18
March
2007
The Stock Market is currently going through some significant hickups. I don’t quite understand why … started with something in China, dropped a little here, then bounced back, until the government decided to go after some subprime lenders, and on and on it goes. It has little to do with performance of any one company, it’s like a whole ocean shifted. Every day there’s a full page article stating that it went up or down because of X or Y.
Of course we always get the results afterwards, how do you prepare for that.
Professional Investors will say “Fundamentals,” but that would apply reason to this market, and I don’t have any sign that this is reasonable. Reasons would be predictable laws, rules that everybody is playing by. But if people are playing with a different set of rules from your, your fundamentals won’t get you anywhere. Maybe the stockmarket is really more about sociology rather than economics, emotions rather than understanding, luck rather than prediction.
The attached article may serve as an illustration. I’m not quoting the whole thing, just a couple of statements. I like the:
“The fundamentals don’t matter. What ultimately does matter is what the Fed is likely to do,” he said.
“It’s an emotional, sentiment-driven market. Anxiety is driving the market. It’s hard to come to any conclusion that the fundamental value of the market is changed from three to four weeks ago.”
I read somewhere a long time ago that Steve Wozniak, the Apple Founder, long ago got out of the stockmarket and just invested in guaranteed rates of return. Don’t know if I believe that, but with the money he made, he should make plenty even at 2% a year. For the rest of us knowing that our retirement is swept along on a giant wave of mass hysteria, it’s a bumpy ride.
(Original found here.)
Stocks Slump as Hopes for Rate Cut Fall
By TIM PARADIS
AP Business Writer
Published March 16, 2007, 11:16 PM CDT
NEW YORK — Wall Street slumped Friday after another reading on inflation deflated hopes the Federal Reserve will start moving toward an interest rate cut when it meets next week. The major indexes suffered moderate losses for the week.
The inflation reading was the second in as many days that upended expectations that the Fed might consider lowering rates as the economy gives off signs of slowing. The sentiment overshadowed a stronger-than-expected increase in industrial production.
“The market is dealing with the softer economic data that we’re seeing and trying to reconcile that with the somewhat stiff inflation data,” said Marie Schofield, fixed income strategist and portfolio manager at Columbia Management Group.
…
Inflation concerns remained entrenched on Wall Street Friday. The Labor Department’s report that its Consumer Price Index rose by 0.4 percent in February renewed some of the concerns that dogged stocks on Thursday. Wall Street had expected an increase of 0.3 percent. The rise was double that of January and the largest rise since a similar increase in December. Rising costs for gasoline, food and citrus crops helped boost prices.
However, the important core figure, which excludes often volatile food and energy prices, didn’t surprise Wall Street. It rose 0.2 percent as expected.
The Federal Reserve reported industrial production increased 1 percent in February, well above the 0.3 percent increase analysts expected.
The consumer inflation figures came one day after a key measure of inflation at the wholesale level took Wall Street by surprise with a higher-than-expected reading. Wall Street overcame the unwelcome Producer Price Index reading Thursday to move moderately higher as it focused on further corporate takeover news.
The inflation readings draw Wall Street’s attention because investors are concerned that higher prices will make it harder for the Fed to justify a reduction in short-term interest rates, even if such a move could help stave off a further slowdown in the economy. The latest inflation readings carry particular significance as the Fed begins a two-day meeting on Tuesday. The central bank has left interest rates unchanged at its last five meetings, interrupting a string of 17 straight increases that began in 2004.
Joe Balestrino, a portfolio manager at Federated Investors Inc., contends investors are viewing economic data through the eyes of the Fed and not as much for what it says about the economy.
“The fundamentals don’t matter. What ultimately does matter is what the Fed is likely to do,” he said.
“It’s an emotional, sentiment-driven market. Anxiety is driving the market. It’s hard to come to any conclusion that the fundamental value of the market is changed from three to four weeks ago.”
Sentiment took a jarring nosedive on Feb. 27 when a worldwide selloff raced through the markets and sent the Dow industrials down 416 points that day. Since then Wall Street has been trying to regain its footing and ascertain whether stocks had found a new bottom.
…
Posted: social/culture, personal finance
18
March
2007
Two articles on the recent fiasco at the Justice Department. First they get busted for the FBI abuses of National Security Letters, now they are on the defensive for having fired US Attorneys for political reasons. The man in the middle is the boss, Alberto Gonzales. The White House is saying nothing, claiming that their memory is hazy. The articles below point at the justifications that are being offered to defend the actions taken. Today an editorial states that Gonzales’ loyalty to his boss is higher than the loyalty to the job he is installed to do.
Why are law enforcement officers (the judiciary) appointed by the president (the executive branch of government). Actually the same argument goes for the Supreme Court. If you really want to keep the branches separate, this seems like a backward way to go about it.
But you see what happens. Bush has appointed a lot of long time friends to high political positions. Loyalty matters. Competency may be less so.
By the way, there seems to be a lot of talk about accountability in the government. Saying “I am accountable” is not taking accountability, not by a long shot.
(Originals found here and here.)
The Reno Precedent
President Clinton’s attorney general fired all U.S. attorneys. So why is this different?
