the rear window of her car shattered.

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

During the days when I had somewhat of significant impact on the planning and implementation of California’s coastal program, I often found myself on one side an ideological divide among environmentalists; between those that focused on the protection and rehabilitation of coastal resources (my leanings) and those that believed that no development is good development. The no development side had a valid point, they argued that, if all development were eliminated along the coast (or at least all new development) the natural environment would return to the state nature intended.

As with most absolutist ideologies, it overlooked several inconvenient facts among which was that no part of California’s shoreline no matter how remote was free of impacts caused by the vast migration of population to California over the last hundred years or so. Unless all or most of those people were driven off, the resources would continue to degrade simply from their continued presence no matter how much future development was restricted.

My position was prompted by concerns about the continuing impact of economic conflict on coastal resources as well as questions of simple equity.

A little story may help explain the evolution of my views. Early in the program, we received a proposal for development of a small resort hotel on the shores of one of the myriad of inlets along the coast. There was no other development along this section of the coast and the resources that could be impacted were especially sensitive. The developer was someone largely self-financed and could not by any means be described as a “large developer.” In fact, I believed that essentially his entire financial resources were tied up in this property. During a meeting with him, as I discussed the various concerns we had with the proposed project, he became visibly agitated. Finally unable to contain himself, he jumped out of his seat, rolled up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal the telltale tattoo of identification numbers that indicated a survivor of the Nazi death camps. He shouted that he was being treated almost as badly as in the concentration camps.

Now without getting into the appropriateness of his analogy or whether or not it was simply a cynical ploy to play upon my emotions for his benefit, it did place in hard contrast the nature of my actions.

Ultimately we denied this project, as we were required to so that the Coastal Plan could be completed without compromising its effectiveness, by actions that could be inconsistent with that plan. Although the denial was ostensibly temporary, I am sure the impact on the developer was devastating since he probably was not financially strong enough to maintain his position and may have been forced into bankruptcy or worse. I also knew that any plan that we came up with would have as one of its goals the maintenance of this short stretch of the coast free from development.

I realized then that our decisions, did not simply preserve resources, albeit temporarily, but also often penalized the economically weak, while favoring of the financially strong. Our actions actually gave an advantage to the large landowner or the well funded development corporation, who could lie in wait for political fortunes to change or could spend whatever it took on political and economic consultants to obtain the economic reward from the exploding value of an entitlement for development along the coast that we had created.

Because a permit to develop along the coast became immensely more valuable as a result of our regulation, those with the wherewithal to wait for a politically propitious time or to purchase the political and technical consultants (of which I was a reasonably successful one following my departure from governmental service) to acquire the prized permit, were often successful. Those without the wherewithal lost, sometimes everything.

As a result, it became my approach to instruct the Commission staff to inform the prospective developers early in the project approval process as precisely as we could what we wanted the development to do, what resources to be protected and equally important what resources needed to be restored or expanded. The latter because I believed that absent such action, environmental resource degradation and loss from the ongoing effects of already existing development would continue. If you are not increasing the extent and health of the resource base you inevitably are losing them. This the “No Development” ideologues simply failed to understand or appreciate.

If the Permit to develop was as valuable as we apparently had made it, then not only were we using that increment in value to improve the resources but, I believed, we also reduced the inequities between the economically powerful landowners and developers and the much more common small entrepreneur. Now the burden was no longer on the agency to maintain an often untenable position but upon the applicant who must decide if the value in hand was worth more that the uncertain future value that may be obtained by fighting on.

The question can be raised whether or not we are merely forcing current development to bear the costs of past errors by government. The answer is, yes and no. Land use regulation does not simply shift property values it, in fact, increases the value of the entitlement itself. In other words the land values have been shifted to some extent from the lands potential development value to its value entitled. On the other hand costs to develop are increased and therefore may represent an increased societal cost, but perhaps not to the extent of the costs of environmental degradation flowing from a failure to regulate. These costs (in either case) often fall heaviest on those least able to bear them. To deal with this several commentators on the process urged and a number of us on the staff agreed that included among the so-called coastal resources were those things that can be considered replacements in whole or in part for some of the societal impacts. These included increased access to coastal recreation by the general public, preservation and expansion of lower cost facilities and the like.

