This poem was nominated by UN as the best poem of 2008, Written by an African Kid

When I born, I black
When I grow up, I black
When I go in Sun, I black
When I scared, I black
When I sick, I black
And when I die, I still black

And you white fellow
When you born, you pink
When you grow up, you white
When you go in sun, you red
When you cold, you blue
When you scared, you yellow
When you sick, you green
And when you die, you grey

And you calling me colored????? !!

The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking & Reasoning

From 'The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning

"we do not claim that thinking is inherently rational, optimal,desirable, or even smart. A thorough history of human thinking will include quite a few chapters on stupidity."

Game Theory Joke

From Mind Your Decisions via Simoleon Sense

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I have been with a loose girl”.

The priest asks, “Is that you, little Joey Pagano ?”

“Yes, Father, it is.”

“And who was the girl you were with?”

“I can’t tell you, Father, I don’t want to ruin her reputation”.

“Well, Joey, I’m sure to find out her name sooner or later so you may as well tell me now. Was it Tina Minetti?”

“I cannot say.”

“Was it Teresa Mazzarelli?”

“I’ll never tell.”

“Was it Nina Capelli?”

“I’m sorry, but I cannot name her.”

“Was it Cathy Piriano?”

“My lips are sealed.”

“Was it Rosa DiAngelo, then?”

“Please, Father, I cannot tell you.”

The priest sighs in frustration.

“You’re very tight lipped, and I admire that. But you’ve sinned and have to atone. You cannot be an altar boy now for 4 months. Now you go and behave yourself.”

Joey walks back to his pew, and his friend Franco slides over and whispers, “What’d you get?”

“Four months vacation and five good leads.”

On the Imprecision of Words & Language

"In all languages, words can have more than one meaning, so reading involves making choices. When the context of the original composition is very different from the reader's context -- long ago or far away, or both -- the choices made may steer the text away from the author's intent. In one episode of The Twilight Zone, earthlings discovered only too late that the Holy Book brought by extraterrestrial visitors, titled To Serve Man, was not, as initially assumed, a philanthropic manifesto; it was a cookbook." - The Evolution Of God P. 191

Obama Speech to Students

From 'Mobs, Messiahs and Markets'

"When you are born, you are full of life. It is all ahead of you: years of energy and excitement. But you use them up; you trade them off for experience, wisdom, money.

Little by little, day by day, year by year, your life gets used up, until you are all experience, all wisdom, all memories, and no life left. That is when your life is behind you ... and nothing is left in front.

We are, as Sophocles put it, nothing but a 'deathward going tribe,' after all." -- P.386

"...you have to be suspicious of what people say to you, even when they call them facts. More importantly, you have to be suspicious of what you say to yourself!

... the older we get, the less we know about anything; the more facts, opinions, and ideas we collect, the less sure we are of any of them.

Besides, we get more and more experience with facts that turn out not to be so."
-- P.384

"... in the modern western world, arranged marriages have given way to deranged ones.

People are expected to fall in love with each other-- that is, they are expected to take leave of their senses, and while in this addled state, they are not only allowed, but encouraged, to sign a contract that is meant to last a lifetime.

It is no wonder that half of them end up anting out of the deal. What is amazing is that the other half stick with it." -- P. 24

Life Lessons From A Dog

From Casey Research Daily Dispatch:

Lessons from a Fallen General

Recently I had to bid farewell to my longtime companion, General Beauregard Piddle. Not to worry, I have no intention of using this space to wax emotionally on his passing.

The simple fact is that General had an incredible life, stretching over 92 human years, or roughly 17 years for a dog, which he was. Given that I found him on death row at the local pound, and he subsequently accompanied us on lengthy explorations of Bermuda, Chile, and Argentina, and was well looked after throughout his many years with us – there can be no regrets about his death, anymore than his life.

So, rather than getting all morose about his passing, I thought I would share the tangible life lessons I learned from General, and they're not many (he was a dog, after all).

Lesson number one: Always wag your tail vigorously upon meeting a stranger. General had friends literally around the world, a consequence of his exuberant greeting ritual. This ritual included smiling widely, wagging not just his tail but his entire rear end, followed by rolling over on one side and waving a front leg at his new acquaintance. I can confirm with certainty that this display never once failed to evoke a warm smile, a friendly rubbing, and a lasting affection in response.