Thursday, March 15, 2007
THE LATEST they-do-it-too excuse for the undeniably botched and increasingly suspicious firings of U.S. attorneys involves the 1993 episode in which President Clinton’s new attorney general, Janet Reno, unceremoniously dismissed the first Bush administration’s holdover U.S. attorneys. By comparison with the Reno massacre, we are told, the Bush administration’s canning of eight U.S. attorneys was positively restrained; if you suspect political motives in the current controversy, so the argument goes, consider that when he was ousted by Reno, the U.S. attorney in the District, Jay Stephens, was just weeks away from deciding whether to indict House Ways and Means Chairman Daniel Rostenkowski (D-Ill.). Inconveniently for these conspiracy theorists, Mr. Rostenkowski was in fact indicted and convicted — and, yes, he ultimately was pardoned by President Clinton.
The Reno precedent is a red herring, not a useful comparison. The summary way she announced the move was, indeed, unusual if not unprecedented. But a turnover in the top prosecutorial jobs with a new administration taking power — especially one of a different party — was not. As we wrote at the time, “These are political appointees who owed their jobs to the last administration and have expected to be replaced ever since last November’s election. It would likely have happened earlier had the Clinton administration not made such an adventure out of the appointment of an attorney general.” And so President George W. Bush, properly and unsurprisingly, replaced all but a few U.S. attorneys during his first year in office. Indeed, while it would undoubtedly have been disruptive and unwise, it would not have been illegal or unethical for the president to follow the suggestion of his then-White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, to replace all the prosecutors again in his second term.
The question, then, is what to make of the president’s move to fire several of the prosecutors. This recent group firing, in the midst of a presidential term, is unprecedented; Mr. Bush was simply incorrect yesterday when he described it as “a customary practice by presidents.” But unprecedented doesn’t equal wrong: U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, and he is entitled to have in place prosecutors committed to his law enforcement priorities. (The potential for misusing the newly bestowed interim appointment authority to evade Senate confirmation is a separate, and troubling, concern.)
Internal administration e-mails released Tuesday offer some indications of those sorts of policy-related issues, from references to “woodshedding” the U.S. attorney in San Diego, Carol C. Lam, over immigration cases to complaints about whether Paul K. Charlton in Arizona and Daniel G. Bogden in Nevada were balking at obscenity prosecutions. But there are also ample grounds for suspicion about improper motives, including the involvement of White House political aides and telephone calls from lawmakers to prosecutors about politically sensitive cases. The dishonest conduct of the Justice Department has only served to deepen suspicions, to underscore the importance of figuring out exactly what transpired here and to distinguish this situation from the Reno precedent.
and here is another article with more background
Time to Go, Mr. Gonzales
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
“I believe in accountability,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales proclaimed yesterday at a news conference that was a self-serving masterpiece of passive voice and unpersuasive platitudes. “Like every CEO of a major organization, I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice. I acknowledge that mistakes were made here. I accept that responsibility. And my pledge to the American people is to find out what went wrong here, to access accountability and to make improvements so that the mistakes that occurred in this instance do not occur again in the future.”
Is there anyone left — seriously, is there a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — who has confidence in Gonzales’s capacity to fix this mess? Is there anyone who accepts Gonzales’s CEO analogy — and thinks that a sentient board of directors wouldn’t have fired him long ago?
Let’s assume Gonzales’s good faith: that he truly is upset about what happened on his watch, just as he was upset last week about the FBI’s cavalier mishandling of its authority to issue “national security letters,” and wants to make things right.
There is no reason to believe that he is capable of making a change. The portrait of the Gonzales Justice Department that emerges from the e-mails released yesterday, and from the attorney general’s own comments, is of an agency overseen by an absentee landlord, chronically clueless about what’s happening around him.
This is a man whose memory is so foggy that George W. Bush — not exactly Mr. Detail — has a sharper recollection of their conversations than the attorney general does. The president, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, told Gonzales that Republicans were complaining about prosecutors failing to aggressively pursue voter fraud. Gonzales doesn’t recall the conversation.
I’m sorry, is there somebody he’s paying more attention to than the president of the United States?
At his I’m-accountable-but-I-didn’t-know-anything news conference yesterday, Gonzales said he knew the White House had suggested canning all 93 U.S. attorneys, rejected that idea and then left things to his chief of staff. “I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on,” he said. “That’s basically what I knew as the attorney general.”
How reassuring. But, a reporter asked, how could it be that his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, was figuring out “which U.S. attorneys to . . . let go and you not know?”
Answer: “Well, again as — I accept responsibility for whatever happens here in this department. But I have 110,000 working in the department. Obviously, there are going to be decisions made that I’m not aware of all the time.”
Translation: “I’m going to tell you I’m responsible, because that’s what they tell me I have to say. But of course I’m not. It’s all Kyle Sampson’s fault. I’m hoping that if I say I’m accountable often enough, no one will actually hold me accountable.”
Ousting a group of top federal prosecutors isn’t some minor, inconsequential act. It’s the sort of thing that a responsible attorney general would be deeply immersed in. Gonzales’s depiction of his own marginality is the most damning evidence of his unfitness for the job.
The precise non-mistake mistake that Gonzales copped to yesterday was sharing “incomplete” — this is Gonzales-speak for wrong — information with Congress. Think about this: Gonzales first testified about the U.S. attorney firings on Jan. 19. His No. 2, Paul McNulty, testified on Feb. 6. Assistant Attorney General William Moschella testified March 6.