The plan and the legislation that ultimately emerged attempted to address most of the issues mentioned above without surrendering its strong focus on coastal resources as follows:

a. The creation of a regulatory agency with specific, not general, policies to focus the regulation on the particular unique resources of the coast and to encourage their expansion.

b. Funding for acquisition of those areas of great value for recreational, environmental and even equitable goals (such as the resort developer referred to above) and,

c. An environmental redevelopment and public access agency to begin the process of undoing the damage already done.

Following in the passage of the massive California Coastal program, alas, those ideologically committed to the belief that no development is good development gradually prevailed in the regulatory program resulting in the favoring the large and powerful developer over the small and financially weak producing a hodgepodge of poorly designed projects, both large and small, a spate of inequitable decisions falling primarily on the economically defenseless, and a slowing down of resource preservation and restoration even to the point of interfering with the ability of other agencies to carry out the policies they were charged with in the coastal legislation.

So does this make me a “liberal” on environmental matters. Not to that certain segment of the environmental community that opposes all or most development. I consider myself, if tags are necessary, more an environmental populist who believes that, even in environmental matters, the statement I have made several times before, should qualify every social, political, environmental and collective action we make and perhaps individual actions as well:

“Why would anyone be morally bound or wish to be morally bound to a civil society that does not share the goal that its citizens deserve a fair distribution of wealth, income and power? If the civil society is not dedicated to that end what else could it possibly be dedicated to? What is freedom to those without wealth, income or power?”

Anything less in my opinion is neither patriotic, good public policy nor moral.

TODAY’S FACTOIDS:

2010: Prescription drug dangers.

In a report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, study authors said that in looking over records that spanned from 1976 to 2006 (the most recent year available) they found that, of 62 million death certificates, almost a quarter-million deaths were coded as having occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors.

An estimated 450,000 preventable medication-related adverse events occur in the US every year.

The costs of adverse drug reactions to society are more than $136 billion annually — greater than the total cost of cardiovascular or diabetic care.

Adverse drug reactions cause injuries or death in 1 of 5 hospital patients.

The reason there are so many adverse drug events in the US is because so many drugs are used and prescribed — and many patients receive multiple prescriptions at varying strengths, some of which may counteract each other or cause more severe reactions when combined.

2012: Headphone danger.

According to Chris Woodyard at USA Today, serious injuries have increased 300% in the last six years for pedestrians wearing headphones. Even more worrying, 70% of the people in these instances were killed.
Nearly 70% of those that died in the accidents were under the age of 30.

Surprisingly, almost half of the vehicles involved in the accidents were trains and not cars. The rapid increase in these accidents directly correlates to the rapid growth of the MP3 player market.The loud volume of the headphones blocking engine and horn noise coupled with the distraction of the music seems to be a fatal recipe. It just might be time to turn down the volume when on the move.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/headphones-may-kill-you-2012-1#ixzz1jlx9uwLV

2012: Olive oil.

Italy sells three times as much olive oil as it produces.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/fake-olive-oil-2012-1#italy-sells-three-times-as-much-olive-oil-as-it-produces-15#ixzz1k3LIeCcs

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. : You might be conservative if (by Bruce Lindner):

1: You’re irate over the president taking so many vacation days on the taxpayer’s dime (61 thus far), but you thought George W. Bush earned every minute of his leisure time (196 days at the same point in his presidency).

2: You’re happy with your 40 hour work week, paid vacations and company-provided healthcare, but you’re strongly anti-union, because those commies haven’t done anything for you lately.

3: You strongly support the First Amendment and its guarantee of religious freedom to all, but you don’t think Muslims have a right to build an Islamic Community Center in Manhattan.