Likewise, when meeting another human being, either for the first time or any time thereafter, the more vigorous you are in your greeting, the better. You know what I'm talking about – a greeting like my friend Pierre-Andre executes so well, a big smile, heart-felt compliments, and a vigorous handshake or, if you are a woman, a hug and a kiss on both cheeks. Now that's how to make a good impression, not with a limp hand and a muttered “Nice to meet you!”

Lesson number two: Don't forget to duck. General was run over twice, and I'm not talking about a little run-over but a full-fledged proper running over – the sort that leaves visible tire tracks across a wiry hide. Yet, other than being stiff for a day or two, there was no noticeable damage. How did he manage it? Well, in the instance I witnessed, upon looking up and seeing the car bearing down on him, General just lay down and assumed a posture familiar to speed bumps. While I’m not conversant in the exact physics of why that position can promote survival, I do know that taking a bumper straight on would have been the end of him.

The lesson? There are times in this life where you can decide to take a firm stand against an onrushing force and pay the heavy consequences or just get low and survive. To provide a more tangible example, faced with a marching army of socialists in one country, one can decide to scrap it out while being bled dry or set up a nest in a more accommodating locale.

Lesson number three: Enjoy the privileges of advancing age. As General grew older, he also grew increasingly bold in his most annoying habit, that of regularly tipping over the household waste receptacles and helping himself to whatever caught his epicurean fancy. In his younger days, this behavior might have earned him a quick but not overly hard smack on the snout. However, as he aged, the extent of his downside was pretty much limited to being the target of a hard look and a muttered swearword. In the human analogy, all too often I find that as people get older, they tend to become increasingly timid, in many cases almost apologetic for their presence. I hope against hope that when I get to be of an advanced age and the dulcet tones of the choir invisible are heard faintly in the distance, I’ll be more, not less, brash. Because, like General, really, what do you have to lose?

There are probably more lessons I can derive from the life of General, but one doesn't want to overdo these things. He had a good run and will, of course, be remembered.

Lightening Interrupts Outdoor Sex

From www.metro.co.uk

A lightning quick sex session in a bush during a storm ended in a flash when a bolt of lightning struck the ground nearby making the earth move for the lovemaking couple.

Jens Gottlieb, 36 and his 28-year-old girlfriend Lisa Gruhn had pulled into a parking space on the busy A44 motorway in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, western Germany, and after kissing and cuddling decided to get out of the car and head into the nearby bushes to make love.

Because the nearby service station near the town of Werl was relatively busy they went a short distance into the wooded area and hid themselves in a bush where they stripped naked.

They were so carried away that they didn't stop even when thunder and lightning started to rip through the air - until a bolt of lightning struck the ground nearby.

The terrified pair ran out of the bush naked and fled in a torrential downpour that followed the lightning strike.

They lost their way and were spotted blundering around in the dark by another motorist in a parking space who called police.

Officers who arrived a short while later managed to find the naked and shivering pair and help them into dry clothes and took them home.

Time for another visit to Amsterdam? from 'cow tipping' to 'car tipping'

From DutchAmsterdam.nl:

Amsterdam, July 25, 2009 [DutchAmsterdam.nl] — Amsterdam police is deeply concerned about a new craze in which vandals toss parked cars from the Smart brand into the city’s canals.

The so-called ‘Smart tossing’ takes place mainly during the weekend, when many youths are out for a night on the town.
...
The Smart cars are small enough to be parked with head or tail pointing to the water.
...
Alongside most canals a low guard rail helps prevent cars from taking a dip, but the Smart car is small enough to be lifted and tossed.

Wealthy pensioners kidnap and torture financial advisor who lost millions

From the Sydney Morning Herald

A group of wealthy pensioners has been accused of kidnapping and torturing a financial adviser who lost about $4 million of their savings.

The pensioners, nicknamed the "Geritol Gang" by German police after an arthritis drug, face up to 15 years in jail if found guilty of subjecting German-American James Amburn to the alleged four-day ordeal.

Two of them are said to have hit him with a Zimmer frame outside his home in Speyer, western Germany, before he was bound with duct tape, bundled into the boot of an Audi A8 and driven 300 miles (483 kilometres) to a home on the shores of a popular holiday lake in Bavaria.