And it wasn’t until this week that Justice finally figured out it hadn’t figured out the whole story? If that’s true — and I’m not sure which would be worse — why should anyone believe this crowd is capable of getting its congressional story straight in the future?
Meantime, the pages of e-mails released yesterday show how — while Gonzales hummed happily above the fray — his lieutenants carefully choreographed the firings, down to making sure that the relevant senators were called at precisely the same time the ousted prosecutors were to be informed of their fates, and delaying the moment of truth until they left a meeting of federal prosecutors “to reduce chatter.”
When Arkansas senators balked at installing Karl Rove protege Tim Griffin in the U.S. attorney’s job there, Sampson recommended that the department “gum this to death.” If the senators ultimately balk, he said, “then we can tell them we’ll look for other candidates . . . and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in ‘good faith’ of course.” Of course.
In his now famous “overblown personnel matter” column in USA Today last week, Gonzales wrote, “While I am grateful for the public service of these seven U.S. attorneys, they simply lost my confidence.” (Or did he mean Kyle Sampson’s confidence?)
It’s time — past time — for the president to say the same, perhaps more quietly and more politely, about his friend, his counselor and his failed attorney general.
Posted: social/culture, politics
18
March
2007
Usually Kathleen Parker writes articles that I’d rather not remember, but once in a while she does leave me with a few nuggets.
Recently there was this about people’s earlier discretions coming back to them after having been posted on the web. The scary part here is no that people were denied jobs because of something stupid they did, but because of something somebody else said about them.
I recently got an email from a college admission officer asking me to not google prospective freshmen for background. Apparently lots of interviewers have been using the Internet for informal background checks and because the younger generations are sharing so much more of their lives (and lifestyles) all this information can make it part of the discussion. The officer’s recommendation was to not make it so, and to just leave it off.
It’s one thing to put things like this into the public commons will the full knowledge that your words can come back and bite you, but it’s a different thing when people write things about you, perhaps without you knowing. Gruntled co-workers, a server who didn’t get a tip, a homeless person you ignored on the street - any action could be documented and reflect upon you. One you may be able to control, but the other one is basically out of your hands.
It’s a brave new world. Be careful. Or perhaps, be truthful, be kind.
(Original found here.)
Peeka-Boo!
Published March 11, 2007
by Kathleen Parker, Orlando Sentinel
WASHINGTON — It seemed like a good idea at the time.
How often have we all pasted that cartoon balloon over the mental image of a youthful indiscretion? Thank goodness no one had a camera, we might add.
Now everybody has a camera, and youthful indiscretions are captured for all time. And suddenly, we’re not so young anymore.
The MySpace-Facebook-dot-com generation has come of age, and some are finding that their silly stunts have come back to haunt them as they enter the grown-up marketplace. Others are finding that their private moments are not so private after all.
Three young women featured anonymously in a recent Washington Post article told horror stories of their attempts to find jobs, only to discover that they may have been disqualified by online postings by virtual strangers. Gossip and graphics included.
One, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate and Yale law student who had gotten articles published in law journals, interviewed at 16 firms for a summer job and received no offers. How could that be?
It turned out that she and others had been discussed in not-so-flattering terms on an online message board, AutoAdmit, which is run by a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and a 23-year-old insurance agent, according to the Post. The board boasts up to 1 million visitors a month, and postings can be anonymous.
And vicious.
Another woman featured in the Post story is a Yale law student and Fulbright scholar who graduated summa cum laude. Not only was she the subject of a derogatory AutoAdmit chat, but photographs of her were posted on a “hottest” law-school student contest site with graphic discussions of her attributes.
Not everyone hates to be considered “hot,” but this woman was afraid to go to the gym because visitors to the site were encouraged to take cell-phone pictures of her. Beware the chatterbox in the shower stall next door. Another young woman felt afraid when online chatter about her led to an anonymous sexual threat.
The tension between free speech and privacy is nothing new, but the debate has become more complicated by the explosion in video portability and networking Web sites. In today’s uncivil society, the stakes are high and the rules are low.
Invite anonymity to the mix and hostility finds release in the vacuum created when shame went missing.
Unfortunately for some, employers are now using the Internet to vet job candidates. They, too, can be privy to those just-for-fun college forays, as well as to commentary from those with an ax to grind.
The Post reported research showing that about half of U.S. hiring officials use the Internet to evaluate job applicants and that about one-third had denied employment based on material produced by an Internet search engine. Could it happen to you? Apparently, it could happen to anyone.
Today’s college students frequently post their bios with photos on Facebook.com. Innocent and inexperienced in the realm of repercussions, they don’t hesitate to display their silliest selves, clothed and often not.
The generation that was serenaded by Madonna and marinated in sexual imagery now dwells in a high-tech, freewheeling, sexually explicit environment where porn is the new risque and everybody’s gone wild.
Ivy League and other large universities frequently are home to sex magazines featuring students who say posing nude is “fun” and a “badge of honor,” according to last Sunday’s New York Times magazine. What’s the big deal? “A body is a body is a body, and I’m proud of my body, and why not show my body?” asks Alecia Oleyourryk, co-founder of Boink, a “user-friendly porn” magazine produced by students at Boston University.