4: You believe Ronald Reagan was a devout Christian, even though he hated going to church, but any president who spends twenty years going to the same Trinity United Church in Chicago must be a Muslim.

5: You believe when a Republican governor creates a healthcare package with an individual mandate for everyone in his state, that’s a good idea. But when a Democratic president does it, suddenly it’s unconstitutional.

6: You’re so enthused about demonstrating your Second Amendment rights, you can think of no finer place to brandish your pistol in public than at a presidential rally.

7: You believe Bill Clinton was responsible for Osama bin Laden’s escape ten years ago, but thankfully George W. Bush caught up with him and killed him in Pakistan.

B. : What “Occupy” is all about and what it really wants:

“POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT”

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“When a man tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him: Whose?”
- Rousseau

TODAY’S CHART:

TODAY’S CARTOON:

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

Terroristcapades:

A fascinating drama is unfolding in BKK over whether there is or was a terrorist threat to tourists.

Based upon Israeli intelligence reports, the US and a number of other countries, as they often do in these cases, issued an advisory to its citizens traveling in the country of a possible terrorist attack at some popular tourist destinations.

Then the Thai police announced they had captured an admitted Hezbollah terrorist and were looking for a supposed accomplice.

This was immediately followed by an announcement by Thai deputy prime minister Cheeky Chalerm, that there was no evidence of terrorists operating in the country and criticized the US for issuing the directive without clearing it first with his government, since it could have an adverse impact on the local tourism industry recently devastated by the epic floods. The Thai military and security services followed with statements that they are on the job and that there were no terrorists in the country despite the weekly bombings by Muslim separatists in the South and the still unresolved “Red” vs “Yellow” shirt antagonism.

This was followed by reports that the alleged terrorist told police authorities that Hezbollah decided to call off the terrorist campaign now that he had been caught, followed by an unverified report that Hezbollah wanted talks with the US about the situation.

Cheeky Chalerm, because his bizarre denial of terrorists operating in the country was ridiculed by almost everyone, was replaced as government spokesperson on the non-terrorist terrorist crisis. He successor then immediately criticized the US for trying to protect its citizens and repeated the claim that there is no terrorist threat in Thailand. In any event the spokesperson added, Thailand’s security services knew about the plot since mid-December but had not acted because the alleged terrorist broke no Thai laws.

This was followed by the announcement by the police of their discovery of a shophouse in which the individual in custody stored large quantities of the type of fertilizer used to make bombs, as well as timers, wires and other bomb making paraphernalia. The man subsequently was charged with not having obtained a permit to possess the bomb making material.

The official government statements that followed (not from the police actually investigating the incident) maintained that the alleged terrorist claimed there was no other terrorist involved and the bomb making equipment was for export and not for use in Thailand. They also renewed their criticism of the US for disrupting the Thai economy, but said that they had no problems with Israel whose security apparatus started it all.

Subsequently, in separate reports in The Nation one of Thailand’s two national English language newspapers, it was revealed that the US notified the Thai minister of foreign affairs 24 hours prior to posting the warning and according to police the suspect, who the government previously had reported was not a terrorist but an innocent go between, admitted driving around Bangkok looking for targets.

In the Bangkok Post a government minister accused the US of being “impolite.”

What’s next? Stay tuned.

B. Pookie’s Adventures in Thailand:

It is getting closer to my departure date. The weather is becoming hotter and the skies overcast. There are reports of unseasonably low temperatures in the North (down to as low as the mid-fifties Fahrenheit) and additional flooding in the South.

Because of the overcast and the chill (temperature down to the low 80′s in BKK) I have avoided swimming and spend my time sweating in the gym.