During his alleged confinement in an unheated cellar, Mr Amburn, 56, claims he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, had two ribs broken, was hit with a chair leg and chained up "like an animal".

The incident began on Tuesday last week as he made his way home after enjoying a drink at an outdoor cafe with a friend.

Mr Amburn, the head of an investment firm called Digitalglobalnet, was allegedly attacked by two men aged 74 and 60 as he entered his apartment building.

"I had no reason to be afraid," he said. "But as I went into my home I was jumped from the rear and struck."

He was left bleeding from his eyes, nose and mouth, he said.

"Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. It took them quite a while because they ran out of breath.

"When they loaded me into the car I thought I was a dead man."

After being driven through the night he arrived at the home of one of his captors and his 79-year-old wife, in Chieming on the shores of Lake Chiemsee.

As he was bundled into the cellar, another couple, retired doctors aged 63 and 66, arrived to join in the alleged torture and humiliation.

"I was led into the cellar," recalled Mr Amburn, who also has a home in Florida.

"I saw a folding bed and a WC reserved for me. They immediately went on about their money. I told them what I had told them before, that due to market conditions, unfortunately it was gone.

"I was struck. Again and again they threatened to kill me. The fear of death was indescribable."

He then told them that he could pay them back if he sold some securities in Switzerland and they agreed to let him send a fax to a bank there.

He scribbled a plea for help on the bottom of the paper.

"It was disguised as a policy," he said. "I wrote 'call. po-lice' and they didn't notice it."

Not knowing whether his message would work, he attempted to escape when he was allowed out of the cellar on Friday for a cigarette break.

He ran down the street pursued by his captors in the Audi, and was seen by several people.

But one of the pensioners shouted "He's a burglar!". Passers-by held him and he was dragged back to the cellar.

In the meantime, an employee at the Swiss bank spotted the message and telephoned police in Germany.

Armed commandos stormed the house in the early hours of Saturday morning. Forty police, accompanied by a doctor in the light of the captors' infirmities, found Mr Amburn in his underwear.

Volker Ziegler, chief public prosecutor in nearby Traunstein, said the pensioners were angry because they had invested money in properties in Florida and had lost it all.

"This was black money; they hadn't declared it to the revenue authorities in Germany," he said.

The pensioners face charges of illegal hostage taking, torture and grievous bodily harm.

London Telegraph

Are we in control of our own decisions? by Dan Ariely

RSS Subscribers Click Here for Video

Deaths that made even top doctors wonder

This case happened in a hospital's Intensive care ward where Patients always died in the same bed and all on Sunday mornings at 11a.m,regardless of their medical condition.

This puzzled the doctors and some even thought that it had something to do with the supernatural.

No one could solve the mystery as to why the deaths took place at 11 AM. So a world-wide expert team was constituted and they decided to go down to the ward to investigate the cause of the incidents.

So on the next Sunday morning, a few minutes before 11 a.m. all doctors and nurses nervously waited outside the ward to see for themselves what the terrible phenomenon was all about.

Some were holding wooden crosses, prayer books and other holy objects to ward off evil........

Just then the clock struck 11...

and then......

Bedilu Chala, the part-time Sunday sweeper from Ethiopia, entered the ward and Unplugged the life support system & plugged in the vacuum cleaner!!!!!!!!!!

Are men really this easy to manipulate?

From the book Nudge, Page 3:

"... the power of small details comes from focusing the attention of users in a particular direction. A wonderful example of this principle comes from, of all places, the men's rooms at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. There the authorities have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess, but if they see a target, attention and therefore accuracy are much increased. According to the man who came up with the idea, it works wonders. 'It improves the aim,' says Aad Kieboom. 'If a man sees a fly, he aims at it.' Kieboom, an economist, directs Schiphol's building expansion. His staff conducted fly-in-urinal trials and found that etchings reduce spillage by 80 percent."

The 401-Keg Plan

From the 4/10/2009 Daily Pfennig

“If you had purchased $1000 of shares in Delta Airlines one year ago, you would have $49.00 today.

“If you had purchased $1000 of shares in AIG one year ago, you would have $33.00 today.

“If you had purchased $1000 of shares in Lehman Brothers one year ago, you would have $0.00 today.

“But… If you had purchased $1000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the aluminum cans for recycling refund, you would have received $214.00.