“It’s not going to keep me from having a job.”
Famous last words, perhaps.
It is true that a body is just a body, and everybody has one. But those who’ve lived awhile know that what we “knew” with certainty in our 20s isn’t necessarily what we come to know in our 30s, 40s and 50s. When you sexualize and objectify yourself, it’s asking a lot that others — including future bosses — refrain from doing the same.
Advice to the young: If you can’t imagine your mother or father doing something, you probably shouldn’t do it either. Your kids may remind you of that someday.
Posted: social/culture
18
March
2007
Two articles coming back to back regarding school lunch programs. Apparently students are being denied lunch, if they lose their lunch tickets. What’s worse: having hungry (and fidgety) children in the classroom, or teaching them responsibility by not losing the tickets in the first place. The solution: beg the population. “If each person in the community gave just one dollar …”
What about the parents? Isn’t that what parents should do, ensure that their kids are fed, rested, and clothed. No, the response is
It’s about aloha, loving the kid. Why deny them lunch? … People are obviously not thinking about the welfare of the child.
Yikes. I’d understand it for kids in kindergarten or the early elementary grades (but then you might not want to ask them to handle “meal tickets” in the first place), but once you get older …
(Originals found here and here.)
School lunch policies questioned
by Lisa Huynh
West Hawaii Today
Monday, March 12, 2007
Prompted by an incident in which a Kohala High School student was denied lunch because he lost his lunch ticket, Hawaii Island administrators are revisiting a long-standing debate about school lunch policies.
The question of whether students should be given lunch when they lose their lunch tickets or forget to bring their lunch money — and whether grade level should guide policy — is a complicated one involving education and finances.
The Department of Education does not have an umbrella policy for how schools should handle lunch distribution. The issues are dealt with on a school-by-school basis, said Randy Moore of the Office of Business Services.
Often schools will provide lunches to students regardless of the situation but in doing so at least several Big Island schools have accrued school-lunch-loan debts. Further, educators have expressed the need to hold students accountable for their actions.
Lani Eugenio, the mother of a Kohala High student, recently appealed to the state DOE and the Board of Education to address problems related to school lunch policy after her son was denied lunch when he lost his lunch ticket and wasn’t able to pay for its replacement.
In a memo to the DOE and BOE titled “Feed Our Children,” Eugenio wrote that her “child lost his lunch ticket and asked that the $5 replacement fee be taken out of his account, which had nearly $100. It was denied and he was denied lunch.”
She said the department and board responded to her letter but have made no changes to the system.
Kohala High School Principal Catherine Bratt said the school has attempted to address the issue of lost school lunch tickets by offering to keep the tickets in the cafeteria, where students can retrieve and return them at meal times.
“If they haven’t had a ticket, we’ve basically given them wiggle room,” Bratt said. However, unpaid loans have led to the school accruing outstanding loans close to $50. Bratt said she’s heard of other schools that have had significantly higher debts from lending students money for lunch.
Hawaii’s public schools have automated systems in which parents are notified immediately when school lunch accounts are running low, said Bratt.
Schools are reimbursed by the federal and state governments for free and reduced lunches. The data from the lunch programs aids federal government tracking of low-income students.
In the 2005-2006 school year, roughly 6.6 million free meals and 2.3 million reduced-price meals were served in Hawaii, according to Glenna Owens, DOE school food services program manager. The state received about $18 million in federal reimbursements for free meals, and about $5.5 million for reduced-price meals.
West Hawaii Complex Area Superintendent Art Souza said the general understanding is all students are going to be fed. Before becoming superintendent, Souza said he inherited a school-lunch-loan debt when he was principal at Waikoloa Elementary.
“The difficulty is, how do we collect the school lunch loans?” Souza said. “It’s an ongoing problem and there’s no right or wrong answer.”
He added there are many levels of understanding on the issue. For some schools, making students responsible for their money and tickets is a form of teaching civic responsibility.
Standard practice from the state office is for elementary schools never to deny children food, said Owens. However, the same practice does not hold for high schools, likely because the students are expected to be more responsible.
Eugenio believes students should never be held accountable for their tickets, and that the school administration is responsible for feeding the students so they are not malnourished.
“It’s about aloha, loving the kid. Why deny them lunch?” she said. “… People are obviously not thinking about the welfare of the child.”
A different approach to solve the same problem.
Konawaena program ensures kids are fed
by Lisa Huynh
West Hawaii Today
Friday, March 16, 2007
If each person in the community gave just one dollar, no student would go hungry. This idea led to a plan and a realization for Konawaena High School teacher Alex Cadang.
The lifelong educator’s idea came from an encounter with a student who, hungry and embarrassed, silently left the school cafeteria after being denied lunch because her meal account was empty.
“I was angry and approached the cafeteria manager about the situation. I asked, ‘Why not just give her the food?’ and he explained that he needed to follow the policies,” said Cadang, an in-school suspension specialist.
Instead of fixating on reasons why students should not or could not be fed, he sought a way in which they would.
Shortly after his encounter with the student, Cadang approached friend Ed Finnegan with the idea of starting a fund. It would help feed students who qualify for free or reduced lunch in emergency situations.
“What we tried to do was keep it very simple … children who have meal cards that are depleted may use our funds,” Finnegan said. “… Regardless of the amount of money you’re donating, you know that you are funding meals for kids.”
With the help of caring people in and outside of the school, and with the support of the Principal Shawn Suzuki, Cadang created the “No Child Left Hungry” Program. Despite Cadang’s not having advertised the program, word spread quickly around campus and many stepped forward to make donations.
“What’s wonderful about this is that people in the community have such a passion for the students. They just want to help our kids and families,” said Suzuki. “… This goes beyond giving money. They are not only giving their money, they are giving their time.”
Finnegan and Cadang call the plan a simple solution from simple folks, but they also acknowledge the larger implications of their collective efforts.
“I’d rather have 1,000 people give $1 than one person getting a tax write-off, because then people will understand the plight of our children,” said Cadang.
Konawaena is not alone in struggling to deal with state and federal school lunch policies prohibiting meal loans. West Hawaii Today highlighted the issue in a recent article involving Kohala High School.
Schools are reimbursed by the federal and state governments for free and reduced lunches. The data from the lunch programs aids federal government tracking of low-income students. In the 2005-2006 school year, roughly 6.6 million free meals and 2.3 million reduced-price meals were served in Hawaii, according to Glenna Owens, Department of Education school food services program manager. The state received about $18 million in federal reimbursements for free meals, and about $5.5 million for reduced-price meals.
Cadang said he wanted to share his school’s story in the hopes that it would help others determine their own solutions.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to look beyond the problem,” Cadang said. “We think we have a model that might help other schools.”
Even though Cadang said he knows the system will be abused by some, he still believes it is worthwhile.
The DOE does not have a policy for how schools should handle lunch distribution. The issues are dealt with on a school-by-school basis, said Randy Moore of the Office of Business Services.
Suzuki said implementation of the program does not negate the fact that students must be responsible for their meal cards.
“The expectation is students will still be responsible for their cards and showing us their identification,” he said. “This is just really a different vehicle for addressing the problems and I sure hope it will do some good.”
School cafeteria manager Kip Yamamoto said keeping meal cards in the cafeteria is difficult because, at the high school level, the students come in at different times and there are too many cards to look after.
“I told (Cadang) that (the program) is a good idea because there are kids that come in without cards or money. It’s a good thing when we can pull up the funds from a general account,” said Yamamoto.
Although he does not deal directly with the students most of the time, Yamamoto said it is hard for the cafeteria staff to turn away students.
For more information, contact Alex Cadang at 323-4500.
Posted: social/culture, local, education
8
March
2007
At the GAP this weekend I saw a big display of boyfriend trousers. Just caught the commercial on TV with a guy and girl on stage to the music “anything you can do I can do better.” Girl is without pants, guy is with pants, girls rips off guy’s pant’s and puts them on. Queue to “boyfriend trousers.”
What are boyfriend trousers? Are they like leather jackets? Signs of an adoring love’s willing to share clothing?
But just imagine if men met in the locker room to check each other out. “Hey, what is that you’re wearing?” “Oh, those are my new girlfriend trousers?” Quite the different reaction.
So what is it about male female relationships and our reactions? Women wear tiny bathing suits, men wear bags. Female frontal nudity is ok, male frontal nudity is not ok. A woman making love to a woman is being asked for, a man making love to a man is just …
People talk about equality of the sexes, but this on a very primal level seems filled with obstacles. It’s entirely cultural and probably entirely different elsewhere on the globe. I’m not advocating change, but just observing, how many of us work deep inside. Obviously boyfriend trousers are cool. Even for men?
Posted: social/culture, design
8
March
2007
Had this strange thought on the ride home today: whatever happened to Tariq Aziz?
He was the foreign minister and deputy prime minister and basically the face of Iraq before the war started. You saw quite a bit of him on TV while the US provided lip service to diplomacy. He seemed diplomatic, intelligent, and reasonable - not at all the crazy madman out to destroy the Zionists plotting to create undue influence in the region, ready to strike back in a seconds notice with Weapons of Mass Destruction. In a nation of muslims, in a political party of a specific sect, he was a Christian. I thought that could have been an asset. Last thing I remember, is that sometimes after the invasion started, he turned himself in to the US Authorities in Iraq. He wasn’t hunted down, he actually went to them.
That was years ago. What has happened since then? Is he still in some jail? Or in exile? Are Iraqis guarding him, or is he in U.S. custody? Was he tortured for inside information (he should have had lots), or was he treated with respect as a former senior government official - like “diplomatic immunity”? Saddam is dead now, so what happens to the rest of the former Iraq government? Remember the deck of cards with the 50 plus top officials they were looking for right at the invasion? What happened to all of them?
Wikipedia has a short article on him that provides few details. (Wikipedia Article here.) But it really doesn’t offer much of an explanation, or status update. He’s in jail awaiting trial.
So while I’m sitting here watching comedy shows, with life going on as usual, we don’t reflect much on what happens elsewhere? These “things” happen, and then they’re over. The problem is that there are people involved, real people, and all this time while this is out of our minds, there are real people some place in a jail, probably having tried to do the right thing (at least in their mind), now waiting for some trial that may execute them.
