Economic, Social and Geopolitical

Does anyone really believe this stock market?

We've surpassed the economic crisis of the real estate boom and crash, related mortgage mess, debt overhang along with high unemployment and have already moved into deeper global problems than many imagined. Earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, New Zealand, Burma with an even more devastating one in Japan accompanied by a tsunami causing highly radioactive water leaking into the ocean.

There are political disruptions all across the Middle East that are not going to be quelled by European nations, the US and NATO bombing Libya. In fact that's the last thing we should be doing, getting involved in "foreign entanglements." We are on the verge, if not already in, the Third World War.

Al of the above significantly involves the supply chain and management of vital parts and goods we need, not to mention food supply that has had a bad crop year due to weather. The only people reaping profits are Midwestern farmers who are doing well on government crop welfare. What all this adds up to is inflation and more inflation. Bernanke and Geithner wanted inflation to pump up the economy on consumption of consumer goods. The result is already beginning to reflect what many predicted, too much inflation on necessary goods.

We are a nation that consumes goods produced by other countries. We manufacture very little anymore and we have trillions of dollars of deficit now and what do we have to show for it? New clothes? Furniture? Lots of fattening snack foods? The vociferous over-printing of money has largely been spent on payments to the low or non-producing sector of the economy. In other words, largely the public sector or in some form of welfare to subprime consumers or subsidizing financial institutions that services them, creating an illusion of a "slow recovery."

The only thing recovering is the cash reserves of private sector companies that they are hoarding because they don't know what the government is going to do next. Individual savers are losing because their cash is becoming inflated and interest rates are for all practical purposes nil. We're rewarding credit spenders and punishing savers.

It is no wonder Ron Paul and others want the Federal Reserve audited. The Treasury and the Fed have also been subsidizing the stock market by buying and selling shares in wholesale blocks. The movement and trends are easy to spot to anyone with a perceptive eye. Aided for good measure by CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Barrons and the New York Times, among others. To once again state a repeating refrain, the fundamental underpinnings of the economy are not sound. In particular the Gross National Product and employment alongside the unrealistic price to earnings ratios of companies do not bear out the US Stock Market being as inflated and "bullish" as it is.

When the Federal Reserve starts withdrawing support from the Markets, then what? Careful of the shards of glass falling from high rise buildings on Wall Street.

End of rant...

Arizona Landscape

Taxpayer funded something or other...

Thinking Out Loud

Being trendy is uncool...

Cool is not being in vogue and anti-cool.

The last thing anyone would call me is trendy but some do call me "cool." Even my twenty something nephews think I'm cool in whatever the vernacular of their generation is. It is an enigma to me how I obtain that assignation, especially since I write phrases like that...

All I can think is that I am called that by some people because I am, I suppose, a classic kind of guy. That is, in several ways, at least. I tend to stick to things that are timeless and "classic" while still always being open to new things. They often become classic. I adopt things a lot of my boomer generation doesn't, such as I'm pretty decent at computer stuff, smartphones, video editing and creating a website blog content. I suppose classic could also mean I'm pretty old for hip stuff even though I don't listen to Classic Rock. It was good then and occasionally good to hear it again but not all the time especially as a radio format. To me that means being stuck in time and I have never liked that, preferring to develop and grow, moving on down the road to the next stop.

Even still, I don't chase trends, know a lot of new music and follow current TV show and movies. I'm not very wired in that way. Mostly I don't seek it out but I do discover new music (to me), for instance Mumford and Sons or The Avett Brothers, through some happy connection. My basic wardrobe hasn't changed much, just updated to suit the times. Also TV has always bored me, my attention span doesn't care for most popular movies and I don't hang out at popular venues to find out what the latest and greatest stuff is. Neither do most of my friends, they must be uncool too.

My conclusion is that although I know my age, I view it as a marker on how far I've come and grown, it doesn't define what I should and shouldn't do. Trendiness though really is for young people and the pretentious in New York City and Los Angeles that like vaporization. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try new things if it suits you. I am open to always learning and trying new stuff if it's interesting and makes sense to me. Maybe being cool is not following the latest new thing and tossing it aside for the next thing that comes along, but adopting what is new that is classic and worth keeping, building upon it and ignoring the rest. Uncool then becomes pursuing up-to-the-minute latest and greatest rage and cool is really being anti-cool.

Arizona Landscape

Presidential Chicken Guarantee...

Music Break: Janis Joplin

Little Girl Blue...

Live TV 1969 "This is Tom Jones" show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVpDOIPx_sY&feature=related

A Head of My Time

Business goes social web...

Uh oh...move over Facebook and LinkedIn, the business world has entered the social web. I know quite a few people who work for large companies that have adopted internal social web pages. I've heard about the managers who've been asked by their manager why they were not "connected" or "friended" by their employees.

I've always been an early adopter and was blogging in the late nineties, getting the idea from one of the original well known blogger, Andrew Sullivan. Prior to that I had already been through BBS, ICQ, forums and other internet communication tools. Early on in this past decade I adopted the new social web services and instant messaging platforms that got eaten up by other big internet names. Then along came YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare; by the middle of last year I was done with Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, StumbleUpon, etc. and deleted all my accounts. I enjoy the interaction on Google Reader and Buzz but YouTube and Blogger are enough for me right now.

Blogging and YouTube are considered old hat by the early adopters now and they're onto the latest platform. By now the pattern is familiar...early adopters take to a service, it becomes popular and the latest craze, gets bogged down by the noise of the masses and the early adopters move on. Personally I believe that the social web platforms as they exist now are pretty much in place and there will not be much more innovation and new social web services. Rather the ones that exist will morph and continue to grow and develop. The reason I still blog and make videos for YouTube is I like the challenge of continuing something considered outmoded by faddists, that actually is still relevant, keeping it current, alive and well. I now tend to view early adopters as people who think they're cool with short attention spans. They don't stick around to develop and achieve on a lasting platform.

When LinkedIn first started I saw the value in it and when I was invited to join their site I accepted the offer. Little did I realize how the social web would catch on and that later business would adopt the concepts and when that happens, you know that a conception has not just become mainstream, but has been co-opted by "The Establishment.". So now my life has come full circle to this...the company I work for has now introduced a social web site. Having seen the value of LinkedIn, although the mainstream social web services became too time consuming for me, I see the worth of participating as an early adopter of this tool for work. My perspective is that it is another method of networking to be used at work just as the phone, texting, instant messaging and email is a way to build working relationships with others in my company. We'll see how it goes.

Arizona Landscape

Analog to Digital Crossroads...

You Can Quote Me On That

Let the Federal Government shutdown...

Not only that, let's celebrate it, make it an extra long national holiday, a break from the political and bureaucratic classes who sharpen their wits with deal-making every day. "Oh NO!" you cry! "What about all the people who need their Social Security and Welfare checks?" "What about Medicare and Medicaid?"

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I'm pretty confident that deep in the American soul there's enough people with a heart and ingenuity who will take care of people when they don't get the check. That is those who want help anyway. I'll bet it won't be bleeding heart liberals either but regular working people. The so-called progressives will be busy getting busted up by the people they've been "helping," who are angry the free ride isn't being conveniently direct deposited. There's a pretty good chance there are several million doctors and health providers who would love to be free of all the paperwork and provide health service at reasonable cost.

It's one way to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

Let's not talk about a week or two here but months, maybe even years. It will be a shakedown of what "vital services" really are and what the government should be involved in and facilitate solutions for. We would know after a period of time what institutional services really are important and needed versus those who are getting the gravy money and dispensable. For example the Coast Guard would qualify but I'm willing to bet that some of their agencies and people will be found as not necessary. My money is on that most students can be taught exceptionally well by competent teachers, let out of the corral and freed from administrators and unions, liberated to innovate without all the clutter of interference.

What about all the disruption it would cause?

Think of the disruption that's going to happen if we don't stop feeding the beast. The political class, bureaucrats and non-governmental organizations living off "grants" is trying to pirate away our money for a government that doesn't serve those of us paying for it very well. They're hijacking our government and we're the fools for voting them in. We need to get hold of the remote control again. Just as surely as the tech bubble, housing bubble and the stock bubble burst, so will the Big Government bubble burst. Now that will be real disruption.

The point is not entirely tongue in cheek. I seriously think we need to let the government stop, become immobile, cease and desist. Most of it anyway and I mean seriously paring it down to bare bones, not this phony baloney "shutdown" which is really government workers staying home and getting paid with all those accumulated personal days, vacation days, sick time. No, just S. T. O. P....Skid Tires On Pavement before smashing into the brick wall of no return. If bureaucrats, politicians and their staff don't have big savings accounts with their bloated paychecks, I don't feel sorry for them. They can help out at the food bank and get groceries.

What is really needed will still be carried out while we figure out what we need and can afford.

Truly vital communications, defense, electrical power, infrastructure and markets will still run without all the programs, grants, pencil and people pushers while we figure out what really is necessary that we can afford. We need to seriously look at our options now before it inevitably bursts all over us like an overcooked egg in a microwave.

Arizona Landscape

No Outlet...

Writing: Fact and Fiction

My anxiety...

An exercise in writing on a topic I rarely publicly discuss.

Like a low vague sound of some humming electrical device the feeling is omnipresent and hangs in my soul somewhere, haunting me without explanation. I'm not exactly sure when I really became aware there was a name for it except it was sometime in the late eighties. It's an unexplained disquiet which for me usually leads to a low level melancholy or depression if I don't resolve it. It occurs to a lot more people than is recognized since those of us who live with it don't like to talk about it. Men suffer from it as much as women but we're generally not very good at identifying intrinsic emotions and expressing them well. Many of us act out inexplicably due to it.

There are two themes underlying my faint angst. The first theme is some unfinished business or I did something I wish I hadn't that is bothering me and it has not been addressed. Very often I really don't know what it is or conversely, I do, but would rather push it down with some cement of the mind to keep it from surfacing. If I do nothing and don't dig within to figure out what is bugging me it turns to melancholy. The other theme is my anxiety is right out there, live wire on the surface, edging to be dealt with immediately. That can be the most dangerous since if I'm around people I'm likely to do and say things that result in something worse. Remorse. That is the tipping point depression sets in.

When I refer to melancholy or depression it is not of the clinical variety but rather a natural emotion that most people feel sometimes, some experience it more often than others. It is a flat or dead feeling and I am sluggish. The best solution is to sleep it off. I have experienced deep, dark, black depression a few times in my life but it was due to a specific tragic event, a normal and typical reaction. Death of a loved one, job loss and broken relationship come to mind. Thankfully I had a support system during those times who listened to me, although in each case the only real answer was time.

Over the years I have tried a lot of routes and taken advice on how to deal with my anxiety. Some of the roads and answers were good and others were very bad for me. With no humility I think I can truthfully say I've learned that I'm smarter than any psychologist or therapist I've ever seen professionally or known personally with the exception of one friend. She is atypical for her field and believes most therapists dish out pablum and balderdash. Her advice, like so many of my head-on-shoulders friends, has helped me make sense of how to deal with anxiety more than any psychologist ever has. The same can be said for doctors who want to feed you pills, there is a price for taking them and it's high and not worth the expense of the aftermath.

What does work is knowing yourself well enough to recognize what is happening when it happens. The discovery of how to cope with it and solve the puzzle before it escalates can be a painful process but well worth it. I know that for fact because I have done it and can follow my own advice of what works for me, however, actually implementing the solution is sometimes another matter. The same strong character traits that usually work for me can also work against me. Persistence becomes stubborn. I know in my intellect that what I should do is think, search and find what is nagging my soul and deal with it. Herein lies the rub, sometimes I am just stubborn and don't want to take the time to deal with it, even knowing full well what will be next.

Fortunately most of the time, especially these past few years, I deal with my anxiety effectively. Writing is integral to my methods of both clarifying and purging my vital essence. Once I mull over and reason out the core of the matter, I am then able to implement very old fashioned solutions to the problem.

Think positively.
Take action to fix what is broken.
Accept it as a learning experience and personal growth.
Things usually work themselves out the way they're supposed to.

You're granddad's or father's advice maybe? Probably. Modern psychology and psychiatry is great for other people if it works for them. All I know is if I take the bull by the horns and wrestle the beast to ground, I won't get gored.

[inspired by Maryann, who is braver and more courageous than she thinks]