“Based on the above statements, the best current investment plan is to drink heavily and recycle. It’s called the 401-Keg Plan.”

HAHAHAHAHHAHAH

British PM Gordon Brown Gets Smacked

Filling the Soaring Demand for Black Friends :-)

Black Friend Finder
Now that Obama is President, everybody wants a black friend.

Video at FunnyOrDie.com

AIG Executive Vice President's resigntation Letter

From the New York Times:


The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G.

DEAR Mr. Liddy,

It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

You and I have never met or spoken to each other, so I’d like to tell you about myself. I was raised by schoolteachers working multiple jobs in a world of closing steel mills. My hard work earned me acceptance to M.I.T., and the institute’s generous financial aid enabled me to attend. I had fulfilled my American dream.

I started at this company in 1998 as an equity trader, became the head of equity and commodity trading and, a couple of years before A.I.G.’s meltdown last September, was named the head of business development for commodities. Over this period the equity and commodity units were consistently profitable — in most years generating net profits of well over $100 million. Most recently, during the dismantling of A.I.G.-F.P., I was an integral player in the pending sale of its well-regarded commodity index business to UBS. As you know, business unit sales like this are crucial to A.I.G.’s effort to repay the American taxpayer.

The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation. I never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps that are now losing so much money. I did, however, like many others here, lose a significant portion of my life savings in the form of deferred compensation invested in the capital of A.I.G.-F.P. because of those losses. In this way I have personally suffered from this controversial activity — directly as well as indirectly with the rest of the taxpayers.

I have the utmost respect for the civic duty that you are now performing at A.I.G. You are as blameless for these credit default swap losses as I am. You answered your country’s call and you are taking a tremendous beating for it.

But you also are aware that most of the employees of your financial products unit had nothing to do with the large losses. And I am disappointed and frustrated over your lack of support for us. I and many others in the unit feel betrayed that you failed to stand up for us in the face of untrue and unfair accusations from certain members of Congress last Wednesday and from the press over our retention payments, and that you didn’t defend us against the baseless and reckless comments made by the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut.

My guess is that in October, when you learned of these retention contracts, you realized that the employees of the financial products unit needed some incentive to stay and that the contracts, being both ethical and useful, should be left to stand. That’s probably why A.I.G. management assured us on three occasions during that month that the company would “live up to its commitment” to honor the contract guarantees.

That may be why you decided to accelerate by three months more than a quarter of the amounts due under the contracts. That action signified to us your support, and was hardly something that one would do if he truly found the contracts “distasteful.”

That may also be why you authorized the balance of the payments on March 13.

At no time during the past six months that you have been leading A.I.G. did you ask us to revise, renegotiate or break these contracts — until several hours before your appearance last week before Congress.

I think your initial decision to honor the contracts was both ethical and financially astute, but it seems to have been politically unwise. It’s now apparent that you either misunderstood the agreements that you had made — tacit or otherwise — with the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, various members of Congress and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo of New York, or were not strong enough to withstand the shifting political winds.

You’ve now asked the current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. to repay these earnings. As you can imagine, there has been a tremendous amount of serious thought and heated discussion about how we should respond to this breach of trust.

As most of us have done nothing wrong, guilt is not a motivation to surrender our earnings. We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house.

Many of the employees have, in the past six months, turned down job offers from more stable employers, based on A.I.G.’s assurances that the contracts would be honored. They are now angry about having been misled by A.I.G.’s promises and are not inclined to return the money as a favor to you.

The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear. Mr. Cuomo has threatened to “name and shame,” and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats — even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in courts and not the press.

So what am I to do? There’s no easy answer. I know that because of hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and have saved enough that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust. Some might argue that members of my profession have been overpaid, and I wouldn’t disagree.

That is why I have decided to donate 100 percent of the effective after-tax proceeds of my retention payment directly to organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn. This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I simply believe that I at least deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and do not want to see them disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.’s or the federal government’s budget. Our earnings have caused such a distraction for so many from the more pressing issues our country faces, and I would like to see my share of it benefit those truly in need.

On March 16 I received a payment from A.I.G. amounting to $742,006.40, after taxes. In light of the uncertainty over the ultimate taxation and legal status of this payment, the actual amount I donate may be less — in fact, it may end up being far less if the recent House bill raising the tax on the retention payments to 90 percent stands. Once all the money is donated, you will immediately receive a list of all recipients.