I don’t know if he was a good guy or a bad guy, but does it really matter? Whatever did happen to Tariq Aziz? Why don’t we care?
Posted: social/culture, politics
7
March
2007
Wombat had to go across the pond to visit the Big City of Honolulu. We had an early official appointment and then had the rest of the day to enjoy ourselves, before our scheduled trip back. What do you do in a big city? For us farm folks from the countryside it’s just exciting to step out the big International Airport and see nothing but concrete as far as the eye can see, eight-lane highways and traffic jams, dozens of car dealerships and lots of fancy cars, big box stores and self-storage places to keep the stuff, correctional center, and other buildings much higher than just three floors. What are simple, country folks to do in this place but … go shopping at the mall.
Honolulu has a nice hang out mall in Ala Moana. It’s 380 stores, three levels, semi outdoors, pretty much a long stretch around an open courtyard, with fishponds and plants. It’s nice, no trouble wasting the better part of a day here. And for us who are shopping deprived, it’s very, very exciting.
So here are a few random impressions of bumpkins in consumerland.
One shopping has become so compartmentalized that you can tell within 5 seconds whether you’re the intended customer. Skulls above the door - nope. Skinny pink bikini bits in the windows, nope (and who calls a swimsuit brand “Raisins”?) Motorcycles extruding out the front wall - nope. Pink flowerly dresses - nope. Everything is designed to look nice, but everything is so thought out, that you have an immediate reaction “yes” or “no.” And I would say for most of the stores the answer is no.
Now design is relative. Prada, Fendi, Gucci all charge you lots of money for their products. You get design and fashion, but we get few reactions for “style.” There are lots of Japanese though in the store, buying status symbols. From a window display I finally realized what the Fendi logo means.
We head into Tiffanys because we’re expecting some design, and sure they have pieces by designers, but it’s definitely split into a “modern” and “tranditional” section. I see some weird pieces designed by Frank Gehry (what else would you expect), but they somehow look like Holocaust memorials, rather aggressive for jewelry. There’s very little that’s simple, I mean simple, simple.
Across from Tiffanys is a Jimmy Choo, shoewear made famous through television series. Looks like there’s unusual things in there (it doesn’t really matter what it is), but looking at the two sales guys gives me enough heebee-jeebies to not get me within 6 ft of the front door. I don’t even want to be “hi, how are you doing today”ed.
Next to Jimmy Choo is a Coach store. Coach used to sell leatherwear, you know belts, wallets, purses, travel bags, and suitcases. How quaint. Now they sell clothing, eye glasses, and fashion items. It’s not about the product, it’s about the brand. And brand is everything. Oakley used to make sunglasses, now I can’t tell that they have anything to do with sunglasses. Just look at the amount of surfstores in the mall, and the amount of surfing stuff sold in them. Or take a look at Banana Republic. Way back when I remembered it as a two level store in a house on Newbury Street in Boston, selling safari clothes and souvenirs upstairs and travel literature and language books downstairs. The current Banana Republic sells some souvenir shirts with the original logo and some Rhinocerous line drawing on them. But the current Banana Republic has nothing to do with a Banana Republic, I wonder if people understand those T-shirts.
But for more branding take a look at Apple. The Apple Stores are very popular, but not for the products, but for the free Internet on their computers. As far as the products go … hmmm. I really don’t like the look of their current products. It’s all nice and clean, but those big monitors look like shiny plastic. The laptops are so unadorned, they almost seem thoughtless, like the only purpose for them was to look simple, at the expense of any personality. They don’t even need to work well (though I think they do).
We spent some time at the Macy’ - “America’s Department Store” it said somewhere. We had some gift certificates that had to be spent. One had expired two weeks ago, we got it extended. As we’re checking for simple tops, I’m watching the clothes on sale and watching the people shop. There sure is a lot of variety out here, but very few pieces I would consider picking. You can tell right away when people are conscious in their decisions, the Eileen Fischer stuff stood out right away in cuts, colors, and materials. But all of the stuff comes with labels, and very little of it causes a response. Who comes up with all these products.
Macy’s also has a few beds for display. We were tired and had to testdrive them. Nice, thick top cover, very comfortable. Found an error on the price label - it said $9600 for the mattress. Yup, for the mattress. We bought a bedsheet that was on sale. Now we’re left with $1.42 on our giftcard. I doubt there’s anything in Macy’s for $1.42.
What else. Realized that Williams Sonoma and Barnes & Nobles are high density stores, that is lots of different products per square foot. Luxury good stores are low density stores, oftentimes sells what seems like less than a dozen products. You spend a lot more time in a high density store, and it’s much more fun to browse and discover. Price is not necessarily the issue, because Williams Sonoma is not cheap.
But you can already tell that shopping here may be no different from any higher-end shopping mall in the country, and yet it is still an Hawaii experience. There were just a few more impressions. 1) I saw a local TV personality doing his lunch shopping at the mall. 2) Found out the reason why security cops are always stationed near the escalators when a bunch of four teens took a joy ride up and down. Escalators are rare around here. 3) I found lockers. These are the first set of lockers I’ve found in the states. They’re not cheap, $1 per hour, $5 per day, but they’re there, tucked away in a dark alley in the bottom level. A place where you can store your bags for the day. What a novel idea, unknown to Hawaii. The airports don’t have them, and we don’t have railway stations here. And I get excited about seeing a bank of metal boxes.
