Market Boom

... [Yesterday's 7+%] declines [in the Dow and Standard & Poor's 500] came on the one-year anniversary of the closing highs of the Dow and the S&P. The Dow has lost 5,585 points, or 39.4 percent, since closing at 14,198 on Oct. 9, 2007. The S&P 500, meanwhile, is off 655 points, or 41.9 percent, since recording its high of 1,565.15.

U.S. stock market paper losses totaled $872 billion Thursday and the value of shares overall has tumbled a stunning $8.33 trillion since last year's high. That's based on preliminary figures measured by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Composite Index, which tracks 5,000 U.S.-based companies' stocks and represents almost all stocks traded in America.

[snip]

From Yahoo News


... and then there's today ....

Artificial Boom

True, governments can reduce the rate of interest in the short run. They can issue additional paper money. They can open the way to credit expansion by the banks. They can thus create an artificial boom and the appearance of prosperity. But such a boom is bound to collapse soon or late.

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) Austrian economist

Knife Fight

At the end of the day, campaigns are campaigns. In the last five days, it always comes down to a knife fight in a telephone booth.

-- Chris Lehane, Democratic political consultant, New York Times, 7 October 2008

Puppet

It was them saying, "We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you."

-- Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News military analyst, on a Pentagon effort to influence news coverage, New York Times, 20 April 2008

Nothing Is Illegal

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.

-- Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

Bad Horsemen

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can't bother about where they're going.

-- Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), Austrian-American economist

Corporation

Corporation: n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

-- Ambrose Bierce, author and editor (1842-1914) "The Devil's Dictionary"

Casino Capitalism

This crisis underlines the excesses and uncertainties of a casino capitalism that has only one logic - lining your pockets. It also shows the bankruptcy of "law of the jungle" capitalism that no longer invests in companies and job creation, but instead makes money out of money in a totally uncontrolled way.

-- German lawmaker Martin Schulz, chairman of the Socialists in the EU assembly, September 2008

T-Shirts

When considering what a police state might look like, I never imagined it would include commemorative t-shirts.

-- Commentor "izz" at RawStory.com, regarding a story on T-shirts produced by Denver's police union -- "We get up early, to beat the crowds," the shirt reads, followed by "2008 DNC." The words flank a grinning police officer holding a baton and wearing a hat with a crossed-out number "68," presumably making reference to activist organization Recreate 68, which staged several anti-war demonstrations during the convention.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Denver_cops_get_Tshirts_that_mock_0928.html

The Other Attitude

I don't think there's anything exceptional or noble in being philanthropic. It's the other attitude that confuses me.

-- Paul Leonard Newman (1925-01-26 - 2008-09-26), American actor and film director, founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which Newman donated all profits and royalties to charity, in "Paul Newman's Road To Glory", interview with Paul Fischer, Film Monthly, 1 July 2002

Remorse

True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive.

-- Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983)

Innovative Products

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

-- Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain in the September/October 2008 issue of "Contingencies", the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries

Review NOT

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

-- From the draft bill authorizing Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to spend ~$700,000,000,000 in tax money to purchase toxic debt from ailing financial institutions

Ghosts

The new stadium is beautiful, but I don't know if the ghosts are going to be there. You can feel that, standing here -- Babe Ruth, DiMaggio. It's not going to be the same.

-- Alex Alicea, Yankees fan from Union City, NJ, on the last game played at Yankee Stadium, New York Times, 22 September 2008

Savor It

The truth is, I'm still not fully conscious of what I have achieved. Perhaps with the passage of time, I'll be able to savor it.

-- Spanish cyclist Alberto Contador, on winning the 2008 Vuelta a Espana (Tour of Spain), rounding out his record 15-month sweep of the three Grand Tours, the Tour de France, Giro d'Italia, and Vuelta a Espana

Old Fashioned

We make money the old fashioned way. We print it.

-- Art Rolnick, former Chief Economist, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank

Insulting

She doesn't have any foreign policy credentials. You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don't know what you can say. You can't say anything. ... I think it's a stretch to, in any way, to say that she's got the experience to be president of the United States. I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, "I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia." That kind of thing is insulting to the American people.

-- Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel on Republican vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, Omaha World-Herald, 18 September 2008

Constitution Day

The disdain and uncooperative nature that this administration has shown toward Congress is so egregious that I can no longer assume that it is simply bureaucratic incompetence or isolated mistakes. Rather, I have come to the sad conclusion that this administration has intentionally obstructed Congress' rightful and constitutional duties.

This administration is setting a terrible precedent. What people have to understand is when there is a liberal Democrat in the White House, the President will have set [the precedent] that Members of Congress can simply be dismissed, and that when they are trying to do a congressional investigation need not be cooperated with, in fact, can be obstructed. Is that the type of President that we want? Is that acceptable? It shouldn't be acceptable to Democrats and it shouldn't be acceptable to Republicans.

It is truly with a heavy heart, Madam Speaker, that I stand here reciting example after example of the maliciousness and condescending attitude exhibited by this administration. It is a problem that's flowing from the top. When I hear my friends on the other side of the aisle accusing this administration of stonewalling, of coverups, or thwarting investigations, I sadly must concur with them.

-- Representative Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA), 26 February 2008


Happy Constitution Day, September 17, the day the U.S. Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution in 1787.

Big Hand

The ocean rose up like a big hand and just went right through our house.

-- Deeann Sherman, who was trapped on Bolivar Peninsula in Texas by Hurricane Ike, New York Times, 16 September 2008

Musical Chairs

Investors are like hyperactive first graders playing musical chairs.

-- Sam Stovall, of Standard & Poor's Equity Research, on a downward spiral affecting the shares of financial companies, New York Times, 14 September 2008

Newspapers

A newspaper is not just for reporting the news, it's to get people mad enough to do something about it.

-- Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), American writer and humorist

Procedure Is Everything

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats, procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

-- Thomas Sowell (30 June 1930-), American economist, political writer, and commentator

LHC Day 1

Don't cross the streams.

-- Harold Ramis as Dr. Egon Spengler, Ghostbusters, 1984

--

You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second.

-- CERN's Ian Bird, who leads the LHC Grid project, a network of 60,000 computers to analyze what happens when protons are hurled at each other

--

If you can read this, then the Large Hadron Collider did not create any earth-consuming black holes today.

Corporations

Corporations have been enthroned. An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people ... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the Republic is destroyed.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Likely Very Expensive

Today's necessary but likely very expensive action for taxpayers is the consequence of regulatory neglect and of a broader political system's reluctance to take on what should have been clearly seen as festering problems.

-- Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, on the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, New York Times, 8 September 2008

Whose Problem?

If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.

-- J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) American industrialist

We Often Borrow

We often borrow from our tomorrows to pay our debts to our yesterdays.

-- Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) [Sand and Foam]

Rivet Their Chains

If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Too Easy A Disguise

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be "American" before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? It is really too easy a disguise for our shortcomings to dress them up as a form of patriotism!

-- Edith Wharton

Surreal

When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal.

-- Lawrence J. Ellison (born 1944), CEO and founder, Oracle Corporation, from Smithsonian Institution Oral and Visual Histories


Java Developer's Journal (28 August 2008) adds: Technology's highest paid CEO currently is also America's highest paid CEO, namely Larry Ellison of Oracle - who with a fiscal 2008 pay package of $84.6M is the top earner at any of the Standard & Poor's 500 companies. Noting that annual pay totals are "based on salary, bonuses, incentives and perks," the Associated Press reports that Ellison's pay in 2008 was 38% higher than the $61.2M pay package he received in 2007.

Some Murder Or Other

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

-- Thomas De Quincey (15 August 1785 - 8 December 1859), English author, "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (1827)

Space Otherwise Reserved

If I extrapolate from myself, there's a lot of deceit in the world without a beginning, middle, or end. The way it really works, a lot of the time, is that you suffer from the weight of what happened, from what you said and did, so you lie as therapy. Now the story you make up starts to take up space otherwise reserved for reality. For phenomena you substitute epiphenomena. Skew becomes ascendant. The secondary becomes primary. When it's time to confess, you don't know what you're saying.

