How To Write A Love Poem

by Jim Behrle

Poetry occupies a cultural space in Contemporary American Society somewhere between Tap Dancing and Ventriloquism. People are certainly aware that poetry exists, but this awareness comes upon them only vaguely and in passing moments. During commercials, mostly, which feature corporate poetry. When people think of a poet, perhaps they imagine the finger-snapping beret-wearing beatnik. Or the slammy mike-wielding poet-ranter. Both proud poetic traditions. But most people who write poetry are people just like yourself. Scruffy, broken wordpals. In the age of Twitter, casual word-shaping may be at its all-time high worldwide. As we attempt to fit all the meaning and emotion we can into a few short lines, no doubt Maya Angelou and Walt Whitman and Bashō are looking down from heaven and smiling. (I know Maya Angelou isn’t dead. She just lives in heaven.)

Love poetry has, of course, been with us since the beginning of time. Lame pick-up lines were passé even in Mesozoic times; we diminish ourselves with cheap dating gimmickry. And who would want to woo anyone who could be gotten so cheaply anyway? It’s the chase that's the fun—and the poem is the map you use! To get to Someone’s Soul! (Excited trumpets!)

When is the right time in a relationship to present someone with a poem? A good question. The line between creepy and romantic is ever shifting. Some people might like a poem written about them at first, and then later come to find it creepy and taser you. Others might, upon first reading, feel creeped out and then later come to love the poem you wrote. You never know. Love makes us put ourselves out there in crazy ways; it's a roller coaster except there are no safety restraints. You could find yourself floating or smashed on the boardwalk like a heel-crushed hotdog. That’s the fun of it! It starts as a funny feeling in the stomach and then quickly goes on to flood the brain. Soon we're constantly thinking about them, wondering what they look like without pants on, trying to remember their schedule at the yoga place. Poets actually know more about longing than they do about love. Poets fall in love with other people’s wives, people who don’t love them back. They're human, in other words; and humans weren't built for happiness. They were built for dissatisfaction and yearning.

So, what’s your story? For whom do you yearn? Could be your parole officer. Or the guy you hired to kill your ex. We generally are attracted to complication: people who it might be impossible to pursue. As the great John Wieners wrote, “The poem does not lie to us. We lie under its law.” I quote that a lot, because it’s the most important thing a poem can do: communicate energy and Capital T Truth to the reader. In this case to someone you think is pretty special. So make your Truth sound pretty good.

The first step is to stare at a blank piece of paper for a while. This is actually a helpful step. Like the way Michelangelo stared at a block of stone for a while and then figured out that there was a man with a strangely small penis inside of it. Or Jackson Pollock would stare at a blank canvas and realize that a bunch of random painting droppings and swirls were underneath, waiting to be dripped out. Or Eve Ensler saw an empty stage and a microphone and then decided that she wanted to talk about her vagina. What does the blank page tell us? A lot. It's a mirror of our own minds. Especially, in my case, when I have spilled coffee on it.

Read more:

UVB-76

by Peter Savodnik

From a lonely rusted tower in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave radio station transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and 34 per minute, each lasting roughly a second—a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether. The signal was said to emanate from the grounds of a voyenni gorodok (mini military city) near the village of Povarovo, and very rarely, perhaps once every few weeks, the monotony was broken by a male voice reciting brief sequences of numbers and words, often strings of Russian names: “Anna, Nikolai, Ivan, Tatyana, Roman.” But the balance of the airtime was filled by a steady, almost maddening, series of inexplicable tones.

The amplitude and pitch of the buzzing sometimes shifted, and the intervals between tones would fluctuate. Every hour, on the hour, the station would buzz twice, quickly. None of the upheavals that had enveloped Russia in the last decade of the cold war and the first two decades of the post-cold-war era—Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika, the end of the Afghan war, the Soviet implosion, the end of price controls, Boris Yeltsin, the bombing of parliament, the first Chechen war, the oligarchs, the financial crisis, the second Chechen war, the rise of Putinism—had ever kept UVB-76, as the station’s call sign ran, from its inscrutable purpose. During that time, its broadcast came to transfix a small cadre of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who tuned in and documented nearly every signal it transmitted. Although the Buzzer (as they nicknamed it) had always been an unknown quantity, it was also a reassuring constant, droning on with a dark, metronome-like regularity.

But on June 5, 2010, the buzzing ceased. No announcements, no explanations. Only silence.

The following day, the broadcast resumed as if nothing had happened. For the rest of June and July, UVB-76 behaved more or less as it always had. There were some short-lived perturbations—including bits of what sounded like Morse code—but nothing dramatic. In mid-August, the buzzing stopped again. It resumed, stopped again, started again.

