Frank Rich points out we have nuts.

We can't wish away climate change.
Human civilization as we know it is at an end. We have the opportunity to control what it will be if we can act. If we do not act, we will be controlled by cascading events. What we can be sure of is the status quo will end soon. When it does it will be too late to choose. The policy of extend and pretend that has worked in finance will not work against rising waters and burnt oil.

Our congress is broken. We must "fix" it. "If it aint broke, don't fix it." is not applicable.

Governor Paterson is in a Wile E. Coyote moment. The fiscal conservatives will have their way and pass no budget.

Touch . . . I miss the giving and the getting. The comfort touch shares.

Chili Is a bigger disaster than reported. The tsunami seems to have not found Hawaii. It is a soliton so we will be out of danger in half a day.

Depression is very real. As your authors point out, the fix is to deal with it. Burying it in drugs or inattention just saves it for later.

Conspiracy theory is a prevalent condition. Race does not confer immunity. Its use as a political tool is a new discovery to me.

Debt is an enemy. A cell phone or other device does not make it less so.

The Democratic party Is not a top down organisation. It is a coalition. It invented the platform fight. Let the whip work. The bill, ruin that it is, will be the best we can get.

Earthquakes are plate tectonics in action. I suspect that Gaea does not even perceive them.

The Coast Guard Has never been funded as it should be.

Converting body movements into electricity.
I think of generator lights on bicycles. I resent the drag.

Insomnia? Depression? Communicative touch . . . I need to sleep for the morrow.

Jeff Koons is still the light-weight he was.

The only hope I see for peace in the Levant is for the Palestinians to convert to Judaism and demand "the right of return". If even a few of them did it would tie the Knesset in in knots. The fight is over water and there will be no resolution.

The voters have already paid. The uncertainty of 2004 was far too high a price.

I read Kristoff and Krugman and Brooks. No news there.
Kristoff has a point, an old one. Do you remember Danny Jewel? He was fetal alcohol.
Krugman is at least fun and to the point.
Brooks is trying hard to sound rational while supporting his party.
Curling is a sport. It looks to be much more fun to do than to watch.
Bocci anyone?

Paterson . . . I hoped he had more spine.

I never had much respect for Jeff Koons. I may have to reconsider.

My dsl link has been down.

bread

I use a bread machine for the mixing and bake in a pan in the oven.
The shape is better and the clean up too.

generally I make a very simple loaf:

on the dough cycle, one oz canola oil, fifteen oz water. table spoon sugar, half teaspoon salt, twenty four oz unbleached white flour and a half teaspoon dry yeast. In the tub in that order. Weights are critical. volumes not. Run the hour and a half dough cycle. Place in pan allow to double in volume. Bake at 350 for three quarters of an hour. Makes a two and a half pound loaf.

Mombot? How about the "Fruit of the Month Club" ?
I did like the H&H Automat. That made little pretense of human interaction with the service. It was a warm place to sit and an excuse to sit with company. The question is: Can a robot go down stairs? Answer: Just once.

Toyota is either slandered or guilty as charged. The facts are not in yet. They are probably guilty. In any case the pillory is inappropriate.

Obama is so much better than GWB. Obama could be so much better.

We will go to nuclear power. Entergy will not. This is not what people want to hear.

Touch . . . I so miss it.

Hummer . . . Available at your local surplus mart. Accept no substitutes.

Space on a plane? It will cost you more.

Google wins on appeal. Italy loves drama. If not, landlords will be liable for the graffiti on their outside walls.

Amy Bishop and gun enthusiasm. What a combination.

Our nation has a long rich history of nuts. Some of them much better informed than others. I am well aware that reality and fantasy are independent. They can be mistaken the one for the other. Under most conditions, I would just as soon not have a gun in my hand, or even in reach. Their use is irreversible.

I am going to ignore Tiger Woods and Gun Control and Toyota.
I will see if I can think of anything to say tomorrow.

Where the bar should be

Good management is a wonder and a treasure.
It is not universal.
There is a large vocabulary describing bad management.
Unions provide some protection from management.
It is unfortunately not selective.
Balancing power is more of a project than either side admits.
Shared goals, communication and understanding help.

Scott Brown
Not much in the article.
Not Irish.
Not a scholar.
Opportunist?
Naked ambition.
It will not matter if he is personally liberal or progressive.
He will follow party discipline.
He may fail for reelection. We can hope.

salt and diet

I have some recent experience. I find it easy to leave the salt out in food preparation. Vinager or lemon serve as effective substitutes as do various other herbs. It is addictive. Some leads easily to more.
The salt restriction here is medical. The treatment seems to be working.

There is a method I have read of. In west Africa salt is expensive as a governmental monopoly. It is also good to restrict it to limit sweating. The locals do not apply it to food but rather put a very small quantity on the back of a hand and lick it during the meal. This loads the taste sensors without loading the food.

I will try this. I know that a small quantity at the table works better than a much larger dose at the stove.

Into the mire?

I do not trust David Brooks. He is drinking the Republican party Kool Aid.
Nobody likes a compromise. This is just the nature of the beast. In the congress we have a number of DINOs and other roters. They have done their very best to poison the health care bill. They have suceeded. Obama has removed some of the most egregious bits and moved to get the thing passed. The health care bill as it now stands is so much better than no bill that I think it should pass into law. I am not alone.

The state of things.

Thomas Friedman whines on in the Times

It is very hard to spend intellectual capital. It is a form of equipment rather than a feedstock. People with ideas just keep on finding applications for them. People who are educated as opposed to those who are trained improvise solutions. They can even recognise new problems. This is not popular with those who want to sell old understood solutions to problems that no longer exist.

At this moment the business model is broken. A business must benefit all those who are involved with it. It has no reason to exist aside from those benefits. Involuntary servitude, fraud and theft are some of the descriptors for nonbeneficial operations. The model is broken because the goal is to maximize stockholder value. This set is far too small. The goal should be to maximize participant value. Suppliers, workers and customers must all benefit along with the stockholders. There can be no externalized costs. In the language of mathmatics, a business can not be zero sum.

Understand that I have no idea how to bring this about. It is antithetical to the received wisdom.

Plan Would Let Students Start College After 10th Grade

What's new about this? It was happening for years in my Western MA Hampshire County school district. High taxes and property owner apathy and disgust led the regional school district to so reduce the school that any smart kid bailed and went to the local community colleges usually with successful results. I wish my own daughter had done this - it would have saved us a bundle of tuition $$ later on.

What is new about this is a further reduction of public education. The diploma offered must be a G.E.D. There is no time in two years to mature a person from a dependent child. You know from your personal experience how vital ones' cohort is.

This is a proposal to abandon the public education system.

What do we want as fellow citizens; educated adults or trained children? Trained children are easy to control. Educated adults, not so much. They tend to think on things and decide on a course of action for themselves. I have thoughts to share with educated adults.

You have an unlimited yes from me.
You do have to ask.

H C H

Tea partiers brace for tyranny. Question: whose?

What is wrong with us is a persistent attempt to externalize costs.

Lean years indeed. A prime example of moral hazard.

I am not prepared to comment on south Asia.

Yes, more liberal senators. The debt crisis is not on yet.

Gov. Paterson is not a Republican.

People just don't want to know about global warming. The last drink is always the next one.

The same goes for debt.

JFK? He is a deity. We question others immages at our peril.

J. M. Keynes was not wrong. If you start there, you can still go wrong.-

I have to go to work.

Paying for politics is one of our problems. Civilian control should be recognised as including legal fictions. One person, one vote in all elections.

Boats float. The sea was much lower more than once. Could the tool makers have reached Crete dry shod?

Just the thing for a holiday morning

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/02/some-morning-greece.html

It is a start.

http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2010/02/a-nation-full-of-people-trying-to-have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too.html

The snow storm was a wet squib. The ground is white but there is not enough to shovel.

ART

I do not pretend to be a painter.
I can make a wall a color or cut an edge.
I have been required to look at paintings and try to understand them.
Near the beginning of my formal training I was required to buy a camera and master black and white photography.
I called it learning to see. I am still working on that.
I am beginning to think in color and to get the light right.
I render objects in the course of my profession.

I took a course in the nineteenth century romantics some years ago. About half of it was painting, a quarter literature and a quarter music. It was an attempt at a survey in preparation for a course in the moderns. The moderns were my teachers and my teachers teachers. I do not know what to call the present. Postmodern begs the question. The recent paintings acquired by the Metropolitan are good. I can see them if I work at it.

From the beginning painters have found the medium limiting. Much of the history of painting is individual painters and schools of painting transcending those limits.
It occurs to me that I can analytically describe the limits of graphic media and perception. Then do a combinatoric exploration of methods and arrive at the complete set of graphic art. Such an effort would incomprehensible to any audience and useless to anyone not prepared to do it. Much work should never leave the studio.
An example of a method is the visual editing called abstraction. The practice begins with paint. The French cave paintings are abstract in that the color is only reminisent of the animals, the light is yellow and dim, the perspective is a guess, the scale is emotional rather than geometric. The pictures work for us and their creators. The ones that did not work were reworked. This kind of notation can become formal. Egyptian hieroglyphics or, more extreme, Ideograms of the Han. Descriptive painting is the tradition I am trying to examine.

Growing sophistication in the selection of details. The level of substitution of color and shadow for geometry.

Eventually the elimination of geometry entirely.

finally the elimination of internal edges.

Eventually a field of color that is in some way a description.

I will have to return to this. My thoughts have evanesced.

There is a narrative I have formed on this.

Photography was new in the middle of the nineteenth century. The invention
removed photorealism from the discourse of the study of painting. The students were left with the question of what a painter could do that a photographer could not do.
The accent changed from geometry and texture to color, light and interaction.
The critics called it impressionism.
As the possibilities of this change of vision filled out the daring became the fauves.

I need an explicit and confirmed invitation from you to take action in your direction.

I find that it takes a long time for me to get through the "noise" in my head.

As much attention as you can spare must content me. Yet, I hunger.

The job search will continue.

Not much near term hope. There is some work in NY fornow

This is a compilation blog I tend to trust on economics. The bloggers main interest is real estate. He quotes and is quoted by Krugman in the Times. He is generally more hopeful about the state of things than I am. The comments are mostly free of gratuitous noise.
Here he is looking at reports from Europe in the last day or two.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/02/eurozone-update.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CalculatedRisk+%28Calculated+Risk%29


Here is url of the blog without further specification:
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/
You will have to run back a few posts for the eurozone update.

communication:

I am in such a state that I can convince myself of anything.
Mother seems to be out of immediate danger but she is deteriorating mentally and physically.
I have been escaping to work a few hours and each time it is traumatic for her.
I need clear unambiguous instructions from you.
Without them I must continue as I have been.

I have been feeding the wild birds.
a squirrel climbed the steel stanchion I hung the seed tray on.
I wiped the steel down with vegetable oil. end of problem.
I will put a picture here. tit mice, chickadees, nuthatches and downy woodpeckers. various sparrows and morning doves. There are blue jays and an owl.

Greece?

I caught a piece on the BBC stating that the Greek economy has gone into crisis.
If the management program works, the status quo anti will prevail.
If, as is likely, the program fails the euro and probably the EU are toast.
This will take down the house of cards that is the US dollar.

What that means for you I don't know. Recently Spain has been in very delicate health.

The advice I have seen is "work as long as you can. Save as much as you can. Pay down debt."

I will write more as I know and think.

The Chinese have instituted a policy of Mercantilism. They are practicing wealth extraction. A manufacturing business is a bargain at any real price. Goods may be bought for money or raw materials only. Our government will not see this. It is a trade war.

"Catcher in the Rye" was often assigned to me but never read. I would slog a few pages and abandon it for better built tales. I think the effort to ban the book made the sales. Other Salinger never held my interest either. His literary executor has a job for life.

I am ambivalent on the toads. Best thing to do is find them another niche. Preferably more than one.
I just cannot cheer on the four horsemen. That would be the real solution.