As I mentioned in my previous post I have begun entering “This and that…” on to a blog. I include the posts and some of the email exchanges that followed them, mostly Irwin’s, those regarding Hayden and those that prompted changes in “This and that…” It will take some time to enter them all. Because of the limitations of the blog format, I have organized them by category on a quarterly basis (Jan 2010 through March 2010, April 2010 through June 2010 and so on.) I have entered January 2012 to date posts and January through February 2010. The link is: http://josephpetrillo.wordpress.com/

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

A. Chapter 1. In the Beginning: an oft told story (continued).

About two weeks after my almost mystical encounter with John Olmsted in the shadow of the TransAmerica pyramid, I found myself traveling to Mendocino and Jughandle Creek with my friend Jeanne McMahon. I was intrigued and smelled the beginnings of an adventure; if strolling among flesh eating plants and stunted trees with a tall skinny obsessed hippy could be considered as having the makings of an adventure.

I do not remember how we got there. I did not have a car at that time and neither did Jeanne. I guess we hitch-hiked which was the preferred mode of travel for those of us eager to join the counter culture (you know “On the Road” and all that).

Jeanne was a freckled faced, relentlessly positive young woman from Dubuque Iowa who, in late sixties, like many others had left the mid-West farm belt to join the nation wide migration of those eager to experience “what’s happening” in California. She walked with a spring in her step, her face resolutely pressed forward toward whatever new experiences life she was sure would lay at her feet.

A few years later, she decided to go to medical school to become a doctor. She went back to school to acquire the proper science credits. She was successful and was admitted to medical school. To celebrate, she and a companion decided to go camping and hiking for a few days in the Trinity Alps a few miles north of Mendocino, an activity she loved.

While hiking, she slipped and fell off a cliff, her friend ran to find help but was not able to bring it back in time. Jeanne died alone and in pain as most of us ultimately must. Her friend and I accompanied her body back to Dubuque for burial. Two weeks later he drowned while swimming.

But that was then in the future and is now in the past. Then we were off on our adventure blissfully and thankfully ignorant of our futures (John himself died a few months ago after a long illness).

John lived in a little cabin in the redwoods alongside Jughandle Creek. A sign was affixed to the cabin that announced “The Jughandle Creek Conservancy.” Inside, John and a friend had just returned from mushroom hunting and had laid on the table before them an incredible collection of dirt encrusted bizarrely shaped fungi that they both were obviously enthralled with. They invited Jeanne and I to join them in sampling their earthy delights. We declined.

After a while we unrolled our sleeping bags on the porch outside and slept soundly lulled to sleepy the rustle of the wind through the redwoods and the periodic hoot of an owl on the hunt nearby.
(To be continued)

B. Postscript: Monty.

Interestingly, I do not remember the circumstances that first brought me into contact with Monty. It had been about seven or eight years since I left public service and resumed my career as a private lawyer for hire. I was a partner in a large firm and was extremely well compensated for representing the corrupt and venal, mostly before the corrupt and venial organization that the California Coastal Commission had become primarily because its director was corrupt owing to the fact that he could not comprehend how truly venal he really was.

Anyway, Monty had sought a permit from the Coastal Commission to develop what originally was to be a large recreational oriented subdivision on about 1800 acres that he owned on the coast in San Luis Obispo County. He was having great difficulty persuading the Commission staff to recommend to the Commissioners approval of his designs despite having scaled them back several times. I was called in to see if I could help him out.

Let me begin by introducing you to Monty; at least as I saw him. Most if not all I learned about Monty’s life before I met him, I learned from Monty himself. Of Irish heritage, he reveled in the Irish passion for story telling and was good at it.

He was a kid off the NY streets. At that time, NY was a center of the horse racing business. Monty’s family worked at the local tracks as trainers and what have you. Monty spent most of his early years around race horses, those who were in the racing business and gamblers.

During his mid-teens he decided to become a prize fighter. He was a middle weight and amassed a notable record in the course of his professional career. Before he was 21 years old he had won over 40 bouts while losing only four. This was all the more of an impressive record when one realizes that he fought during boxings golden years when the middle weight devision had some of the greatest boxers that ever lived. Monty was smart, had great hand speed, could take a punch and never, never gave up. He could have been a contender. Unfortunately, his career was cut short when in a street fight someone plunged a knife into his eye.
(to be continued)

PAPA JOES TALES AND FABLES:

See also: http://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/

THE NAKED MOLE RAT CHRONICLES:

A. Chronicles: Workers (continued):

As you can see, the toilet burrow is a rather large and imposing room as well as it should be. Here, throughout the day the residents not only relieve themselves rub themselves down with it so that, in the dark tunnels, we can distinguish members of the community from intruders by their smell. It also serves as sort of a cantina where we can supplement or diet of tubers. So it is a very important place for us.Sort of like the teachers lounge in a high school.

Well, we are in luck, look who is here, Old George, perhaps I can get him to tell us a story about the Dark Times.

(In our next issue Old George will tell us a tale about the “Dark Times.”)

B. H. Glaber fellow travelers:

The “They Call me Lucky” band. According to Peter G. a member of the band, “You will be pleased to know that for tonight’s ‘They Call Me Lucky’ band gig, Dennis named the set list, ‘Lucky Naked Mole Rat New Year’. A tunnel is reaching out to the Outer Richmond.”

H. Glaber says, check it out.

JOEY’S MYSTERY NOVEL:

Alas, once again I must put off the next installment of RED STAR. On the other hand, I guess, for a mystery or a thriller any additional suspense is a good thing. Some regrettably we leave Meg, having just murdered a potential witness for the crimes she was investigating because he called her a dyke, climbing the at Devils Slide, while Vince, in Isabella’s apartment removes the briefs that he shit into in panic during the assassination attempt on his life. Stay tuned.

TODAY’S FACTOIDS:

1940: From Strange Victory and from William Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic, one can track the French reaction to the Nazi attack across the Meuse starting on May 10, 1940.

“The first thing to note is that the Nazi lead elements took up to 70% casualties and kept coming–indicative of extraordinary ideological commitment. In a world in which any “normal” unit breaks at 25% casualties or so, it’s hard to beat people who keep coming at you: you can only hope that the enemy doesn’t have that many of them. Had the Nazi soldiers been “normal,” the initial attack by the seven panzer divisions would probably have failed, and the French would have had time to redeploy.”

for those interested in a great brief discussion about the fall of France in 1940 see: ttp://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/01/hoisted-from-the-archives-defending-cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys-blogging.html

2012: Anti-crime group SOS Impresa has released a report that calls the mafia “Italy’s number one bank”.

The report argues that the ability to exploit the financial crisis has lead to criminal groups earning a turnover of 140 billion euros ($179 billion), more than 100 billion euros ($127 billion) in profit, and more than 65 million euros ($83 million) in liquidity.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/mafia-bank-italy-2012-1#ixzz1j7BhAYPS

1983: 90% of all Major Media Outlets in the US (t.v. news, major movie studios, radio news, print news, etc.) were owned by 50 different companies. TODAY, that same 90% of the Media is owned by … ready for this? … just “6″ different corporations. Those corporations are: GE, News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch), Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

What “Occupy” is all about and what it really wants:

“POOKIE FOR PRESIDENT”:

Please see the blog: http://papajoestales.wordpress.com/

1. Santorum says:

“…If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery.”
Rick Santorum- Associated Press, April 23, 2003

(Sounds good to me.)

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/shit-santorum-says-2012-1#-4#ixzz1inD07Ruc

2. Of course it is not racist:

I have noticed the racist right wing propaganda machine appears to have temporarily halted sending through the mails photographs of chimpanzees or orangutans with Michelle Obama’s face superimposed. They now send pictures of Ms Obama informing us that as First Lady she stays in expensive hotels and is protected by elaborate and costly security, failing to mention that every white first lady before her did the same. I guess, they believe that she should still be sitting at the back of the bus.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter—with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. … Our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
— Adolf Hitler, 1939

In case we forget, two or three times as many Poles were exterminated by the Nazi ethnic cleansing machine during WWII than Jews. But then there were a lot more Poles to get rid of.

TODAY’S CHARTS:

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH: