Sunday, July 10, 2011
The Next, Worse Financial Crisis
by Brett Arends
The last financial crisis isn’t over, but we might as well start getting ready for the next one.
Sorry to be gloomy, but there it is.
Why? Here are 10 reasons.
1. We are learning the wrong lessons from the last one. Was the housing bubble really caused by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Barney Frank, Bill Clinton, “liberals” and so on? That’s what a growing army of people now claim. There’s just one problem. If so, then how come there was a gigantic housing bubble in Spain as well? Did Barney Frank cause that, too (and while in the minority in Congress, no less!)? If so, how? And what about the giant housing bubbles in Ireland, the U.K. and Australia? All Barney Frank? And the ones across Eastern Europe, and elsewhere? I’d laugh, but tens of millions are being suckered into this piece of spin, which is being pushed in order to provide cover so the real culprits can get away. And it’s working.
2. No one has been punished. Executives like Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers and Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide , along with many others, cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars before the ship crashed into the rocks. Predatory lenders and crooked mortgage lenders walked away with millions in ill-gotten gains. But they aren’t in jail. They aren’t even under criminal prosecution. They got away scot-free. As a general rule, the worse you behaved from 2000 to 2008, the better you’ve been treated. And so the next crowd will do it again. Guaranteed.
3. The incentives remain crooked. People outside finance — from respected political pundits like George Will to normal people on Main Street — still don’t fully get this. Wall Street rules aren’t like Main Street rules. The guy running a Wall Street bank isn’t in the same “risk/reward” situation as a guy running, say, a dry-cleaning shop. Take all our mental images of traditional American free-market enterprise and put them to one side. This is totally different. For the people on Wall Street, it’s a case of heads they win, tails they get to flip again. Thanks to restricted stock, options, the bonus game, securitization, 2-and-20 fee structures, insider stock sales, “too big to fail” and limited liability, they are paid to behave recklessly, and they lose little — or nothing — if things go wrong.
4. The referees are corrupt. We’re supposed to have a system of free enterprise under the law. The only problem: The players get to bribe the refs. Imagine if that happened in the NFL. The banks and other industries lavish huge amounts of money on Congress, presidents and the entire Washington establishment of aides, advisers and hangers-on. They do it through campaign contributions. They do it with $500,000 speaker fees and boardroom sinecures upon retirement. And they do it by spending a fortune on lobbyists — so you know that if you play nice when you’re in government, you too can get a $500,000-a-year lobbying job when you retire. How big are the bribes? The finance industry spent $474 million on lobbying last year alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Read more:
The last financial crisis isn’t over, but we might as well start getting ready for the next one.
Sorry to be gloomy, but there it is.
Why? Here are 10 reasons.
1. We are learning the wrong lessons from the last one. Was the housing bubble really caused by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Barney Frank, Bill Clinton, “liberals” and so on? That’s what a growing army of people now claim. There’s just one problem. If so, then how come there was a gigantic housing bubble in Spain as well? Did Barney Frank cause that, too (and while in the minority in Congress, no less!)? If so, how? And what about the giant housing bubbles in Ireland, the U.K. and Australia? All Barney Frank? And the ones across Eastern Europe, and elsewhere? I’d laugh, but tens of millions are being suckered into this piece of spin, which is being pushed in order to provide cover so the real culprits can get away. And it’s working.
2. No one has been punished. Executives like Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers and Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide , along with many others, cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars before the ship crashed into the rocks. Predatory lenders and crooked mortgage lenders walked away with millions in ill-gotten gains. But they aren’t in jail. They aren’t even under criminal prosecution. They got away scot-free. As a general rule, the worse you behaved from 2000 to 2008, the better you’ve been treated. And so the next crowd will do it again. Guaranteed.
3. The incentives remain crooked. People outside finance — from respected political pundits like George Will to normal people on Main Street — still don’t fully get this. Wall Street rules aren’t like Main Street rules. The guy running a Wall Street bank isn’t in the same “risk/reward” situation as a guy running, say, a dry-cleaning shop. Take all our mental images of traditional American free-market enterprise and put them to one side. This is totally different. For the people on Wall Street, it’s a case of heads they win, tails they get to flip again. Thanks to restricted stock, options, the bonus game, securitization, 2-and-20 fee structures, insider stock sales, “too big to fail” and limited liability, they are paid to behave recklessly, and they lose little — or nothing — if things go wrong.
4. The referees are corrupt. We’re supposed to have a system of free enterprise under the law. The only problem: The players get to bribe the refs. Imagine if that happened in the NFL. The banks and other industries lavish huge amounts of money on Congress, presidents and the entire Washington establishment of aides, advisers and hangers-on. They do it through campaign contributions. They do it with $500,000 speaker fees and boardroom sinecures upon retirement. And they do it by spending a fortune on lobbyists — so you know that if you play nice when you’re in government, you too can get a $500,000-a-year lobbying job when you retire. How big are the bribes? The finance industry spent $474 million on lobbying last year alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Read more:
Me, Inc.
by Pamela S. Karlan
When the Supreme Court heard Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886, few would have pegged the case as a turning point in constitutional law. The matter at hand seemed highly technical: could California increase the property tax owed by a railroad if the railroad built fences on its property? As it turned out, the Court ruled unanimously in the railroad’s favor. And in so doing, the Court casually affirmed the railroad’s argument that corporations are “persons” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” So certain were the justices of the Fourteenth Amendment’s applicability that their opinion did not engage the issue, but the Court reporter recorded the justices’ perspective on the topic:
Much criticism of the Citizens United decision has focused on whether corporations should have rights under the Constitution. This critique is mistaken. Corporations come in many forms, ranging from large, publicly traded profit-driven companies (think IBM) to smaller, ideologically motivated nonprofits (the American Civil Liberties Union or the Audubon Society) with many others in between (your local newspaper). The diverse nature of corporations may mean that some corporations have stronger claims than others with respect to particular rights, but on the whole it is clear that our democracy could not function if corporations received no constitutional protection. One of the most famous First Amendment decisions of the Warren Court, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), protected a for-profit newspaper from a libel suit for publishing a paid advertisement criticizing a public official. Many foundational freedom-of-association cases likewise involve corporations, such as the NAACP. And even with respect to purely economic rights, it is hard to argue persuasively that the government should have no obligation to provide due process to corporations before imposing fines or condemning their property.
So corporations are entitled to constitutional protection. But are they entitled to the same protection as living, breathing human beings? In this year’s Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, the Supreme Court suggested they are not so entitled. The Court refused to extend to AT&T a provision of the Freedom of Information Act that exempts the disclosure of material that might cause “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” A corporation, Chief Justice Roberts said, does not have the “type of privacy evocative of human concerns.” Similarly, corporations cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.
But even if the Court decided that corporations are in every way like persons, there might be limits on the corporate role in politics. When faced with the issue of popular confidence in the democratic process, courts have agreed that the speech rights of flesh-and-blood persons may be bounded. The Hatch Act, for example, forbids government employees from engaging in partisan political activity, including some activities in their off-time. In fact, when it comes to a willingness to restrict constitutional rights in the name of confidence in the democratic process, the Court’s decisions show a troubling and puzzling asymmetry in favor of corporations. A few years ago, the Court upheld Indiana’s draconian voter-identification statute, which threatened to deny the fundamental constitutional right to vote to thousands of individuals who lack government-issued photo ID. The Court asserted, “Public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process has independent significance, because it encourages citizen participation in the democratic process.” The Court nowhere explains why a similar rationale should not apply to political spending. Several legislatures think it does and have concluded that citizens are less likely to participate in a process they think is rigged in favor of large corporate interests.
The real question, then, is not whether corporations deserve some constitutional protections: they do. The issue is whether there is something about the nature of corporations that makes it appropriate to limit their involvement in the political process. The Court has foreclosed the most common affirmative answer to that question: corporations have accumulated enormous wealth, which enables them to distort a political process that rests on a commitment to equality, embodied most prominently in the principle of one person, one vote. The Citizens United decision rejected this argument by overruling a prior holding in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990).
Read more:
When the Supreme Court heard Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886, few would have pegged the case as a turning point in constitutional law. The matter at hand seemed highly technical: could California increase the property tax owed by a railroad if the railroad built fences on its property? As it turned out, the Court ruled unanimously in the railroad’s favor. And in so doing, the Court casually affirmed the railroad’s argument that corporations are “persons” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” So certain were the justices of the Fourteenth Amendment’s applicability that their opinion did not engage the issue, but the Court reporter recorded the justices’ perspective on the topic:
Before argument Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: ‘The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.’That statement marks the origin of the view that corporations are persons as a matter of constitutional law. This played a central role in the 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down portions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that restricted corporate spending on electioneering communications in the run-up to a federal election. The Court declared that Congress could not discriminate between electioneering communications according to the identity of the speaker: since individual human beings clearly have a First Amendment right to speak about candidates during the election process, so too must corporations.
Much criticism of the Citizens United decision has focused on whether corporations should have rights under the Constitution. This critique is mistaken. Corporations come in many forms, ranging from large, publicly traded profit-driven companies (think IBM) to smaller, ideologically motivated nonprofits (the American Civil Liberties Union or the Audubon Society) with many others in between (your local newspaper). The diverse nature of corporations may mean that some corporations have stronger claims than others with respect to particular rights, but on the whole it is clear that our democracy could not function if corporations received no constitutional protection. One of the most famous First Amendment decisions of the Warren Court, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), protected a for-profit newspaper from a libel suit for publishing a paid advertisement criticizing a public official. Many foundational freedom-of-association cases likewise involve corporations, such as the NAACP. And even with respect to purely economic rights, it is hard to argue persuasively that the government should have no obligation to provide due process to corporations before imposing fines or condemning their property.