Then on August 25, at 10:13 am, UVB-76 went entirely haywire. First there was silence, then a series of knocks and shuffles that made it sound like someone was in the room. Before this day, all the beeping, buzzing, codes, and numbers had hinted at an evil force hovering on the airwaves. Now it seemed as though the wizard were suddenly about to reveal himself. For the first week of September, transmission was interrupted frequently, usually with what sounded like recorded snippets of “Dance of the Little Swans” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

On the evening of September 7, something more dramatic—one listener even called it “existential”—transpired. At 8:48 pm Moscow time, a male voice issued a new call sign, “Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris,” indicating that the station was now to be called MDZhB. This was followed by one of UVB-76’s (or MDZhB’s) typically nebulous messages: “04 979 D-R-E-N-D-O-U-T” followed by a longer series of numbers, then “T-R-E-N-E-R-S-K-I-Y” and yet more numbers.

***

As you might expect, the Buzzer’s history is murky. Roughly 30 years ago, it’s said, the Soviets built a radio station near Povarovo (the accent is on the second syllable), a 40-minute drive northwest of Moscow. At the time, Leonid Brezhnev was still alive, the Kremlin presided over an intercontinental empire, and Soviet troops were battling the mujahideen. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it was revealed that Povarovo was controlled by the military, and that whatever happened there was top-secret.

Shortwave radio aficionados developed various hypotheses about the role of the station in Russia’s sprawling, military-communications network. It was a forgotten node, one theory ran, set up to serve some function now lost deep in the bureaucracy. It was a top-secret signal, others believed, that transmitted messages to Russian spies in foreign countries. More ominously, countered another theory, UVB-76 served as nothing less than the epicenter of the former Soviet Union’s “Dead Hand” doomsday device, which had been programmed to launch a wave of nuclear missiles at the US in the event the Kremlin was flattened by a sneak attack. (The least sexy theory, which posited that the Buzzer was testing the thickness of the ionosphere, has never enjoyed much support.)

Read more:

Photo: Sergey Kozmin

Love (by Mikel Jaso)
via:

Isabelle by Drew Young.
via:

4 Non Blondes

[ed. Scary.]

Current Events: Due-Process Free Assassinations

[ed.  Counterpoint to Mr. Greenwald's column here:]

by Glenn Greenwald

It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki.  No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was “considering” indicting him).  Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even had any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt.  When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts.  He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner.  When Awlaki’s inclusion on President Obama’s hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that “it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.”

After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.).  It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its.  The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world.  The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.

What’s most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.  Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President’s ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki — including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry’s execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists: criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.

From an authoritarian perspective, that’s the genius of America’s political culture.  It not only finds ways to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process).  It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.

Read more:

Love Among the Equations

[ed.  For Anna and Nate.]

by Jennifer Ouellette

Shortly after becoming engaged, my now-husband and I drove from a conference in San Francisco to our new home in Los Angeles via the scenic route along the Pacific Coast Highway. At sunset, we stopped briefly to refuel just north of Malibu and found ourselves admiring the brilliant orange, red, and purple hues stretching across the darkening horizon, savoring the peaceful sound of ocean waves lapping against the shore.

Against this idyllic Hallmark moment, Sean put his arms around me, pressed his cheek to mine, and gently whispered, “Wouldn’t it be fascinating to take a Fourier transform of those waves?”

A Fourier transform is a mathematical equation that takes a complex wave of any kind – water, sound, light, even the gravitational waves that permeate the fabric of space time – and breaks it down into its component parts to reveal the full spectrum of “colors” that are otherwise hidden from human perception.

Another woman might have been taken aback by Sean injecting a bit of cold hard math into the warm hues of a romantic ocean sunset – talk about over-analyzing the scene and spoiling the mood! Me? I found it charming, yet another intriguing color in the spectrum that makes up this multifaceted man with whom I have chosen to share my life.

My husband is a theoretical physicist. He spends his days pondering big questions about space, time, and the origins of the universe. It’s not just Fourier transforms that lurk in the nooks and crannies of our marriage. Our pillow talk includes animated discussions about Boltzmann brains, the rules of time travel, poker, phase transitions, and the possibility of a multiverse: the notion that there are an infinite number of universes out there, beyond our ken, perhaps containing carbon copies of ourselves – the same, and yet somehow different.

I have issues with this concept, especially when I’m sleepy: all those universes filled with doppelgangers cluttering up the landscape just strikes me as crowded and untidy. But Sean wrestles with these questions all the time, and is adamant in his defense. “It’s infinity,” he reassures me. “It’s not like we’ll run out of room!” I guess the multiverse has unlimited storage space.

I wasn’t looking to fall in love, and never imagined I would be a wife. Years of failed relationships had convinced me that I had no gift for making love work. My romantic calculations seemed doomed to failure, always slightly off, never quite yielding the right combination, no matter how intricately I manipulated the numbers.

By the time Sean entered my orbit, my heart had been broken into little pieces and reassembled so many times, I was convinced the telltale cracks would never fully heal. I gave up on dating, buried myself in work and told myself it was better this way. I built a thick wall around my heart and guarded the perimeter zealously.

Love stole back into my life, ninja-like, while I was looking the other way. Sean is a scientist, and I am a science writer, but our day-to-day lives were like parallel lines that never met. Our paths didn’t cross until we discovered each other’s blogs online. We quickly formed an online friendship, both recognizing a kindred spirit across the vast expanse of Cyberspace. Two months and many emails later, we arranged to meet over dinner at a physics conference in Dallas.

Physicists are often unfairly characterized as absent-minded geniuses, socially inept, with zero fashion sense, a la Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory.  It’s an exaggeration, but there is a tiny element of truth to that. So I was pleasantly surprised when a tall, lanky man with boyish good looks and an engaging smile appeared in the hotel bar, sporting jeans and a casual-yet-chic jacket. This was not your stereotypical physicist.

Read more:

 

Peter Clark . Mott Street Dash, 2011. Found vintage paper collage.
via:

It Knows

by Daniel Soar

This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been running. People believed him. What distinguished his new ‘gang of four’ from the generation it had superseded – companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco, which mostly exist to sell gizmos and gadgets and innumerable hours of expensive support services to corporate clients – was that the newcomers sold their products and services to ordinary people. Since there are more ordinary people in the world than there are businesses, and since there’s nothing that ordinary people don’t want or need, or can’t be persuaded they want or need when it flashes up alluringly on their screens, the money to be made from them is virtually limitless. Together, Schmidt’s four companies are worth more than half a trillion dollars. The technology sector isn’t as big as, say, oil, but it’s growing, as more and more traditional industries – advertising, travel, real estate, used cars, new cars, porn, television, film, music, publishing, news – are subsumed into the digital economy. Schmidt, who as the ex-CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation had learned to take the long view, warned that not all four of his disruptive gang could survive. So – as they all converge from their various beginnings to compete in the same area, the place usually referred to as ‘the cloud’, a place where everything that matters is online – the question is: who will be the first to blink?

If the company that falters is Google, it won’t be because it didn’t see the future coming. Of Schmidt’s four technology juggernauts, Google has always been the most ambitious, and the most committed to getting everything possible onto the internet, its mission being ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Its ubiquitous search box has changed the way information can be got at to such an extent that ten years after most people first learned of its existence you wouldn’t think of trying to find out anything without typing it into Google first. Searching on Google is automatic, a reflex, just part of what we do. But an insufficiently thought-about fact is that in order to organise the world’s information Google first has to get hold of the stuff. And in the long run ‘the world’s information’ means much more than anyone would ever have imagined it could. It means, of course, the totality of the information contained on the World Wide Web, or the contents of more than a trillion webpages (it was a trillion at the last count, in 2008; now, such a number would be meaningless). But that much goes without saying, since indexing and ranking webpages is where Google began when it got going as a research project at Stanford in 1996, just five years after the web itself was invented. It means – or would mean, if lawyers let Google have its way – the complete contents of every one of the more than 33 million books in the Library of Congress or, if you include slightly varying editions and pamphlets and other ephemera, the contents of the approximately 129,864,880 books published in every recorded language since printing was invented. It means every video uploaded to the public internet, a quantity – if you take the Google-owned YouTube alone – that is increasing at the rate of nearly an hour of video every second.

It means the location of businesses, religious institutions, schools, libraries, community centres and hospitals worldwide – a global Yellow Pages. It means the inventories of shops, the archives of newspapers, the minute by minute performance of the stock market. It means, or will mean, if Google keeps going, the exact look of every street corner and roadside on the planet, photographed in high resolution and kept as up to date as possible: the logic, if not yet the practice, of Google Street View, means that city streets should be under ever more regular photographic surveillance, since the fresher and more complete the imagery the more useful people will find it, and the more they will therefore use it.[1] If it doesn’t already have a piece of data, you can be sure that Google is pursuing a way of getting it, of gathering and sorting every kind of public information there is.

But all this is just the stuff that Google makes publicly searchable, or ‘universally accessible’. It’s only a small fraction of the information it actually possesses. I know that Google knows, because I’ve looked it up, that on 30 April 2011 at 4.33 p.m. I was at Willesden Junction station, travelling west. It knows where I was, as it knows where I am now, because like many millions of others I have an Android-powered smartphone with Google’s location service turned on. If you use the full range of its products, Google knows the identity of everyone you communicate with by email, instant messaging and phone, with a master list – accessible only by you, and by Google – of the people you contact most. If you use its products, Google knows the content of your emails and voicemail messages (a feature of Google Voice is that it transcribes messages and emails them to you, storing the text on Google servers indefinitely). If you find Google products compelling – and their promise of access-anywhere, conflagration and laptop-theft-proof document creation makes them quite compelling – Google knows the content of every document you write or spreadsheet you fiddle or presentation you construct. If as many Google-enabled robotic devices get installed as Google hopes, Google may soon know the contents of your fridge, your heart rate when you’re exercising, the weather outside your front door, the pattern of electricity use in your home.

Google knows or has sought to know, and may increasingly seek to know, your credit card numbers, your purchasing history, your date of birth, your medical history, your reading habits, your taste in music, your interest or otherwise (thanks to your searching habits) in the First Intifada or the career of Audrey Hepburn or flights to Mexico or interest-free loans, or whatever you idly speculate about at 3.45 on a Wednesday afternoon. Here’s something: if you have an Android phone, Google can guess your home address, since that’s where your phone tends to be at night. I don’t mean that in theory some rogue Google employee could hack into your phone to find out where you sleep; I mean that Google, as a system, explicitly deduces where you live and openly logs it as ‘home address’ in its location service, to put beside the ‘work address’ where you spend the majority of your daytime hours.

Read more:

Friday Book Club - A River Runs Through It

Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.

Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.

By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales which express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie, and the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has sold more than a million copies. As Proulx writes in her foreword to this new edition, "In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as fish swim and books are made."

"Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. . . . As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway."—Alfred Kazin, Chicago Tribune Book World

"It is an enchanted tale. . . . I have read the story three times now, and each time it seems fuller."— Roger Sale, New York Review of Books

"Maclean's book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren. I love its sound."—James R. Frakes, New York Times Book Review

"The title novella is the prize. . . . Something unique and marvelous: a story that is at once an evocation of nature's miracles and realities and a probing of human mysteries. Wise, witty, wonderful, Maclean spins his tales, casts his flies, fishes the rivers and the woods for what he remembers from his youth in the Rockies."—Publishers Weekly

"Ostensibly a 'fishing story,' 'A River Runs through It' is really an autobiographical elegy that captivates readers who have never held a fly rod in their hand. In it the art of casting a fly becomes a ritual of grace, a metaphor for man's attempt to move into nature."—Andrew Rosenheim, The Independent

via:

As Long As We Both Shall Love

by Mary Elizabeth Williams

When you live in a place with a 50 percent divorce rate, is "till death do you part" even a realistic concept? In a radical rethinking of matrimony, Mexico City's assembly is mulling a proposed civil code reform that would enable the city to issue marriage licenses with time limits.

The idea, explains assemblyman Leonel Luna, is to help couples avoid "the tortuous process of divorce." Instead, couples could opt for a renewable contract for a minimum two-year term, complete with provisions for the division of assets and custody of children. "If the relationship is not stable or harmonious," Luna says, "the contract simply ends." Luna says there could be a vote on the new marriage contracts by the end of the year.

Unsurprisingly, the Catholic Church, still fired up over Mexico City legalizing same-sex unions in 2009, is none too pleased with the move. Mexican archdiocese spokesman Hugo Valdemar told Reuters this week that "This reform is absurd. It contradicts the nature of marriage. It's another one of these electoral theatrics the assembly tends to do that are irresponsible and immoral." Because anything other than a lifetime binding contract between a man and woman is hooey!

There's something irresistible about the notion of a love that can last forever. But matrimony has always existed as both a business relationship as well as a romantic one. Sure, plenty of arranged marriages have led to deep and lasting love, but they've also been built on practical social alliances between families. The blending of fortunes, the rearing of children -- they all factor into the culture of marriage.  It's not just about eternal ardor. So why not make it easier for couples to openly acknowledge another practical aspect of marriage – that it doesn't always last until one person gets the privilege of burying the other one?

Love, even under the best of circumstances, is not a static condition. Even if you're with the same person, the relationship you're in at 24 isn't the one you're going to be in at 64. And though it may sound harsh to subject it to periodic review, there is in fact both a pleasantly incentivizing reason to do so and a luxuriously liberating one as well. Think of any couple you've ever known -- or possibly participated in -- in which domesticity was taken as Let Yourself Go pass. Partnered life doesn't have the urgent frisson of early dating, but it's not an excuse to stop putting in the work, either. How different might the experience of marriage be if both participants in it were subject to periodic, mutual review? The chance to say, here's what's working, here's what's changed, here's what needs improvement? The opportunity, even, to say, maybe it's time to move on? Why not acknowledge that a great five-year run could be more satisfying than a 30-year sentence? After all, we leave jobs and houses and quietly distance ourselves from old friends all the time, and it's rarely considered failure. Instead it's understood to be part of growth and the nature of life. So why is permanence so highly prized? Why is endurance equated with commitment?

Read more:

image:  Perov Stanislav via Shutterstock

Current Events: Eurozone Crisis

[ed.  There's so much economic news coming out today (nearly all bad) that I hardly know what to highlight (see also, the California and Bust post below).  We'll start with this article, by Pippa Malmgren.]

by Pippa Malmgren

News to expect in the coming days and weeks:

• Greece defaults
• Germany protects German banks but other countries cannot do the same thus quickly provoking multiple sovereign defaults and or bank failures, all of which may easily lead to a payments crisis in the global banking system. Derivatives are particularly at risk in terms of operation and execution.
• The Euro falls in value especially against the US dollar
• The Germans announce they are re-introducing the Deutschmark. They have already ordered the new currency and asked that the printers hurry up.
• The Euro falls even more on any news that Germany is withdrawing from the Euro.
•  Legal wrangling begins as to the legality of Germany’s decision. Resolution takes years.
• Germany insists that the Euro continues to exist even they do not use it any longer. They emphasize that European unification will continue and suggest new legal instruments to strengthen European Unification including new EU Treaties.

The markets are focused on the imminent default by Greece. But, this is not the most important issue now. The historic development the markets have not priced in as that Germany is preparing to exit the Euro. The markets are very likely to have to contend with the re-introduction of Deutsche Marks in the near future. This is bound to mean a collapse in the value of the Euro for those countries that will remain in it (devaluation for the rest of Europe). This step may seem unthinkable but, I believe that the German government is telling us in multiple ways that there is no other solution from their point of view. It is also why you will hear various policymakers at the G7 meeting his weekend echo Christine Lagard’s comment that the world economy is entering a "dangerous new phase."[i] This was certainly the atmosphere at Jackson Hole where policymakers openly talked about entering a period of history where we would face challenges beyond the scope of anything we have seen in our careers. 

The Vice Chancellor of Germany, Philip Roesler[ii], gave a speech on September 11^th in which he said there will be no more bailouts and any German politician who approves a single Euro for the debt problem of another European nation will not survive in office.  This is consistent with a German poll over the weekend that shows more than 70% of Germans oppose any more transfer of German wealth to nations with debt problems.

Please note his specific language: "Roesler told the Monday edition of Germany's Welt daily there should be "no limits to thinking" of possible scenarios of how to end the euro crisis."[iii]

The Germans have already concluded that if they are going to write any further checks then they are going to write them to their domestic institutions and protect their domestic investors.  Necessarily, this means that many Eurozone countries will default on their debt. It now seems this will happen within a matter of days. Germany has, therefore, already announced its intention to ring-fence and support their own banks and only their own. This may ultimately involve the nationalization of some or even all the German banks. This is necessary because a falling Euro will further weaken the ability of the other Eurozone members to meet their commitments and thus increases the risk of multiple sovereign defaults. Eurozone countries that are going to default will do so virtually simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Eurozone countries may or may not have the resources to nationalize their banks. Therefore, we have to expect that bank failures are a real possibility. Apparently, the Europeans are warning the US to come up with a plan to nationalize Bank of America given that it is already in a precarious position, despite the injection of capital from Warren Buffet. The multiple lawsuits against Bofa and other banks alone will render the US banking system vulnerable to any dramatic announcement out of Europe. But, no doubt US banks have immense exposures to European institutions and some may even have sovereign credit risk directly on their balance sheets.

It is hard to overestimate the shock that this will bring to the financial markets.  Risk aversion will set in quickly as people start to consider the multiple possible consequences, some unintended, of such a decision. Huge fortunes will be made and lost in this moment in history.

It is worth providing a review of the evidence that led me to this conclusion.

Read more:

Wabisuke.  Nonoyama, Kōzan, 1780-1847.
via:

California and Bust

[ed.  Great article on a lot of different levels.  What's even scarier is that these isssues are just the tip of the iceberg; the structural and social upheaval that'll likely occur will be immense.  Be sure to click on 'Single Page' at the bottom for easier reading.]

The smart money says the U.S. economy will splinter, with some states thriving, some states not, and all eyes are on California as the nightmare scenario. After a hair-raising visit with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who explains why the Golden State has cratered, Michael Lewis goes where the buck literally stops—the local level, where the likes of San Jose mayor Chuck Reed and Vallejo fire chief Paige Meyer are trying to avert even worse catastrophes and rethink what it means to be a society.

by Michael Lewis

On August 5, 2011, moments after the U.S. government watched a rating agency lower its credit rating for the first time in American history, the market for U.S. Treasury bonds soared. Four days later, the interest rates paid by the U.S. government on its new 10-year bonds were plummeting on their way to record lows. The price of gold rose right alongside the price of U.S. Treasury bonds, but the prices of virtually all stocks and other bonds in rich Western countries went into a free fall. The net effect of a major U.S. rating agency’s saying that the U.S. government was less likely than before to repay its debts was to lower the cost of borrowing for the U.S. government and to raise it for everyone else. This told you a lot of what you needed to know about the ability of the U.S. government to live beyond its means: it had, for the moment, a blank check. The shakier the United States government appeared, up to some faraway point, the more cheaply it would be able to borrow. It wasn’t exposed yet to the same vicious cycle that threatened the financial life of European countries: a moment of doubt leads to higher borrowing costs, which leads to greater doubt and even higher borrowing costs, and so on until you become Greece. The fear that the United States might actually not pay back the money it had borrowed was still unreal.

On December 14, 2010, the television news program 60 Minutes aired a 14-minute piece about U.S. state and local finances. Correspondent Steve Kroft interviewed a private Wall Street analyst named Meredith Whitney, who, back in 2007, had gone from being obscure to famous when she correctly suggested that Citigroup’s losses in U.S. subprime bonds were far bigger than anyone imagined, and predicted the bank would be forced to cut its dividend. The 60 Minutes segment noted that U.S. state and local governments faced a collective annual deficit of roughly half a trillion dollars, adding that another trillion-dollar gap existed between what the governments owed retired workers and the money they had on hand to pay them. Whitney pointed out that even these numbers were unreliable, and probably optimistic, as the states did a poor job of providing information about their finances to the public. New Jersey governor Chris Christie concurred with her and added, “At this point, if it’s worse, what’s the difference?” The bill owed by American states to retired American workers was so large that it couldn’t be paid, whatever the amount. At the end of the piece, Kroft asked Whitney what she thought about the ability and willingness of the American states to repay their debts. She didn’t see a real risk that the states would default, because the states had the ability to push their problems down to counties and cities. But at these lower levels of government, where American life was lived, she thought there would be serious problems. “You could see 50 to a hundred sizable defaults, [maybe] more,” she said. A minute later Kroft returned to her to ask when people should start worrying about a crisis in local finances. “It’ll be something to worry about within the next 12 months,” she said.

That prophecy turned out to be self-fulfilling: people started worrying about U.S. municipal finance the minute the words were out of her mouth. The next day the municipal-bond market tanked. It kept falling right through the next month. It fell so far, and her prediction received so much attention, that money managers who had put clients into municipal bonds felt compelled to hire more people to analyze states and cities, to prove her wrong. (One of them called it “the Meredith Whitney Municipal Bond Analyst Full Employment Act.”) Inside the financial world a new literature was born, devoted to persuading readers that Meredith Whitney didn’t know what she was talking about. She was vulnerable to the charge: up until the moment she appeared on 60 Minutes she had, so far as anyone knew, no experience at all of U.S. municipal finance. Many of the articles attacking her accused her of making a very specific forecast—as many as a hundred defaults within a year!—that failed to materialize. (Sample Bloomberg News headline: meredith whitney loses credibility as muni defaults fall 60%.) The whirlwind thrown up by the brief market panic sucked in everyone who was anywhere near municipal finance. The nonpartisan, dispassionate, sober-minded Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in Washington, D.C., even released a statement saying that there was a “mistaken impression that drastic and immediate measures are needed to avoid an imminent fiscal meltdown.” This was treated in news accounts as a response to Meredith Whitney, as she was the only one in sight who could be accused of having made such a prediction.

But that’s not at all what she had said: her words were being misrepresented so that her message might be more easily attacked. “She was referring to the complacency of the ratings agencies and investment advisers who say there is nothing to worry about,” said a person at 60 Minutes who reviewed the transcripts of the interview for me, to make sure I had heard what I thought I had heard. “She says there is something to worry about, and it will be apparent to everyone in the next 12 months.”

Whatever else she had done, Meredith Whitney had found the pressure point in American finance: the fear that American cities would not pay back the money they had borrowed. The market for municipal bonds, unlike the market for U.S. government bonds, spooked easily. American cities and states were susceptible to the same cycle of doom that had forced Greece to seek help from the International Monetary Fund. All it took to create doubt and raise borrowing costs for states and cities was for a woman with no standing in the municipal-bond market to utter a few sentences on television. That was the amazing thing: she had offered nothing to back up her statement. She’d written a massive, detailed report on state and local finances, but no one except a handful of her clients had any idea what was in it. “If I was a real nasty hedge-fund guy,” one hedge-fund manager put it to me, “I’d sit back and say, ‘This is a herd of cattle that can be stampeded.’ ”

What Meredith Whitney was trying to say was more interesting than what she was accused of saying. She didn’t actually care all that much about the municipal-bond market, or how many cities were likely to go bankrupt. The municipal-bond market was a dreary backwater. As she put it, “Who cares about the stinking muni-bond market?” The only reason she had stumbled into that market was that she had come to view the U.S. national economy as a collection of regional economies. To understand the regional economies, she had to understand how state and local governments were likely to behave, and to understand this she needed to understand their finances. Thus she had spent two unlikely years researching state and local finance. “I didn’t have a plan to do this,” she said. “Not one of my clients asked for it. I only looked at this because I needed to understand it myself. How it started was with a question: How can G.D.P. [gross domestic product] estimates be so high when the states that outperformed the U.S. economy during the boom were now underperforming the U.S. economy—and they were 22 percent of that economy?” It was a good question.

From 2002 to 2008, the states had piled up debts right alongside their citizens’: their level of indebtedness, as a group, had almost doubled, and state spending had grown by two-thirds. In that time they had also systematically underfunded their pension plans and other future liabilities by a total of nearly $1.5 trillion. In response, perhaps, the pension money that they had set aside was invested in ever riskier assets. In 1980 only 23 percent of state pension money had been invested in the stock market; by 2008 the number had risen to 60 percent. To top it off, these pension funds were pretty much all assuming they could earn 8 percent on the money they had to invest, at a time when the Federal Reserve was promising to keep interest rates at zero. Toss in underfunded health-care plans, a reduction in federal dollars available to the states, and the depression in tax revenues caused by a soft economy, and you were looking at multi-trillion-dollar holes that could be dealt with in only one of two ways: massive cutbacks in public services or a default—or both. Whitney thought default unlikely, at least at the state level, because the state could bleed the cities of money to pay off its bonds. The cities were where the pain would be felt most intensely. “The scary thing about state treasurers,” she said, “is that they don’t know the financial situation in their own municipalities.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I asked them!”

All states may have been created equal, but they were equal no longer. The states that had enjoyed the biggest boom were now facing the biggest busts. “How does the United States emerge from the credit crisis?” Whitney asked herself. “I was convinced—because the credit crisis had been so different from region to region—that it would emerge with new regional strengths and weaknesses. Companies are more likely to flourish in the stronger states; the individuals will go to where the jobs are. Ultimately, the people will follow the companies.” The country, she thought, might organize itself increasingly into zones of financial security and zones of financial crisis. And the more clearly people understood which zones were which, the more friction there would be between the two. (“Indiana is going to be like, ‘N.F.W. I’m bailing out New Jersey.’ ”) As more and more people grasped which places had serious financial problems and which did not, the problems would only increase. “Those who have money and can move do so,” Whitney wrote in her report to her Wall Street clients, “those without money and who cannot move do not, and ultimately rely more on state and local assistance. It becomes effectively a ‘tragedy of the commons.’ ”

The point of Meredith Whitney’s investigation, in her mind, was not to predict defaults in the municipal-bond market. It was to compare the states with one another so that they might be ranked. She wanted to get a sense of who in America was likely to play the role of the Greeks, and who the Germans. Of who was strong, and who weak. In the process she had, in effect, unearthed America’s scariest financial places.

“So what’s the scariest state?” I asked her.

She had to think for only about two seconds.

“California.”

Read more:

Photograph by Art Streiber

Banks to Make Customers Pay Fee for Using Debit Cards

[ed.  I plan on visiting my local credit union next week.  I know it'll be a pain in the ass reassigning all my auto-pay accounts, but that's a short-term irritant compared to the incessant rip off schemes these banks come up with nearly every month.  Now, if there were just a credit union option for my cable company.]
 
by Tara Siegel Bernard and Ben Protess

Bank of America, the nation’s biggest bank, said on Thursday that it planned to start charging customers a $5 monthly fee when they used their debit cards for purchases. It was just one of several new charges expected to hit consumers as new regulations crimp banks’ profits.

Wells Fargo and Chase are testing $3 monthly debit card fees. Regions Financial, based in Birmingham, Ala., plans to start charging a $4 fee next month, while SunTrust, another regional powerhouse, is charging a $5 fee.

The round of new charges stems from a rule, which takes effect on Saturday, that limits the fees that banks can levy on merchants every time a consumer uses a debit card to make a purchase. The rule, known as the Durbin amendment, after its sponsor Senator Richard J. Durbin, is a crucial part of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law.

Until now, the fees have been 44 cents a transaction, on average. The Federal Reserve in June agreed to cut the fees to a maximum of about 24 cents. While the fee amounts to pennies per swipe, it rapidly adds up across millions of transactions. The new limit is expected to cost the banks about $6.6 billion in revenue a year, beginning in 2012, according to Javelin Strategy and Research. That comes on top of another loss, of $5.6 billion, from new rules restricting overdraft fees, which went into effect in July 2010.

And even though retailer groups had argued that lower fees were important to keep prices in check, consumers were not likely to see substantial savings. In fact, they are simply going to end up paying from a different pot of money.

Or as Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, put it after passage last year of the Dodd-Frank Act, “If you’re a restaurant and you can’t charge for the soda, you’re going to charge more for the burger.”

Chase is now charging customers for a paper statement. It also, like many other banks, scrapped its debit card rewards program. And customers that Chase inherited from Washington Mutual no longer enjoy free checking accounts.

The bank is also exploring a number of other fee increases, including for online banking, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Bank of America’s debit fee is steeper than most of its competitors’, reflecting the broader challenges the bank is facing after the financial crisis. The bank has introduced an online-only account that charges customers for doing business at a local branch. It also plans to apply its new debit card fees to anyone who uses the card to make recurring payments like gym fees or cable bills.

Read more:

photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters, via NY Times

Hecho en América

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

Pedro awoke suddenly in the middle of the night, his eyes on fire. Out of nowhere—sharp, blazing pain. He sat up, rubbed his face, kept trying to unglue his eyes. He reached for his dad or his brother, fumbling frantically in the darkness of the damp tent. "Daddy! Juan! Daddy!"

Juan is Pedro's twin. They are exact replicas: slim, brown, shy, equally oblivious to the powers of their teen-idol good looks—the kind of twins who can survive by bamboozling people, taking tests and talking to girls for each other. Juan felt Pedro's panic as if it was his own. He grabbed a flashlight. "Daddy!" he hollered, waking his father, who reached into the light and pried open one of Pedro's eyes. It was yellow, the eyeball hidden beneath a thick curtain of pus."I can't see!" Pedro screamed. "Daddy, I can't see."