This choice is right for me. I wish others at A.I.G.-F.P. luck finding peace with their difficult decision, and only hope their judgment is not clouded by fear.

Mr. Liddy, I wish you success in your commitment to return the money extended by the American government, and luck with the continued unwinding of the company’s diverse businesses — especially those remaining credit default swaps. I’ll continue over the short term to help make sure no balls are dropped, but after what’s happened this past week I can’t remain much longer — there is too much bad blood. I’m not sure how you will greet my resignation, but at least Attorney General Blumenthal should be relieved that I’ll leave under my own power and will not need to be “shoved out the door.”

Sincerely,

Jake DeSantis

Are we all Religious?

From 'The Road Less Traveled' by M. Scott Peck Pages 185 - 193

"...among the members of the human race there exists an extraordinary variability in the breadth and sophistication of our understanding of what life is all about.

This understanding is our religion. Since everyone has some understanding -- some world view, no matter how limited or primitive or inaccurate -- everyone has a religion. This fact, not widely recognized, is of the utmost importance: everyone has a religion.

We suffer, I believe, from a tendency to define religion too narrowly. We tend to think that religion must include a belief in God or some ritualistic practice or membership in a worshiping group. We are likely to say of someone who does not attend church or believe in a superior being, 'He or she is not religious.' I have even heard scholars say such things as: 'Buddhism is not really a religion' or 'Mysticism is more a philosophy than a religion.' We tend to view religion as something monolithic, cut out of whole cloth, and then, with this simplistic concept, we are puzzled as to how two very different people can both call themselves Christians. Or Jews. Or how an atheist might have a more highly developed sense of Christian morality than a Catholic who routinely attends mass.
...

Usually a person's religion or world view is at best only incompletely conscious. [People] are often unaware of how they view the world, and sometimes may even think they possess a certain kind of religion when they actually are possessed by a far different kind.
...

How do people's religions develop? What determines a person's particular world view? There are whole complexes of determinants, and this book will not explore the question in depth. But the most important factor in the development of religion of most people is obviously their culture. If we are Europeans we are likely to believe that Christ was a white man, and if we are African that he was a black man. ... We tend to believe what the people around us believe, and we tend to accept as truth what these people tell us of the nature of the world as we listen to them during our formative years.
...

To develop a religion or world view that is realistic -- that is, conforms to the reality of the cosmos and our role in it, as best we can know that reality -- we must constantly revise and extend our understanding to include new knowledge of the larger world. We must constantly enlarge our frame of reference.
...

Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding. It is no wonder, then, that the world of humanity is full of conflict. We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived. Bryant Wedge, a psychiatrist specializing in the field of international relations, studied negotiations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. and was able to delineate a number of basic assumptions as to the nature of human beings and society and the world held by Americans which differed dramatically from the assumptions of Russians. These assumptions dictated the negotiating behavior of both sides. Yet neither side was aware of its own assumptions or the fact that the other side was operating on a different set of assumptions. The inevitable result was that the negotiating behavior of the Russians seemed to the Americans to be either crazy or deliberately evil, and of course the Americans seemed to the Russians equally crazy or evil. We are indeed like the three proverbial blind men, each in touch with only his particular piece of the elephant yet each claiming to know the nature of the whole beast. So we squabble over our different microcosmic world views, and all wars are holy wars."

Is it Possible Global Warming is Full of Hot Air?

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” -- Gustav Le Bon

"...you have to be suspicious of what people say to you, even when they call them facts. More importantly, you have to be suspicious of what you say to yourself! ... the older we get, the less we know about anything; the more facts, opinions, and ideas we collect, the less sure we are of any of them. Besides, we get more and more experience with facts that turn out not to be so." Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, P.384

Interesting Videos Below ...

We're right, We're right - We are all right!

From memo to Oaktree Clients

"My mother used to tell a story about the shtetls – villages – in the old country where disagreements were settled by the rabbi.

In one, an argument was raging with no possible grounds for compromise. The villagers brought the two parties to the rabbi. “Tell your side,” the rabbi said to one fellow, and he did.

“You’re right,” the rabbi declared.

One of the bystanders piped up: “You can’t tell him he’s right, rabbi; you haven’t heard the other side of the story.”

So the rabbi told the other party to tell his side, and he did. His story was the polar opposite of the other party’s.

“You’re right,” said the rabbi.

“Hold on, rabbi,” a villager said, “the first guy told his story and you said he was right. Then the other guy told his story – different in every regard – and you said he was right. They both can’t be right.”

“And you’re right,” said the rabbi.

The current disagreement over bank nationalization shows that (a) there can be valid arguments on both sides of an issue and (b) it can be hard to figure out who’s right."

Economic Conundrum

From memo to Oaktree Clients

"The impossibility of reaching into the economic toolbox for that one perfect tool is easily illustrated with a list of some of the challenges present today. For a learning exercise,skip today’s Sudoku or crossword puzzle and take a crack at resolving these dilemmas:

• Consumer confidence and spending are weak. We want to stimulate, but we don’t want to replace weakness with hyperinflation.


• We’re willing to drop fiscal discipline in favor of stimulus through deficit spending,but we don’t want to scare away offshore investors from the Treasury securities we’ll issue to fund our deficits.


• We’re willing to distribute stimulus checks, but we seem unable to make frightened individuals spend the money rather than save it.


• In fact, we know consumers got into trouble by spending more than they earned, and now they should build some savings. But whereas in the recent past consumer spending grew faster than incomes, a rising savings rate means spending would grow
  slower than incomes, just at a time when incomes are falling and spending is needed.


• Likewise, with tax revenues down, states and cities have to balance their budgets. One way to do so is to raise income tax and sales tax rates, but this will further depress local economies and increase the burden on their beleaguered citizens.


• We want to recapitalize the banks, but we don’t want to reward past mistakes.


• We’re thinking about buying the banks’ “toxic” assets. But if we pay above-market prices, that’s a subsidy to the reckless (see above), and if we pay market or belowmarket prices, that will further erode bank capital through write-downs.


• We know suspending mark-to-market accounting would end write-downs, but doing so might also reduce confidence in balance sheets and postpone the day of reckoning needed for our financial institutions to reach bottom and recover.


• We want the banks to lend, but we can’t – and shouldn’t – make them extend loans to non-creditworthy borrowers.


• We want to reduce the incidence of home foreclosure, but we don’t want to reward people who speculated by buying multiple homes or lied on mortgage applications. And we’d rather not treat people who bought more house than they could afford better than those who acted prudently.


• We want to make mortgage relief available to those who are unable to service their mortgages, but we don’t want to give people incentives to stop making payments.


• We’re considering letting bankruptcy judges reset mortgage contracts, but we don’t want to tell lenders that loan contracts are no longer sacrosanct, which certainly would deter them from making new loans.


• We don’t want the depressant impact of auto companies going bankrupt and suppliers and dealers following suit. But we also don’t want to pump money into the industry unless we’re confident it can produce good cars at competitive prices.


• We want to see the auto industry “rationalized,” but that means seeing people lose their jobs or have their paychecks reduced, which would spread pain, put stress on benefit funds, and cut into GDP.


• We want taxpayer-supported automakers to use American steel, but (assuming it’s more expensive than imported steel) that will either (a) raise car prices, making cars more expensive for hard-pressed buyers and making the Big 3 less competitive, or (b) require the companies to eat the difference, making it harder for them to achieve profitability.


• We want to curb speculation in derivatives, but we don’t want to make it harder for businesses, farmers, insurers and investors to legitimately hedge risk.


• In fact, we want to prevent excesses on the part of business, but most people don’t think it’s a good idea to nationalize companies or have the government tell them how to operate.

It’s abundantly clear from this list – and it’s only a partial list – that solving the current problem will require compromises and a combination of disparate elements. Some will work, while others will fail and have to be replaced. And some will work with regard to one facet of the problem but aggravate another. Lastly, no one should think that even a wise combination will produce quick results."

Finally ....

... a President who can dance.

Arthur Miller on Mark Twain & America

"I wonder whether in him is some kind of symbolization of the American character.

There is so much boasting going on; that always goes on. Great country for self advertising - we are god's country, we're a big success.

And he had that about him. He was not hiding his light under a bushel. At the same time, underneath there, you smelled suffering.

And of course that's the American dilemma - we are all great successes, and if you push a little bit, you can reach the anguish that's underneath it all."

--- Ken Burns' Mark Twain