-- David Guterson (4 May 1956-), American novelist, short story writer, poet, in "The Other" (2008)

Bypassing Trouble

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), American Judge

Bannister

The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the one who will win.

-- Roger Bannister (1929-), British athlete, first person in the world to run a mile in under four minutes, on May 6, 1954

Relevant?

If art doesn't seem dangerous for the artist, it probably isn't relevant.

-- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Blog, 15 August 2008

Kickin' It Old School

In the past few weeks I've heard more news commentators mistakenly say the word "Soviet" when they meant "Russian" than ever before. Putin's machinations with respect to Georgia, and now Poland, have that old-school feeling of Soviet aggression.

Words Strain

Words strain,
    Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
  Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
    Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

-- T.S. Eliot, poet (1888-1965)

Don't Invade

In the Twenty-first Century, nations don't invade other nations.

-- Presidential candidate Senator John McCain, 13 August 2008, on Russia's invasion of Georgia

Too Depressing

The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing

I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

-- Google's copyright man, William Patry, on ending his blog on copyright

Hamdan Sentencing

Mr. Hamdan, I hope the day comes that you are able to return to your wife and daughters and your country.

-- Military Judge Keith J. Allred, after the sentencing of Salim Ahmed Hamdan at Guantanamo Bay, New York Times, 8 August 2008.

RIP Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within the power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 - 3 August 2008), Russian novelist, dramatist and historian

Real ID

Do you want our government to have the ability to track where you went, how you went, how you got there and when you got home? It would be naive for someone to think this information will not be abused in the future. Virtually every decade these kinds of files have been used to violate people's privacy.

-- Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, in a letter to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, explaining why Montana will not participate in Real ID, reported in Canada Free Press, 31 July 2008

--

More from the article: After Chertoff called the governor and told Schweitzer that Montana residents would be banned from airplanes, or subjected to severe, time-consuming inspections at airports, Schweitzer replied, "How about we both go on 60 Minutes a few days after the DHS starts patting down Montana driver's license-holders who are trying to get on the planes and both of us can tell our side of the story." Chertoff backed down. As of the May 11 deadline for implementation, no state is in compliance with the Real ID Act.

Paris For President?

Hey America, I'm Paris Hilton and I'm a celebrity, too. Only I'm not from the olden days and I'm not promising change like that other guy. I'm just hot. But then that wrinkly, white-haired guy used me in his campaign ad, which I guess means I'm running for president. So thanks for the endorsement white-haired dude ... I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead.

-- Paris Hilton, in a mock campaign ad in response to McCain's attack ad comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton & Brittney Spears

Champaign Park District Mini Triathlon

On Saturday 08-02-08 I participated for the second time in the annual Champaign Park District mini-triathlon. I did OK, though I didn't win any prizes. It was a 400 meter swim, 6 mile bike ride, and 2 mile run. My time was 48:41.4, an improvement of 4:23 over my previous performance.

I finished 5th of 17 in my age group (men age 44-49), 56th of 142 among men of all ages, and 82nd of 305 among all men and women for the entire event. Of the 223 people I beat, 187 were younger. Of the 86 men I beat, 74 were younger.

I hate running, but I like both swimming and biking. If I can convince myself to do some training next summer, I should be able to improve on both my time and my placing.

I signed up 8 weeks ahead of time, but the event was full, and I was #43 on the waiting list. Usually only a handful of people drop out in time for the people on the waiting list to be helped. This year, I got a call with just 17 days to go stating that they were expanding the field by 50, so I was in. I hadn't been running at all, but was able to leg out a number of 2-mile runs to get ready.

Bill Of Rights - Amendment X

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Bill Of Rights - Amendment IX

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Bill Of Rights - Amendment VIII

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Bill Of Rights - Amendment VII

Amendment VII

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Bill Of Rights - Amendment VI

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Bill Of Rights - Amendment V

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.