At the end of the day we took the bus back to the airport. Our loot - the above bedsheet and a pair of pants. For lunch we headed into the food court at the Shirokiya Department Store - fresh tempura, sashimi, custard pancakes, marinated cuttlefish and mackerel, ocean salad and kim chee daikon. All “not normal” and all good.
So boy that was a fun day. But let’s not go crazy. Now it’s time to jump back to the quiet life in the wombat burrow.
Posted: social/culture, design, local
4
March
2007
Nice, clear, calm, informative article from a police officer explaining while drunk drivers are put back on the street as “released on their own recognizance.”
First time you hear this you go - whaaaaa? But then you get some background and it sounds perfectly reasonable, given what we have, and what the police has to deal with. What other choice is there in this environment?
DUI procedures
How the release works
Saturday, March 3, 2007 8:43 AM HST
Two people recently submitted letters questioning the reasoning behind the release of persons arrested for driving under the influence (DUI) on their own recognizance. The reasoning is multi-faceted and I hope to clarify for your readers.
In the late 1980s, a design for the planned Kealakehe Police Station was submitted to the county council for approval. That building plan was then reduced by about 33 percent, as the council could not foresee the future growth of Kona.
The current Kealakehe Police Station was built with a cell block that has nine normal cells and one rarely used padded cell. While that cell block was adequate during the early 1990s, it quickly became too small, as the population and number of arrests increased over the years.
By the early 2000s, it was not unusual for two prisoners to be placed in every cell on any given weekend. As remarkable as it may seem, there have actually been times when three prisoners shared a five- by eight-foot cell.
In the 1990’s, an organization called Mother’s Against Drunk Driving (MADD) pressured the Legislature into passing new laws regarding drunk driving.
These laws created a lot of extra paperwork for the arresting officer and basically increased the arrest process time dramatically.
In the old days, a single officer could make a DUI arrest, process the arrestee, complete the paperwork and be back out on the road patrolling within one to two hours.
These days, if the officer is unfortunate enough to try and do the entire process alone, the average officer is looking at a minimum of 3-5 hours at the station. Because of this, officers pitch in and help each other with the process. This results in two or three officers being off the road for an hour or two.
It also means that two or three officers are going to be subpoenaed for court at the time of the trial. That results in more overtime and more officers being pulled off the road if the trial occurs during the officers’ tour of duty.
When an arrestee is charged and held on bail, all of the paperwork needs to be completed by the end of the shift. That includes the several pages of arrest report the officer dictates and transcribers in Hilo prepare the following morning. The Prosecutor’s Office expects the entire report by the time the prisoner shows up at Kona District Court on the morning after the arrest.
By releasing the prisoner on his own recognizance (ROR) and giving the arrestee a future court date, the officers can complete some of the paperwork and get back on the road as quickly as possible. The officers call someone to pick up the drunk driver (usually a friend or family member) and hold the arrestee’s keys at the station until the next morning. The officer can then complete the paperwork at a slower time.
This may seem unreasonable to the uninformed, but when your beat partners are responding to fights without adequate backup or calls on your beat, it is important.
The decision to release a prisoner on his or her own recognizance is made by the arresting officer and confirmed by the desk supervisor.
While it may seem shocking to your readers, DUI arrestees are frequently released “ROR.” With limited cell space, a huge amount of paperwork (for DUI arrests), and a system that requires the police to jump numerous hurdles while trying to maintain a safe level of manpower on the streets, releasing a drunk driver to the care of a sober friend is a necessary evil.
Ret. Sgt. Bradley Main
Kailua-Kona
Posted: social/culture, local
2
March
2007
Let’s ignore the precise definitions of those terms, but with the recent Dow Jones stock dump on Tuesday, I had a curious thought. We’re always advised to invest in a balanced portfolio so that events like Tuesday’s don’t impact us. But investing in a balanced portfolio is kind of like a getting vaccinated for the Flu. The social part isn’t getting yourself protected, the social part is you preventing the transmission of the flu.
Now if I have a balanced portfolio that won’t drop much, then I don’t need to panic. If everybody else does the same, then nobody panics and this will quickly relevel.
So in fact the stockbrokers with their balanced approach are reengineering society as a whole to keep things running smooth.
This has nothing to do with survival of the fittest, because that would mean, act fast, get out of there while it’s still high, then get back in when it has dropped to its minimum. Let the others be the suckers.
In fact, there’s also the Kennedy quote, “A Rising Tide Lift All Boats.” Well, as long as you have a boat that’s true. But the assumption is, I do well, so everybody does well. That’s the stockmarket, though in the stockmarket some boats certainly float higher than others.
Posted: social/culture, personal finance
2
March
2007
Don’t know what to do with this article, summarizing the problems of capitalism. Everybody adopts it, though people seem to call it different things. What is the alternative? To consume less?
The warnings are there. Everybody assumes that it is the only system that can work, and the author isn’t willing to step far enough back to look for a drastic alternative. Reducing our consumption reminds me of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” The solutions are all out there, but do those solutions have enough impact to actually turn the tide?
(Original found here.)
Global capitalism now has no serious rivals. But it could destroy itself
Our planet cannot long sustain the momentous worldwide embrace of the manufacture of desires
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday February 22, 2007
The Guardian
What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it. And now the members of Israel’s oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted to introduce variable salaries based on individual performance. Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient.
Here is the great fact about the early 21st century, so big and taken for granted that we rarely stop to think how extraordinary it is. It was not ever thus. “Can capitalism survive?” asked the British socialist thinker GDH Cole, in a book published in 1938 under the title Socialism in Evolution. His answer was no. Socialism would succeed it. Most readers of this newspaper in 1938 would probably have agreed.
What are the big ideological alternatives being proposed today? Hugo Chávez’s “21st century socialism” still looks like a local or at most a regional phenomenon, best practised in oil-rich states. Islamism, sometimes billed as democratic capitalism’s great competitor in a new ideological struggle, does not offer an alternative economic system (aside from the peculiarities of Islamic finance) and anyway does not appeal beyond the Muslim umma. Most anti-globalists, altermondialistes and, indeed, green activists, are much better at pointing out the failings of global capitalism than they are at suggesting systemic alternatives. “Capitalism should be replaced by something nicer,” read a placard at a May Day demonstration in London a few years back.
Of course there’s a problem of definition here. Is what Russian or Chinese state-owned companies do really capitalism? Isn’t private ownership the essence of capitalism? One of America’s leading academic experts on capitalism, Edmund Phelps of Columbia University, has an even more restrictive definition. For him, what we have in much of continental Europe, with multiple stakeholders, is not capitalism but corporatism. Capitalism, he says, is “an economic system in which private capital is relatively free to innovate and invest without permission from the state, green lights from communities and regions, from workers, and other so-called social partners”. In which case most of the world is not capitalist. I find this much too restrictive. Surely what we have across Europe are multiple varieties of capitalism, from more liberal market economies like Britain and Ireland to more coordinated stakeholder economies like Germany and Austria.
In Russia and China, there’s a spectrum from state to private ownership. Other considerations than maximising profit play a large part in the decision-making of state-controlled companies, but they too operate as players in national and international markets and increasingly they also speak the language of global capitalism. At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, I heard Gazprom’s Alexander Medvedev defend the company’s record by saying that it is one of the world’s top five in market capitalisation and constantly looking for value for its shareholders - who happen to include the Russian state. At the very least, this suggests a hegemony of the discourse of global capitalism. China’s “Leninist capitalism” is a very big borderline case, but the crab-like movement of its companies towards what we would recognise as more rather than less capitalist behaviour is far clearer than any movement of its state towards democracy.
Does this lack of any clear ideological alternative mean that capitalism is secure for years to come? Far from it. With the unprecedented triumph of globalised capitalism over the last two decades come new threats to its own future. They are not precisely the famous “contradictions” that Marx identified, but they may be even bigger. For a start, the history of capitalism over the last hundred years hardly supports the view that it is an automatically self-correcting system. As George Soros (who should know) points out, global markets are now more than ever constantly out of equilibrium - and teetering on the edge of a larger disequilibrium. Again and again, it has needed the visible hands of political, fiscal and legal correction to complement the invisible hand of the market. The bigger it gets, the harder it can fall.
An oil tanker is more stable than a sailing dinghy, but if the tanker’s internal bulkheads are breached and the oil starts swilling from side to side in a storm, you have the makings of a major disaster. Increasingly, the world’s capital is like oil in the hold of one giant tanker, with ever fewer internal bulkheads to stop it swilling around.
Then there is inequality. One feature of globalised capitalism seems to be that it rewards its high performers disproportionately, not just in the City of London but also in Shanghai, Moscow and Mumbai. What will be the political effects of having a small group of super-rich people in countries where the majority are still super-poor? In more developed economies, such as Britain and America, a reasonably well-off middle-class with a slowly improving personal standard of living may be less bothered by a small group of the super-rich - whose antics also provide them with a regular diet of tabloid-style entertainment. But if a lot of middle-class people begin to feel they are personally losing out to the same process of globalisation that is making those few fund managers stinking rich, while at the same time outsourcing their own middle-class jobs to India, then you may have a backlash. Watch Lou Dobbs on CNN for a taste of the populist and protectionist rhetoric to come.
Above all, though, there is the inescapable dilemma that this planet cannot sustain six-and-a-half billion people living like today’s middle-class consumers in its rich north. In just a few decades, we would use up the fossil fuels that took some 400 million years to accrete - and change the earth’s climate as a result. Sustainability may be a grey and boring word, but it is the biggest single challenge to global capitalism today. However ingenious modern capitalists are at finding alternative technologies - and they will be very ingenious - somewhere down the line this is going to mean richer consumers settling for less rather than more.
Marx thought capitalism would have a problem finding consumers for the goods that improving techniques of production enabled it to churn out. Instead, it has become expert in a new branch of manufacturing: the manufacture of desires. The genius of contemporary capitalism is not simply that it gives consumers what they want but that it makes them want what it has to give. It’s that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is unsustainable on a global scale. But are we prepared to abandon it? We may be happy to insulate our lofts, recycle our newspapers and cycle to work, but are we ready to settle for less so others can have more? Am I? Are you?
Posted: social/culture