So corporations are entitled to constitutional protection. But are they entitled to the same protection as living, breathing human beings? In this year’s Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, the Supreme Court suggested they are not so entitled. The Court refused to extend to AT&T a provision of the Freedom of Information Act that exempts the disclosure of material that might cause “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” A corporation, Chief Justice Roberts said, does not have the “type of privacy evocative of human concerns.” Similarly, corporations cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.
But even if the Court decided that corporations are in every way like persons, there might be limits on the corporate role in politics. When faced with the issue of popular confidence in the democratic process, courts have agreed that the speech rights of flesh-and-blood persons may be bounded. The Hatch Act, for example, forbids government employees from engaging in partisan political activity, including some activities in their off-time. In fact, when it comes to a willingness to restrict constitutional rights in the name of confidence in the democratic process, the Court’s decisions show a troubling and puzzling asymmetry in favor of corporations. A few years ago, the Court upheld Indiana’s draconian voter-identification statute, which threatened to deny the fundamental constitutional right to vote to thousands of individuals who lack government-issued photo ID. The Court asserted, “Public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process has independent significance, because it encourages citizen participation in the democratic process.” The Court nowhere explains why a similar rationale should not apply to political spending. Several legislatures think it does and have concluded that citizens are less likely to participate in a process they think is rigged in favor of large corporate interests.
The real question, then, is not whether corporations deserve some constitutional protections: they do. The issue is whether there is something about the nature of corporations that makes it appropriate to limit their involvement in the political process. The Court has foreclosed the most common affirmative answer to that question: corporations have accumulated enormous wealth, which enables them to distort a political process that rests on a commitment to equality, embodied most prominently in the principle of one person, one vote. The Citizens United decision rejected this argument by overruling a prior holding in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990).
Read more:
Saturday, July 9, 2011
I Can Sea Clearly Now
See the world below you with remarkable clarity in this 2 person canoe. This hard shell transparent canoe provides 100% visability. It weighs only 40 lbs., and is lighter than most aluminum or wood canoes.
This canoe is beautiful and has a highly functional design. And it's tough. It's made out of the same polycarbonate material used in the production of bulletproof glass. The seats provide excellent back support and comfort. This canoe comes with a retractable skeg system that improves tracking which among other things, makes it easier to paddle long distances.
via:
A Woman Who Stood for Something
by Carl Sferrazza Anthony
A pro-choice Republican feminist, who used her first lady role to help transform our culture.
It would be easy to say that Betty Ford has one great claim to fame, as the leader of the national movement for substance abuse recovery because of the famous southern California treatment center that bears her name. Given the celebrity-soaked media, the pipsqueak actress Lindsay Lohan now seems to have more association with the name "Betty Ford" than does the woman herself. In reality, alcohol and drug treatment is but one in a number of issues that Mrs. Ford became a world-recognized trailblazer of by simply being herself – which is to say, speaking out honestly and rationally.
With her death at 93 on Friday, Betty Ford should command respect not for the coincidence of being married to the only President who was never even elected as a Vice President, or that she survived cancer, alcoholism and chronic osteopathic pain to become the third longest-living First Lady in history (Bess Truman died at 97, Lady Bird Johnson at 94) but rather for what she did with the public role she was thrust into and the values of justice and compassion she lived with all her years.
It might also be easy to label her a middle-American, middle-class political housewife who burst into prominence. As a child, however, she told me that Eleanor Roosevelt and her frank public opinion on a variety of political issues was just as important a role model for her as her own mother, who'd introduced her to the needs of disabled children. Volunteering as a young teenager in local clinics and hospitals where those with disabilities were treated, she taught them confidence and grace through the movement of dance, which she'd already had considerable training in. That passion drove her to pursue the rigor of training with the then-radical theories of modern dance with the legendary Martha Graham herself. She supported herself in a Greenwich Village walk-up by working as a print ad model. Later she saw to it that the modern dance movement leader was given the respect shown the traditional performing arts with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In the brief sweet spot of the so-called "Me Decade" that marked her tenure as First Lady, an era that also saw the mainstreaming of "personality" and traditional gossip columns with the creation of People magazine, Betty Ford deftly managed to shape her public persona directly from her private person, drawing on real experiences from a life never intended to be nationally broadcast. When she had breast cancer and a mastectomy, she went against tradition to publicly disclose the details because she recognized the visibility of her persona might save the lives of millions of other women who were living with it undetected until it was too late. She spoke openly about the value she'd gained from seeking the professional services of a mental health therapist and broke another taboo, hoping to reduce some of the stigma that had been socialized against it. She discussed her first marriage and divorce.
Her support on a variety of other women's health-related issues, including lupus and a woman's right to make decisions about their own bodies (she was careful to never endorse or criticize abortion but to instead support a woman's right to that choice) was at the core of her conscience, stemming from an ironclad belief in the equality of women and men. This conviction also emerged from personal experience. Before, during and after her first marriage, she had earned her own living, from a women's clothing buyer for a large department store to an assembly-line, frozen-food factory worker.
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Yogi Berra Will Be a Living Legend Even After He's Gone
by Joe Posnanski
No man in the history of American sports—perhaps even in the history of America—has spent a lifetime facing more expectant silences. And it is happening again. Another afternoon. Another silence. Strangers stand at a respectful distance and wait for Lawrence Peter Berra to say something funny and still wise, pithy but quirkily profound, obvious and yet strangely esoteric. A Yogi-ism.
It ain't over till it's over.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
You can observe a lot by watching.
In this case the strangers waiting in the silence are a mother and son. They had been touring the Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls, N.J., in anticipation of having the boy's bar mitzvah here. The family had decided that there is no better place for a boy to become a man than in the museum of the greatest winner in the history of baseball. And when they got word that the legend himself was present, they had to meet him, of course. They found him here, in the museum office, looking for a glass of water.
"I cannot believe it's really you!" the woman says to Yogi Berra.
"It's really me," he says.
The woman pauses for a moment. Is that it? Is that the Yogi-ism? What did he mean by "really me"? Was he being existential? Could he be summoning Delphic wisdom from the temple of Apollo, that phrase which translates loosely as "Know thyself"? It's hard to tell. Yogi Berra is looking for water so he can take his medication. He is supposed to take it in about 45 minutes. He's getting nervous about it. Berra hates being late for anything.
It gets late early out here.
(At Yogi Berra Day in his hometown of St. Louis in 1947) Thank you for making this day necessary.
A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.
"This is such an honor," the woman says after a moment or so. Berra nods sheepishly. Again there is the silence. The silence always surrounds Yogi Berra. It smothers him. Imagine having every word you say analyzed like bacteria in a petri dish. Imagine facing that look of wide-eyed anticipation whenever you are about to say something, anything. Once a man and woman came up to him at the museum and asked him to invent a Yogi-ism, on the spot. He told them it doesn't work that way. He does not just divine these phrases. He said, "If I could just make 'em up on the spot, I'd be famous." The couple laughed happily. Yogi Berra did not know what was so funny.
If people don't wanna come out to the park, nobody's gonna stop 'em.
If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer.
I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hitting.
The silence has become stifling. Yogi Berra, decked out in a Yankees hat and jacket, holding the water that he plans to use for his medication, looks out the window. Rain falls. The woman walks over to give him a hug, which he graciously accepts as the conclusion to the conversation. The woman repeats a few more words about how wonderful it is to meet him, and Yogi Berra continues to stay silent and stare out the window.
"How do you think the Yankees will do tonight?" she asks.
Yogi Berra shrugs. He doesn't make predictions. He hopes it will stop raining by game time.
From here on this will be a story without quotes. Well, there will be two Yogi Berra comments at the end, but that will be about it. There will be no new Yogi-isms. There will be no bits from others about how much Berra means to baseball. There will be none of that.
Yogi Berra is 86 years old, and he is probably the most quoted athlete of the last 100 years. The sampling above represent only a few of the dozens and dozens of quips and one-liners and bits of wisdom that have been attributed to him. Yogi Berra has now crossed into that American realm—with Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and Will Rogers—in which just about any famous collection of words gains prestige by being connected to his name. Just throw "As Yogi Berra says" in front of anything and, voilà, you're ready for the banquet circuit.
Read more:
image credit:
No man in the history of American sports—perhaps even in the history of America—has spent a lifetime facing more expectant silences. And it is happening again. Another afternoon. Another silence. Strangers stand at a respectful distance and wait for Lawrence Peter Berra to say something funny and still wise, pithy but quirkily profound, obvious and yet strangely esoteric. A Yogi-ism.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
You can observe a lot by watching.
In this case the strangers waiting in the silence are a mother and son. They had been touring the Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls, N.J., in anticipation of having the boy's bar mitzvah here. The family had decided that there is no better place for a boy to become a man than in the museum of the greatest winner in the history of baseball. And when they got word that the legend himself was present, they had to meet him, of course. They found him here, in the museum office, looking for a glass of water.
"I cannot believe it's really you!" the woman says to Yogi Berra.
"It's really me," he says.
The woman pauses for a moment. Is that it? Is that the Yogi-ism? What did he mean by "really me"? Was he being existential? Could he be summoning Delphic wisdom from the temple of Apollo, that phrase which translates loosely as "Know thyself"? It's hard to tell. Yogi Berra is looking for water so he can take his medication. He is supposed to take it in about 45 minutes. He's getting nervous about it. Berra hates being late for anything.
It gets late early out here.
(At Yogi Berra Day in his hometown of St. Louis in 1947) Thank you for making this day necessary.
A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.
"This is such an honor," the woman says after a moment or so. Berra nods sheepishly. Again there is the silence. The silence always surrounds Yogi Berra. It smothers him. Imagine having every word you say analyzed like bacteria in a petri dish. Imagine facing that look of wide-eyed anticipation whenever you are about to say something, anything. Once a man and woman came up to him at the museum and asked him to invent a Yogi-ism, on the spot. He told them it doesn't work that way. He does not just divine these phrases. He said, "If I could just make 'em up on the spot, I'd be famous." The couple laughed happily. Yogi Berra did not know what was so funny.
If people don't wanna come out to the park, nobody's gonna stop 'em.
If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer.
I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hitting.
The silence has become stifling. Yogi Berra, decked out in a Yankees hat and jacket, holding the water that he plans to use for his medication, looks out the window. Rain falls. The woman walks over to give him a hug, which he graciously accepts as the conclusion to the conversation. The woman repeats a few more words about how wonderful it is to meet him, and Yogi Berra continues to stay silent and stare out the window.
"How do you think the Yankees will do tonight?" she asks.
Yogi Berra shrugs. He doesn't make predictions. He hopes it will stop raining by game time.
From here on this will be a story without quotes. Well, there will be two Yogi Berra comments at the end, but that will be about it. There will be no new Yogi-isms. There will be no bits from others about how much Berra means to baseball. There will be none of that.
Yogi Berra is 86 years old, and he is probably the most quoted athlete of the last 100 years. The sampling above represent only a few of the dozens and dozens of quips and one-liners and bits of wisdom that have been attributed to him. Yogi Berra has now crossed into that American realm—with Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and Will Rogers—in which just about any famous collection of words gains prestige by being connected to his name. Just throw "As Yogi Berra says" in front of anything and, voilà, you're ready for the banquet circuit.
Read more:
image credit:
We Do Not Need Another Cat
We are down a cat. It's still too upsetting to talk about (rural life, tentative open window policy, probable coyote, lifetime of horrible, horrible guilt for not sticking to indoor cat guns), but we used to have two cats, the correct number of cats, and now we have one cat. An indoor cat.
And we can't really face the idea of acquiring a second cat, because a) we're having a human baby in a few months, and b) First Cat never really liked having a second cat, and now that she's Only Cat, she's super-stoked about it and prances around like she owns the place, and c) that would involve formally admitting that Second Cat is gone for good.
But, you know, I read the shelter intake emails every morning, even though Second Cat has been almost certainly deceased for a month now, and so I literally page through dozens of pictures of homeless cats on a daily basis, and it makes me feel like a ghoul. Even though, bless 'em, homeless cats usually put on great bitchface for the camera, you know? The dogs have that plaintive "where's my mommy?" thing going, and the cats are all "get that out of my face. I don't need you! I don't need anyone!"
And you start thinking, maybe an elderly boy cat? Just some big orangey lump? But then First Cat is all, "I tolerated Second Cat because she was from the same Brooklyn feral cluster as me. We were basically sisters. Don't push your luck. Did you see what I did to the stuffed bobcat you bought for your nieces?"
I don't know.
by Nicole Cliff, The Hairpin | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost]
And we can't really face the idea of acquiring a second cat, because a) we're having a human baby in a few months, and b) First Cat never really liked having a second cat, and now that she's Only Cat, she's super-stoked about it and prances around like she owns the place, and c) that would involve formally admitting that Second Cat is gone for good.But, you know, I read the shelter intake emails every morning, even though Second Cat has been almost certainly deceased for a month now, and so I literally page through dozens of pictures of homeless cats on a daily basis, and it makes me feel like a ghoul. Even though, bless 'em, homeless cats usually put on great bitchface for the camera, you know? The dogs have that plaintive "where's my mommy?" thing going, and the cats are all "get that out of my face. I don't need you! I don't need anyone!"
And you start thinking, maybe an elderly boy cat? Just some big orangey lump? But then First Cat is all, "I tolerated Second Cat because she was from the same Brooklyn feral cluster as me. We were basically sisters. Don't push your luck. Did you see what I did to the stuffed bobcat you bought for your nieces?"
I don't know.
by Nicole Cliff, The Hairpin | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost]
The World’s Narrowest House
Architect Jakub Szczęsny has laid out design concepts to fill in a small crack between an old tenement building and tower building in Warsaw, Poland with plans to erect the world’s narrowest house, which will be 60 inches in width.
Talented Israeli writer Etgar Keret is a symbolic patron of the project and he will be given “the main pair of keys” to the house. After the house officially opens on Feb 4, 2012, Keret will spend the first month there and later on will share it as a studio for a select few creative and intellectual individuals from around the world. At the center of what Szczesny considers an art installation that he has aptly entitled, “Ermitage” or hermitage in English, is the residency program that will house these individuals and hopefully, foster a worldwide creative and intellectual exchange.
The architect has shared with Home-Designing some exclusive pictures of this project.
The house has one bedroom, bathroom, lounge, kitchen all on two floors, yet little room for one’s personal possessions and furniture. A ladder will also need to be used in order to move through the two floors. Its interior will come to 52 inches (133 centimeters) at its widest spot. “I saw the gap and just thought it needed filling. It will be used by artists.” Says Szczesny of the inspiration for his designs.
Talented Israeli writer Etgar Keret is a symbolic patron of the project and he will be given “the main pair of keys” to the house. After the house officially opens on Feb 4, 2012, Keret will spend the first month there and later on will share it as a studio for a select few creative and intellectual individuals from around the world. At the center of what Szczesny considers an art installation that he has aptly entitled, “Ermitage” or hermitage in English, is the residency program that will house these individuals and hopefully, foster a worldwide creative and intellectual exchange.
The architect has shared with Home-Designing some exclusive pictures of this project.
The house has one bedroom, bathroom, lounge, kitchen all on two floors, yet little room for one’s personal possessions and furniture. A ladder will also need to be used in order to move through the two floors. Its interior will come to 52 inches (133 centimeters) at its widest spot. “I saw the gap and just thought it needed filling. It will be used by artists.” Says Szczesny of the inspiration for his designs.
Opium Made Easy
By Michael Pollan
[ed. A very long and interesting read. Originally published in Harpers, April, 1997.]
Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of which, I discovered rather too late, is a felony under state and federal law. Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that. My poppies were, or became, felonious; another gardener’s might or might not be. The legality of growing opium poppies (whose seeds are sold under many names, including the breadseed poppy, Papaver paeoniflorum, and, most significantly, Papaver somniferum) is a tangled issue, turning on questions of nomenclature and epistemology that it took me the better part of the summer to sort out. But before I try to explain, let me offer a friendly warning to any gardeners who might wish to continue growing this spectacular annual: the less you know about it, the better off you are, in legal if not horticultural terms. Because whether or not the opium poppies in your garden are illicit depends not on what you do, or even intend to do, with them but very simply on what you know about them. Hence my warning: if you have any desire to grow opium poppies, you would be wise to stop reading right now.
As for me, I’m afraid that, at least in the eyes of the law, I’m already lost, having now tasted of the forbidden fruit of poppy knowledge. Indeed, the more I learned about poppies, the guiltier my poppies became—and the more fearful grew my days and to some extent also my nights. Until the day last fall, that is, when I finally pulled out my poppies’ withered stalks and, with a tremendous feeling of relief, threw them on the compost, thereby (I hope) rejoining the ranks of gardeners who don’t worry about visits from the police.
It started out if not quite innocently, then legally enough. Or at least that’s what I thought back in February, when I added a couple of poppy varieties (P. somniferum as well as P. paeoniflorum and P. rhoeas) to my annual order of flowers and vegetables from the seed catalogues. But the state of popular (and even expert) knowledge about poppies is confused, to say the least; mis- and even disinformation is rife. I’d read in Martha Stewart Living that “contrary to general belief, there is no federal law against growing P. somniferum.” Before planting, I consulted my Taylor’s Guide to Annuals, a generally reliable reference that did allude to the fact that “the juice of the unripe pod yields opium, the production of which is illegal in the United States.” But Taylor’s said nothing worrisome about the plants themselves. I figured that if the seeds could be sold legally (and I found somniferum on offer in a half-dozen well-known catalogues, though it was not always sold under that name), how could the obvious next step—i.e., planting the seeds according to the directions on the packet—possibly be a federal offense? Were this the case, you would think there’d at least be a disclaimer in the catalogues.
So it seemed to me that I could remain safely on the sunny side of the law just as long as I didn’t attempt to extract any opium from my poppies. Yet I have to confess that this was a temptation I grappled with all last summer. You see, I’d become curious as to whether it was in fact possible, as I’d recently read, for a gardener of average skills to obtain a narcotic from a plant grown in this country from legally available seeds. To another gardener this will not seem odd, for we gardeners are like that: eager to try the improbable, to see if we can’t successfully grow an artichoke in Zone 5 or make echinacea tea from the roots of our purple coneflowers. Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power. Also, one of the greatest satisfactions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So, yes, I was curious to know if I could make opium at home, especially if I could do so without making a single illicit purchase. It seemed to me that this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of alchemy.
[ed. A very long and interesting read. Originally published in Harpers, April, 1997.]
Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of which, I discovered rather too late, is a felony under state and federal law. Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that. My poppies were, or became, felonious; another gardener’s might or might not be. The legality of growing opium poppies (whose seeds are sold under many names, including the breadseed poppy, Papaver paeoniflorum, and, most significantly, Papaver somniferum) is a tangled issue, turning on questions of nomenclature and epistemology that it took me the better part of the summer to sort out. But before I try to explain, let me offer a friendly warning to any gardeners who might wish to continue growing this spectacular annual: the less you know about it, the better off you are, in legal if not horticultural terms. Because whether or not the opium poppies in your garden are illicit depends not on what you do, or even intend to do, with them but very simply on what you know about them. Hence my warning: if you have any desire to grow opium poppies, you would be wise to stop reading right now.As for me, I’m afraid that, at least in the eyes of the law, I’m already lost, having now tasted of the forbidden fruit of poppy knowledge. Indeed, the more I learned about poppies, the guiltier my poppies became—and the more fearful grew my days and to some extent also my nights. Until the day last fall, that is, when I finally pulled out my poppies’ withered stalks and, with a tremendous feeling of relief, threw them on the compost, thereby (I hope) rejoining the ranks of gardeners who don’t worry about visits from the police.
It started out if not quite innocently, then legally enough. Or at least that’s what I thought back in February, when I added a couple of poppy varieties (P. somniferum as well as P. paeoniflorum and P. rhoeas) to my annual order of flowers and vegetables from the seed catalogues. But the state of popular (and even expert) knowledge about poppies is confused, to say the least; mis- and even disinformation is rife. I’d read in Martha Stewart Living that “contrary to general belief, there is no federal law against growing P. somniferum.” Before planting, I consulted my Taylor’s Guide to Annuals, a generally reliable reference that did allude to the fact that “the juice of the unripe pod yields opium, the production of which is illegal in the United States.” But Taylor’s said nothing worrisome about the plants themselves. I figured that if the seeds could be sold legally (and I found somniferum on offer in a half-dozen well-known catalogues, though it was not always sold under that name), how could the obvious next step—i.e., planting the seeds according to the directions on the packet—possibly be a federal offense? Were this the case, you would think there’d at least be a disclaimer in the catalogues.
So it seemed to me that I could remain safely on the sunny side of the law just as long as I didn’t attempt to extract any opium from my poppies. Yet I have to confess that this was a temptation I grappled with all last summer. You see, I’d become curious as to whether it was in fact possible, as I’d recently read, for a gardener of average skills to obtain a narcotic from a plant grown in this country from legally available seeds. To another gardener this will not seem odd, for we gardeners are like that: eager to try the improbable, to see if we can’t successfully grow an artichoke in Zone 5 or make echinacea tea from the roots of our purple coneflowers. Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power. Also, one of the greatest satisfactions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So, yes, I was curious to know if I could make opium at home, especially if I could do so without making a single illicit purchase. It seemed to me that this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of alchemy.
First U.S. Open or 31st, Challenge is the Same
Mariel Galdiano, 13, left, and Betsy King, 55, right, have converged at the United States Women’s Open.
[ed. Sadly, it looks like neither lady will make the cut this weekend.]
by Karen Crouse
In 1998, Mariel Galdiano was born in Honolulu. That same year, Betsy King became the first golfer to surpass $6 million in career earnings on the L.P.G.A. Tour.
Galdiano, 13, and King, 55, are from eras as far removed as Venus is from Mars. Their worlds have converged at the United States Women’s Open, where Galdiano, a four-time Hawaii state junior champion, started the week on equal footing with King, a three-time tour player of the year.
They met on Wednesday on the practice range, after Galdiano made a guest appearance at a clinic run by Annika Sorenstam, the Hall of Fame golfer who won the Open the only other time it was held here, in 1995.
King said she laughed when Sorenstam asked Galdiano about her daily routine and heard Galdiano say, “I go to school and then my dad picks me up after school and takes me to the golf course.” King, who is using a putter that is 14 years older than Galdiano, said, “That’s when it hit me how young she is.”
It is the first Open for Galdiano and the 31st — and almost certainly last — one for King, the 1989 and 1990 champion. Galdiano, who had a morning tee time, played 13 holes in six over par before play was suspended because of inclement weather. King was among 72 players who did not tee off before the round was suspended.
Of the two, one was predictably so nervous in the days leading to Thursday that she had a recurring nightmare in which she was standing on the first tee but could not make a free swing because a towering pine stood in her way.
That would be King, whose personality developed a sandpaper edge from grinding during tournament weeks.
Read more:
Friday, July 8, 2011
Bon Dance
[ed. It's Obon Festival season. One of the best evenings of my life was spent at a Bon dance on the island of Lanai.
Bon Festival (Wikipedia)
Bon Festival (Wikipedia)
Invasive Species
by Rick Sinnott
On a country road through the rolling hills of western Kentucky, I pointed out a white-tailed deer to our two nieces and nephew in the back seat. The doe, unfazed by our moving vehicle, remained stock-still a few yards off the macadam.
As we zoomed past, 8-year-old Chirana mused, “It’s actually very natural … the countryside.”
Chirana was experiencing Kentucky from the opposite end of the spectrum from Alaska, where I call home. She lives in south Florida, arguably one of the least natural environments in the United States. In Florida, citrus groves, sugarcane fields and other agricultural monocultures increasingly dominate the interstices between sprawling urban areas. Its subtropical climate is burdened with the second highest conglomeration of invasive species of the 50 states, second only to Hawaii.
An invasive species is one that does not naturally occur in an area and whose release is likely to cause economic or environmental damage, including harm to human health. Exotic birds, mammals, reptiles, fish and plants have infested the unique North American panhandle like ticks on a farm dog. Over 515 exotic plants and 250 animals, mostly birds and reptiles, have been reported.
But I don’t want to talk about Florida.
My wife and I were visiting our families in three Midwest states. It’s rare for us to leave Alaska. The last time I visited America’s heartland was seven years ago. Each time I return to my boyhood haunts, the people are more or less the same, but the natural world has changed significantly.
On our previous visit, I saw stray cats and feral cats everywhere. Cats were not content just to patrol farms or rural homesteads, where a hard-working feline might find house mice or rats and benefit humankind by killing these age-old pests, among the first recorded invasive species. Instead the cats had elected to become an invasive species themselves. At night, their bright eyes winked and flashed from the shoulders of interstate highways far from the nearest house, and not a few were pummeled by passing vehicles and flattened on roads like the raccoons and opossums they were slowly replacing.
Cats are perhaps the least domesticated of domesticated animals, little changed from their common ancestor with African wildcats. Depending on how you feel about cats, it may or may not surprise you to know they are on the list of the 100 world’s worst invasive alien species. Experts estimate that there are more than 77 million pet cats and 60 to 100 million stray and feral cats in the United States. Cats in America kill hundreds of millions of wild birds and more than a billion small mammals every year. They may be the nation’s most abundant medium-sized predator. Unlike most wild predators, even well-fed cats kill.
But I don’t want to talk about cats, either.
Read more:
image credit:
On a country road through the rolling hills of western Kentucky, I pointed out a white-tailed deer to our two nieces and nephew in the back seat. The doe, unfazed by our moving vehicle, remained stock-still a few yards off the macadam.
As we zoomed past, 8-year-old Chirana mused, “It’s actually very natural … the countryside.” Chirana was experiencing Kentucky from the opposite end of the spectrum from Alaska, where I call home. She lives in south Florida, arguably one of the least natural environments in the United States. In Florida, citrus groves, sugarcane fields and other agricultural monocultures increasingly dominate the interstices between sprawling urban areas. Its subtropical climate is burdened with the second highest conglomeration of invasive species of the 50 states, second only to Hawaii.
An invasive species is one that does not naturally occur in an area and whose release is likely to cause economic or environmental damage, including harm to human health. Exotic birds, mammals, reptiles, fish and plants have infested the unique North American panhandle like ticks on a farm dog. Over 515 exotic plants and 250 animals, mostly birds and reptiles, have been reported.
But I don’t want to talk about Florida.
My wife and I were visiting our families in three Midwest states. It’s rare for us to leave Alaska. The last time I visited America’s heartland was seven years ago. Each time I return to my boyhood haunts, the people are more or less the same, but the natural world has changed significantly.
On our previous visit, I saw stray cats and feral cats everywhere. Cats were not content just to patrol farms or rural homesteads, where a hard-working feline might find house mice or rats and benefit humankind by killing these age-old pests, among the first recorded invasive species. Instead the cats had elected to become an invasive species themselves. At night, their bright eyes winked and flashed from the shoulders of interstate highways far from the nearest house, and not a few were pummeled by passing vehicles and flattened on roads like the raccoons and opossums they were slowly replacing.
Cats are perhaps the least domesticated of domesticated animals, little changed from their common ancestor with African wildcats. Depending on how you feel about cats, it may or may not surprise you to know they are on the list of the 100 world’s worst invasive alien species. Experts estimate that there are more than 77 million pet cats and 60 to 100 million stray and feral cats in the United States. Cats in America kill hundreds of millions of wild birds and more than a billion small mammals every year. They may be the nation’s most abundant medium-sized predator. Unlike most wild predators, even well-fed cats kill.
But I don’t want to talk about cats, either.
Read more:
image credit:
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