This Pale Blue Dot

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47EBLD-ISyc]

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Worse Housing Crisis Looms

NEW YORK - Home prices tumbled by the steepest rate ever in May, according to a closely watched housing index released Tuesday, as the housing slump deepened nationwide. The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city index dropped by 15.8 percent in May compared with a year ago, a record decline since its inception in 2000. The 10-city index plunged 16.9 percent, its biggest decline in its 21-year history.

I predicted this time would come back in about 2003. I saw the signs of a looming crisis and told everyone I knew. I wish I had this blog then so I had something to point back at, but alas that isn’t the case. Things were pretty good then and no one believed me. Such is life. There are those who haven’t forgotten, I won’t let them.

The pendulum is swinging the other way at the moment. With home prices falling and financing even harder I predict we are about to screw up again. The worst problem with lending during the prelude to the sub prime crisis was the bottom end limit. Katy and I tried several times to get mortgages on properties we could afford even in our present economic situation. Despite good credit we lacked enough cash to make the twenty and thirty percent or higher down mortgages under $50k required. Oddly enough these same lenders kept offering us pre-approved zero down auto loans for upwards of $60k but wouldn’t finance a $25k four bedroom house that had been appraised at $100k. With falling home prices they are in even worse of a bind.

After some investigation with local lenders and real estate agents specializing in foreclosed properties what I have found doesn’t prove promising. Where the bottom end of the standard mortgage lending limit was $50k locally this has jumped to over $65K now. With falling home values and large numbers of foreclosed on homes, these lenders seem to be backing themselves into a corner. In a quick local foreclosure search I found more than a hundred homes that sold three to five years ago in the $80k to $100k range. The current appraisal is now in the $50k to $70k. The asking price of these homes, mostly from lenders shouldering the burdens is in the $25k to $40k. These lenders say they want to sell these properties, quickly but refuse to write mortgages at the level they are selling them. I was directed to several low price specialists who are no asking as much as 50% and none lower than 30% on these homes. This is too much for many people.

It appears the greed of the sub-prime crisis has not abated. Simply put people who could afford monthly mortgage payments for ten or fifteen years are being left out in the cold because they lack sufficient cash down payments. Mark my words if something is not done, soon to sell these properties to people that will live in them there will be an even worse crisis.

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News Round Up 7-28-08

Indian Police Raid American Ex-Pat:
Police raided the home of an American citizen living in Mumbai and
seized a computer from which an email claiming responsibility for an
attack that killed 45 was reportedly sent.

Homes Destroyed In Yosemite Wildfires:
Hot weather
hampered efforts to contain a fast-moving wildfire near an entrance to
Yosemite National Park that had already destroyed 12 homes and forced
the evacuation of nearly 200 others.

The DOJ Plays CYA:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new Justice Department report concludes that politics
illegally influenced the hiring of career prosecutors and immigration
judges, and largely lays the blame on top aides to former Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales…. He knew nothing about this because he is as clueless as W!

Miles Driven In May Fell:
This includes the Labor Day Weekend. The high price of gas is finally doing the one bit of good it can cause. We still need to drive less though.

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The Point of Prison

The point of prison isn’t to find out why they call it the pokey.  Susan Atkins, a former Manson Family member, is wasting away in prison with cancer, amputations, and generally at death’s door step.  She applied for parole because of these conditions and was flatly denied.  This was as much a political decision as anything,simply because of how famous her crimes were.  This however violates professional ethics, common sense, and probably good economic policy.

The point of prison is not to punish criminals for their crimes, it is to keep society safe from them while we supposedly rehabilitate them.  We give out life sentences and order the death penalty because we believe they can not be redeemed and society will not be safe if they walk the streets.  Such is the case of Susan Atkins.  At least it was the point of Susan Atkins incarceration.

Let us flash forward three and a half decades.  Susan Atkins is dying.  She has terminal brain cancer.  She has had a leg amputated, and from some accounts suffering mental problems.  The parole board said no to her request for release, why?  Does she continue to pose a threat to society?  No.  Will releasing her jeopardize the political careers of some people?  Quite possibly.  So rather than doing their job the board members chose to save their own ass and not follow the basic tenants of incarceration.

Not only was that decision against any sort of professional ethics, it doesn’t make for good common sense either.  California prisons are already overcrowded and underfunded, removing those that are no longer a threat to society from this system is the easiest way to fix the problem.  They do not have to be let to roam the streets without supervision, but neither should the be kept in prison past the point of it being useful.  Secondly hers and others illnesses is hitting this system hard financially.  Medical care in prison is very costly, just the guards used when she was transported off site has run the system over three hundred thousand dollars, let alone the nearly two million her care has cost.  This is care that would have cost ten percent of that outside of the prison system.  This is a stupid waste of money and resources.

No matter what happens we can’t bring back Sharron Tate or the others Susan Atkins had a part in killing.  I am not saying we should forgive those crimes either.  I am however saying we should release her to her husbands care, because there is no valid reason to keep her incarcerated.  She might enjoy that last bit of freedom, but so what, the point of prison was never to punish her.

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Child Molester Walks Free In Florida

(CNN) — For nearly two years, the South Florida middle school art teacher forced the boy to have sex in a classroom supply closet… But a year later, Mohanlal has yet to spend a day in prison.

I personally am shocked and horrified by this. At first reading I wanted to rage and scream. Then I wanted to know why. Wanting to know why, left me with the unmistakable need to blame someone.

In asking myself how this could possibly happen, I didn’t like the answer I found. This judge is known for being a conservative, in a place where they steal elections for republicans, ban adults from paying to hear 2Live Crew from saying “Fuck”, and think anyone who advocates teaching evolution as an alternative theory to creationism in public schools is a dangerous liberal. It is a place where teachers on summer who go to the beach in modest bikinis have lost their jobs for showing too much skin. If the bible belt runs through Ohio, then Broward County Florida is the tip of the dick. If a conservative judge in a place like that can give a post trial bond to a child molester, it can only mean one thing. The prosecutor fucked up so magnificently that this case will be over turned, and this judge is playing CYA, for himself, the county and the state.

I shudder to think what the prosecutor must have done. Simple mistakes are one thing, people aren’t perfect. But if you do something so blatantly illegal that a child molester will have to be kept out on bond while they wait to hand you your ass, I get far more than angry. I hate prosecutorial misconduct almost as much as I hate child molesters. I just can’t fathom how you can go forward with a case that leaves little doubt, and then deliberately do something illegal to let him walk free. There days when I think Lennin was right and we should should all the lawyers.

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Quit Mowing The Grass Part II

The more bio-fuel we make the less food we can grow. We already produce an excess of corn which is fuel intensive to grow. We aren’t using crop land to grow the switch grass though we could and still come out ahead. We can drive the cost of growing crops down by harvesting with bio-fuel powered machinery.

• Ethanol puts out more pollution than gasoline. In some studies this is the case. However automakers never wanted to work on the problem, because they were one in bed with the oil companies and secondly because there was no demand to do it.
• Ethanol will harm my cars engine. This is partly true. Old gaskets and seals won’t withstand long term ethanol use. Many of those cars and trucks need to be taken off the road anyways which is slowly being done by attrition. We have the technology to make gaskets and seals which are safe for use with ethanol, some even do better against ethanol than they do gasoline.
• It will cost more to make ethanol burning cars than it does gasoline burners. False. This is just one more thing automakers say to keep people from using ethanol.
• The price of gas won’t go down. Well duh, nothing is going to make the price of gas go below $3.00 a gallon ever again.
• It is better to buy or use diesel machinery than ethanol burners. In some things it most certainly is and there is nothing stopping us from planting different, highly productive crops to make that too. The goal isn’t just to produce fuel it is to cut down on how much is wasted by grass mowing. The fact we can make fuel from alternate plants is just a bonus.
• Refineries cost too much to build for the government. False. Huge refineries cost a lot of money, but a cellulosic or bio-diesel production facility doesn’t have to be huge. You can easily produce small ones to handle local amounts of bio-matter for very little money. Secondly there is nothing that says it has to be a public processor. A local processor would encourage others to use local unused lands for the same crop, producing even more fuel.
• Expensive pipeline infrastructure would been to be built. False. Sending the final product away from the production facility defeats the purpose of local production and consumption. Secondly we need new a pipeline infrastructure anyways. Most of our current system is old and starting to show signs of degradation.

Like my call to stop cutting grass on an individual level I am not saying we should totally eliminate the task. There are some places that need cutting and some very good reasons to do it in others. However simply reducing the amount of time we spend doing it will save not only money, but lessen the impact we make on our environment.

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Fugitive War Criminal Arrested

Yes, a war criminal has been arrested, and no it isn’t George W Bush.

(CNN) –Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been arrested after more than a decade as a fugitive from war crimes charges, the U.N. tribunal that charged him announced today. Karadzic, 63, was the Serb political leader

When it is all said and done will we ever charge Bush for what he has done. Many have come forward even the Red Cross and called W a war criminal. Will we ever bring him to task for his crimes? Will we ever take responsibility as a nation for letting him get away with it? Or will the next president who ever it is pardon him and say let the past be the past?

What will history say about us, if we don’t take action?

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A Nation of Whiners

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm said

Friday that he is stepping down as co-chairman of Sen. John McCain’s

presidential campaign amid criticism for saying last week that “we have

sort of become a nation of whiners.”

I actually can’t say I disagree with Phil on this. In fact I might take it a step further and say we have become The Bitch and Moan Nation. I am however not going to say we are without cause. Our government has let us down for too long. No one really noticed or listened to the people it was crapping on the most for decades, because everything was pretty good for most people. These days most people are struggling a lot more than they ever thought they would have to.

We are for the first time in our history looking around, scratching our heads, and saying to anyone who will listen “WTF happened?” The devoutly middle class aren’t struggling to make two car payments and having to decide whether or not they can really afford a boat. The middle class are now trying to figure out how they pay their utilities, meet their mortgage and have to balance the food budget against having enough gas to get back and forth to work until the next pay check. People are angry. Some are whining. Some are screaming. We are angry and we have a right to be so. That said we also have a responsibility to change it for the better.

BTW: I am pretty sure electing John McCain will only make it worse not better.

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Quit Mowing The Grass

This applies to everyone from homeowners and golf courses to the state and federal governments. With a fuel crisis full on for everyone it seems stupid to keep wasting gas mowing grass. Really people think about it. This isn’t just a hot tired cranky guy who sweated his ass off this afternoon doing his city mandated task of cutting the grass saying this either.

Let’s take it from my point of view first and foremost though. Read more

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Can You Feel The Love

Today was a good day for Barack Obama. Not only is he out seeing the world and showing his support. World leaders like Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki praise his forward visionary thinking. Then with nothing they could say bad about him or his plan today The White House emailed the press corps telling them how much they seem to support him too. I think someone wants to keep their job into the next administration.

CRAWFORD, TX (CNN) – An embarrassing slip up for the White House press office Saturday, when an aide hit the wrong button and mistakenly sent to the news media a Reuters article saying Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki backs presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s troop withdrawal plan.

Ouch! No response to this high praise has been given by the McCain camp. I wonder why.

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Queens of The Court No More

The Williams sisters have been the reigning queens of women’s tennis for the last decade with good reason. They are ferocious when they take the court. like them or not, you have to give them their props for being great players. However, that time in the limelight is coming to an end I believe with astonishing speed. Just last night 15 year old Larcher de Brito of Portugal took Serena Williams to three sets and nearly beat her.

While this no doubt says something about the lovely and talented, and did I mention hot Larcher de Brito, I think maybe it says more about Serena Williams. At 26 Serena is certainly not an old player, but she just isn’t playing as hard as she used to. Even as the top rated women’s tennis player, Venus Williams, isn’t doing much better. They struggle where they used to pounce.

I have no doubt that the Williams sisters will still be on top for a few more years, but when a 15 year old qualifier can take them to task, I wonder what the new face of women’s tennis will look like. Unfortunately I know it won’t look like Anna Kournikova. We are going to be hard pressed to see one so hot for some time to come.

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Kay Ryan Named America’s Poet

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czWFAOMNLH0]
I only vaguely remember hearing the name Kay Ryan and the word poet together before this morning. When i saw the news that she was named Poet Laureate of The United States, I first got excited that I recognized her name. I enjoy poetry, at least some of it, but it usually isn’t among my top reading choices. The little bits I read and heard online have inspired me though to head for the library today. Read more

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Kay Ryan Named America’s Poet

I only vaguely remember hearing the name Kay Ryan and the word poet together before this morning. When i saw the news that she was named Poet Laureate of The United States, I first got excited that I recognized her name. I enjoy poetry, at least some of it, but it usually isn’t among my top reading choices. The little bits I read and heard online have inspired me though to head for the library today. Read more

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Low Carb Beats Low Fat

A new study comparing the Atkins diet, a Mediterranean diet and a low-fat diet published on July 17 inThe New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), is likely to inspire headlines saying that the Atkins diet is better for your waistline and your health than a low-fat diet.

For years now the “low fat gurus” have been screaming bloody murder about alleged claims that “low carb high fat” diets not only work, but for many people work better. As someone who just got fatter and had their diabetes get worse on a “low fat” low calorie” diet, then started losing weight and getting their blood sugar under control, and had my total cholesterol drop with a significant improvement of good to bad while on a low carb diet, i can tell you it certainly works better for me.
I am no where close to where I want to be, but I will get their. I don’t have to be a diet guru to know these facts from my own life.

• My low fat diet was this: 1800 calorie a day diet that was planned out from a nutritionist and approved of whole heartedly by my doctor, then weighed, measured, and eaten according to plan took me from 240 pounds with a total cholesterol of 220 and an LDL (Bad) cholesterol level of 170. My average daily blood sugar was 140.
• I stayed on the diet to the letter from June of 2003 to May 2005. I went from 240 pounds to 295 pounds my total cholesterol went to 260 and my LDL went to 200. My average blood sugar went to 190. For those that don’t know this is pretty damned high and especially dangerous to those of us without insurance.
• On The Fuck It Diet where you eat what ever you want because you don’t really care or can’t afford to do differently I went as high 350 pounds. Cholesterol went to 270 and average blood sugar on and off meds went to 200.
• Since May of this year on a straight forward low card diet without expensive food, vitamins, or feeling like I was going to starve to death I have dropped to 300 pounds, have enough energy to exercise, dropped my total cholesterol to 220 with my LDL 180 and this mornings fasting blood sugar was 98.

While these are no doubt good results and will differ from person to person I am sick and tired of being told this doesn’t work. The good news is there is a new long term study out saying it does work wonders.Then we hear from the detractors for example.

Dr. Dean Ornish MD: “as a lead investigator on numerous peer-reviewed studies of low-fat diets, and the author of several books about the benefits of healthy low-fat lifestyles, I believe this study is extremely flawed.”

At least he can admit he knows the new information is bad for his reputation as “low fat guru”. Others over the years were clearly wrong about the benefits too. My former doctor despite the comparative results and hard data still doesn’t believe I am eating healthier. She and her fat ass can have their plain baked potato with tiny portions of anything that tastes good, I will take a thick juicy steak or bacon and eggs every day for breakfast over her diet any day. Oh I miss the carbs and indulge from time to time, but I go back to my diet of choice and continue to lose.

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Feist 1-2-3-4

The one thing I am looking forward to with a new baby on the way is Sesame Street. Yes, I know I am a thirty something that still has painful memories of Mr Hooper’s death.  I also knew that that Bert and Ernie must be gay at a young age simply because they were two guys  living with each other, just like my Uncle Jeff and David.  David with all his worrying and stuffy behavior reminded me a lot of Bert. He is also probably the reason I feel Bert must be Jewish.  Could you imagine Bert’s Jewish mother?   It doesn’t take a big leap of faith for me to imagine it.  it really isn’t the characters I have missed though.  I have missed the the musical guests.  I have been enjoying the Leslie Feist 1234 song quite a bit of late. Now that I have seen her covering it on The Street courtesy of YouTube I am just a bit excited for the birth of this little girl.  Give me days cold enough I have to stay inside, send the wife off to work, the boy off to school and Sarah and I will have an education on Sesame Street.  Do you Know The Way?

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Pop Culture Points To Perez

Keli Goff: McCain’s Perez Hilton Problem

It is no secret John McCain is a homophobe. However how stupid can you be, even when going out of your way to prove you you have right wing neo-con pew cred. When even Southern Baptists start asking, “Did he really just say that?” You start wondering just how much like David Duke John McCain really is.

This time doofus is talking about gay adoption. Whether you love or hate Perez Hilton, it is always bad for gay bashers to get noticed. Hooray for pop culture icons noticing and promoting how bad McCain will be for the country. He used McCain’s quote, “I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption,” as his quote of the day on Sunday. At last count Hilton’s post garnered around 700 comments. Talk about effective viral marketing. Open Mouth! Insert Foot! Go WTF!

I give this one as a win for both Perez and Obama. Do you think Perez will get invited to the iInnaugurable Ball for this? Lets hope so the gossip ought to be interesting!

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Foreign Policy Promotion is Premature

(CNN) — Shortly after Barack Obama laid out his foreign policy
vision in Washington on Tuesday, presumptive Republican presidential
nominee John McCain criticized his proposals as naive and premature.

Of course what John McCain really meant to say is I am going to be the next president so Obama shouldn’t even be making policy claims for a job he isn’t going to get. While the polls can always swing back the other way, the 49% to 41% polls in favor of Obama, would suggest that McCain has attended the Bush School for Creative Reality and specialized in New Math.

Here are the facts. Barack Obama wants us out of Iraq and John McCain is simply a another Republican War Monger. It is time for McCain to give up his hopes and dreams of being involved in a winning war. I am sure that notion got him through some very hard times, but being shot down and taken prisoner doesn’t mean keep fighting until you beat someone. Throwing good money after bad, and sacrificing ever more lives for political points doesn’t make you a leader. It makes you makes you a school yard bully who doesn’t care who you hurt so long as you can keep deluding yourself you have the biggest dick and therefore you should win. (W has a big Dick as VP and look where that has gotten us!)

If John McCain thinks Barack Obama’s foreign policy is premature, then so is his own thinking that he is already president.

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Marijuana Not Just For Stoners Anymore

Weeding Out The Highs Of Medical Marijuana

ScienceDaily (July 15, 2008) — Research exploring new ways of exploiting the full medicinal uses of cannabis while avoiding unwanted side-effects will be presented to pharmacologists on July 15 by scientists attending the Federation of European Pharmacological Societies Congress, EPHAR 2008.

For a second time today I am posting a pot related story, which only goes to prove that any smoking I might have done in my youth has not hampered my long term productivity or ambition. There is a down side to too much pot for sure. There is a down side to almost anything we put in our body in excessive quantities. From cannabis to carbs, pot to protein, THC to trans fat, they all have down sides. The government funds and encourages hundreds of studies a year to the tune of billions of dollars to tell us over and over again junk food, lack of exercise, not believing in god, not believing the president is god, or the economy isn’t that bad because people aren’t jumping out of skyscrapers on the account of their electric bill. What the US government refuses to spend money on is pot might have some beneficial effects.

I am not talking about legalizing it, even though I think that is a good idea too. I talking about just pure clinical research to back up the claims that pot has a benefits besides that happy feeling you get before grim creeper sets in. We have lots of anecdotal evidence from many medicinal users. We have studies done in other countries with respectable medical credentials. What we refuse to do is allow clinical experimentation, the development of medications that don’t have to be smoked, or even admit the real reasons it was banned in the first place.

Why do we still not accept their might be some benefit to it? The so far right that they are fringe elements of the extremely radical left would have a field day with it. If pot might have some benefit, they would have to let go of the very old notion that it was bad and accept they banned it because it was preferred by minorities to the bastion of American economics, tobacco. They might also have to accept J. Edgar Hoover wanted it banned so he could arrest and harass more “subversives” who admittedly preferred it for its non medicinal uses.

What evidence do they base this ban on? The evidence that always gets brought up as the gold standard by the anti-pot crowd was done in the 1970’s. They put a rat in box, piped in huge quantities of pot smoke. When the rat was dead they declared pot is bad, and had a dead rat as evidence to back it up. Of course the necropsy didn’t reveal any sort of poisoning from the pot, it showed the rat died of suffocation. When you lock a living creature in a box and then replace the breathable air with smoke suffocation is a forgone conclusion. That study was rigged to prove a predetermined government position, just like the few that have been done since to counter Canadian, European, and Japanese studies that all show benefits of pot.

Whether we are still kowtowing to big tobacco or just pandering to the fear mongers the evidence does exist that marijuana has beneficial effects does exist. We don’t have to stick our head into a cloud of smoke simply to pull our head out of the sands, so we might as well let the truth present itself for what it is worth.

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News Round Up For 7/15/2008

In Today’s News Round Up

Canada to deport U.S. war deserter:
This is after the immigration court told the Federal Court they thought he had made a clear justifiable case to stay. To me this looks like a clear case of some one either kissing ass, or pressure put on Canada by the US.

UN pulls back staff from Darfur:
In Some Respects I can’t say i blame them. What the country needs is an occupying invasion force that won’t put up with any crap. However, the US Military can not be made available at this time do to the purely internal nature of the conflict, the lack of oil, wrong religion, or the fact they are black. Take your pick I am sure todays answer is one of the above.

Americans Twice As Likely To Have Tried Marijuana Than Dutch:
Have we ever stopped to think prohibitions don’t work. Perhaps no child left behind has left out the reasons about the reasons the Eighteenth Amendment didn’t work.

Bush Gives Israel The Go Ahead To Bomb Iran:
This is no big shock. Let’s encourage Israel, the biggest baddest army in the middle east start a war with Iran. Then as such a good friend of Israel we will feel compelled to go to their aid, even if they don’t need it. What a lovely way to sidestep the War Powers Act.

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Why Are You A Democrat

I am still considering whether or I am going to enter, but I know why I am a democrat. The answer wasn’t the first snarky idea that popped into my head either, “what kind of idiot wants to be a republican?” My wife thought that was good enough, but for me it isn’t. I don’t vote Democratic Tickets, because I know the Republicans would screw me if they got there way, either. Keep watching here for my Why I am a Democrat story.