There are systems in place, of course—family doctors, pharmacies, and twenty-four-hour urgent-care centers. But a lot of those amenities are not immediately within reach if you're a migrant worker living out of your car, sleeping beside a field of blueberries. Perhaps you should have made preparations for your kid waking up blind, but you didn't. You just didn't. Urbano, a compact, worn-out version of his sons, sat in the tent wondering what to do. It was nearly 4 A.M., and Consuelo, on the other side of camp, would be up soon to start the biscuits and the soup. Urbano told theboys to stay in the tent, to be quiet and wait. They shouldn't disturb anyone. That was how he taught them. Keep a low profile. Don't ever make a scene. Not even if someone robs your tent; just hide your money better next time. If the family in the cabin next door is drunk and fighting and you can't sleep, put earplugs in. If the rain soaks your bedroll, get up and sleep in the car.

Surely someone in Consuelo's huge clan—thirteen people crammed into two cabins—would know what to do for Pedro. So Urbano hushed his son, wrapped his arms around him, and rocked him, even though at 14, Pedro was way too old for something like that. "Shshshsh," Urbano said, swaying back and forth, his mind soon rolling with the thoughts that can rattle like loose cargo in the back of his head. He was a man who had awakened to a thousand mornings of bad news, but these, he knew, had only made him stronger. He had acquired wisdom. He understood how the world was divided: kings over here, peasants over there. Kings live in palaces and want berries on their cornflakes; peasants need the money so they work the fields. And you? You were born king or you were born peasant, and that got decided long before you fell out of your mama's womb, so don't bother worrying about it. Say your prayers, be thankful for what you've got, and hang a crucifix from your rearview mirror so Jesus will protect your family from the chupacabras and other spirits lurking in the woods.
···
Wash the apple before you bite into it, because that's the way you were raised. Germs, pesticides, dirt, gunk, it doesn't matter—just wash it. The fingerprints, too, go down the drain with the rest. It's easy to forget that there are people who harvest our food. Sometimes, maybe, we are reminded of the seasons and the sun and the way of the apple tree, and if we multiply that by millions of apple trees, times millions of tomato plants, times all the other fruits and vegetables, we realize, holy potato chips, that's a lot of picking. Without 1 million people on the ground, on ladders, in bushes—armies of pickers swooping in like bees—all the tilling, planting, and fertilizing of America's $144 billion horticultural production is for naught. The fruit falls to the ground and rots.

Most of the people who pick our food come from Mexico. They blanket the entire country, and yet to most of us they're strangers, so removed from our lives we hardly know they're here, people hunched over baskets in the flat distance as we drive down vacation highways. If we imagine them having anything to do with our lives at all, the picture isn't good: 50 percent of the migrant-farmworker population is in the United States illegally, the one piece of the story Americans hear quite a lot about and are increasingly bothered by, or urged to be. On TV and talk radio and especially during election years, we're told we must work together to stop this national crisis. These people are robbing our homes and trafficking drugs and raping our children right there in our J.C. Penney dressing rooms. The bad guys make headlines, as bad guys will, and the rest, we're told, are a more insidious blight: taking American jobs, giving birth to bastard "anchor babies" in what Pat Buchanan once called "the greatest invasion in human history." Whether we buy into the rhetoric or not, one thing has been made clear: Illegal immigration is a problem reaching a breaking point, and something must be done.

Except there really is no invasion, no growing national crisis. In fact, recent statistics show that immigration from Mexico has actually gone down—and steeply so—over the past decade. (An estimated 80,000 unauthorized migrants crossed the Mexican border into the United States last year, down from 500,000 ten years ago.) More to the point: There is nothing new about this story. Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians, and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese—everything you learned in sixth-grade social studies about the great American melting pot. And with each group came a new wave of anti-immigrant, pro-Anglo rage.

Ourcurrent debate over how to control our borders is really just a rehashed version of a very old one cycling over the reach of history. It's a lively conversation about fairness and purity, about who belongs and who does not, and as a result, the people who pick our food are shamed into the shadows, nameless, mostly afraid, and certainly inconvenient to the experience of the satisfying first crunch and explosion of sugar that happens when we discover that this, oh yes, this apple is awesome.

Read more:

illustration: John Ritter

Kate Montgomery, North Beach. Art Chicago
via:

The Hidden Symbolism in 20 Clever Logos

[ed.  The creativite world of logo design.  Very cool.]

In the world of advertising, logo design & branding is one of the key pillars of a company’s identity. The amount of thought and work that goes behind the seemingly simplest of logos would boggle the mind of any advertising outsider. Below we will review 20 clever logos that have hidden symbolism you may have not noticed before. Some are obvious, others are subtle, but all of them are interesting to examine. Enjoy!

More logos here:

How to Peel a Head of Garlic

[ed.  Dang, this looks great.]

How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.

via: