A Commonplace Book

[trysail]

A decade ago, while cruising the Leeward Islands aboard a chartered sailing vessel, we anchored for the night in a harbor on the west side of the French Antilles isle of Guadeloupe. As night started to fall, my cousin, sisters and I dinghied ashore for dinner. After walking nearly a mile to an isolated "restaurant" that had been recommended by a passerby, my sister (never noted for possession of an enormous reserve of common sense) was exhausted and her feet bloody from a blister ("sensible shoes," anyone?) When we finally arrived (and it turned out to be not so much a restaurant as a family home), we were informed that they weren't open that night. Needless to say, we were crestfallen (as well as starving) and daunted by the prospect of another mile-long walk back with no guaranty that we'd be able to find a place to eat.

Noting our long faces, the pater familia took pity on us and offered to check to see if his cousin's "restaurant" could accomodate us. After a protracted telephone call to his cousin, he told us we'd be able to eat there and volunteered to drive us. By this time it's twilight and my cousin is very, very, very nervous that we're going to be taken for "a ride into the jungle" where we white folk are going to be cut up into very small pieces and never heard from again. It was, to say the least, a disquieting situation. On the one hand, our putative "Good Samaritan" seemed genuine and earnest; on the other, we're isolated, in the midst of a completely alien culture and don't speak Creole French. In life, there are times when we all have to make snap character judgments. Observing that, "If these guys are bad, they're very, very good" we decided to throw caution to the wind and piled into the automobile.

Arriving at our "Good Samaritan's" cousin's house after a fifteen minute drive through the pitch dark, we were on tenterhooks, looking at each other with glances that betrayed our thoughts: "So this is where we're going to die."

We were ushered into the family's house and directed to their dining room table. Our host and his family could not have been more gracious. It turned out to be an absolutely magical evening. We were treated to a Creole bouillabaise that was the most incredible soup I've ever tasted, followed by a meal so succulent that we regretted it didn't go on forever.

It was a night that restored our faith in humanity. On our return to the States, we all made a point of writing thank-you notes to our benefactors. It was a night all of us will remember as long as we live.

 

[trysail]

On my 16th birthday (quite literally), when it first became legal for me to be employed, I became a ditch digger at the magnificent emolument of $1.60 per hour. For a forty-hour week, my gross paycheck was $64.00 which translated to $55.14 after the government finished nicking it. I worked like a dog in gratitude to my employer for providing the opportunity.

In all the summers that followed, I worked as a gandy dancer laying rail and driving spikes on the docks and waterfront of Baltimore, as a warehouseman and as a laborer. It didn't take long before I figured out that: (A) this wasn't what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing and (B) I didn't want to be out there in the middle of winter. My earnings as a laborer helped pay the cost of my college education.

Following college, while many of my contemporaries were living high on the hog, I lived at home madly saving money so that I would be able to pay for graduate school, which I eventually attended (footing the entire bill myself).

This was followed by twenty-six years of seventy-hour work weeks— scrimping and scrounging the whole way and, eventually, the anxiety of helping to start a business. Along the way, I met and worked with the good and the bad— there were people of high ideals and standards and there were the deceitful, the corrupt, the meddling and the whining entitled malingerers.

Economic justice is an undefined term; an abstraction that is undefined and defies quantification is, at bottom, subject to interpretation. Therefore, I submit the following definition of economic justice:

YOUR hand in MY wallet.​

 

[trysail]

History:

 

[trysail]

While the purported authorship of Alexander Tytler has been disproven, the accuracy of the statement inaccurately attributed to him is unfolding:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

Whether the eventual bankruptcy of the United States will lead to dictatorship, I do not pretend to know. Given its current trajectory, we're going to find out. The "something for nothing," finger-pointing, envy-peddling, overspending, name-calling, entrenched politicos are taking the U.S. down a path that is bound to have unpleasant consequences.

A "chicken in every pot" will lead to the bankruptcy of us all.

Andrew J. Bacevich ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Bacevich ) is worth reading.


_____________________________


"Tip of the South,
toe of the North,
a little of either,
and neither of both.''

-Ogden Nash


"The ruins of a once great medieval city.''

-H.L. Mencken



Birthplace of Eubie Blake, Leon Uris, Wallis Warfield Simpson, Billie Holliday, John Waters, Thurgood Marshall, Barry Levinson and Frank Zappa. Residence of the aforementioned Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Wilkes Booth and John Barth. Home of H.L. Mencken and Anne Tyler.

Site of the first bloodshed of the "War of Northern Aggression" or "The Civil War" or "The Recent Unpleasantness." Baltimore Clippers and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Thoroughbreds, Maryland beaten biscuits ( what other recipe calls for the blunt force trauma of an axe? ), Maryland rye whiskey, aristocrats and cavaliers mixed with Germans, Poles, Irish, Italians, Lithuanians and refugees from Southern poverty. Débutantes and scoundrels.

Where the falls of rolling hills meet Piedmont, marsh, and Tidewater— neither entirely freshwater nor oceanic saline. Where northern grain growers meet tobacco planters. Salty mariners, duck and goose hunters, fox-hunters, watermen and merchants.

"Smalltimore," "Charm City," "Queen City of the Chesapeake," "The Monumental City," "Crabtown" and "Mobtown".

Fatti maschii, parole femine.


_____________________________


I believe that very little of any use or consequence emanates from "Cancer on the Potomac," a/k/a "The District of Confusion." The only things the place produces is hot air and corruption. Otherwise, it serves little purpose other than a seat to eat and spend the fruit produced by auslanders.

From the vantage point of a family that built railroads, bridges and schools, manufactured textiles and innovative plastics, the advent of a United States Congressman ( other than several eighteenth and early nineteenth century forebears ) into our fold was a novelty. An uncle observed that he could never undertake such a thing because it would provide "no sense of accomplishment." Observing the Congressman's multi-decade career has done nothing but reinforce that sense. I honestly do not understand how he tolerates the fundamental silliness of his position or the place. As for people like Barney Frank, John Warner, "Chuckie" Schumer, "Babs" Mikulski, Dick Cheney, William Jefferson Blythe ( aka "Clinton" ) and their ilk: I do not understand how they look in the mirror. I'd shoot myself.

There's a simple reason the people of Wall Street and Washington are interchangeable; both fields are fertile ground for mastering the art of talking out of both sides of your mouth.

Listening to "Mac" McClarty's babblings this morning, I am reminded of the horrid susceptibility of the trough-feeders to Potomac Fever. Possessing no other useful skills, far too many of the parasites fall back upon influence peddling as a means to earn a living. For seven decades, the rubes have migrated to their perceived source of wealth and power— and all of 'em forget to go back where they came from after "serving the people" ( more accurately, "themselves" ).


"A patriot is one who loves his country— and expects to be paid for it."
- H. L. Mencken


________________________________



http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/mencken.htm

From Gore Vidal's introduction to Marion Elizabeth Rodger's The Impossible Mencken:

"... A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

Mencken is a nice antidote. Politically, he is often right but seldom correct by today's stern standards. In a cheery way, he dislikes most minorities and if he ever had a good word to say about the majority of his countrymen, I have yet to come across it. Recently, when his letters were published, it was discovered that He Did Not Like the Jews, and that he had said unpleasant things about them not only as individuals but In General, plainly the sign of a Hitler-Holocaust enthusiast. So shocked was everyone that even the New York Review of Books' unofficial de-anti-Semitiser, Garry Wills (he salvaged Dickens, barely), has yet to come to his aid with An Explanation. But in Mencken's private correspondence, he also snarls at black Americans, Orientals, Britons, women, and WASPs, particularly the clay-eating Appalachians, whom he regarded as subhuman. But private irritability is of no consequence when compared to what really matters, public action...

******​

... Matthew Arnold wrote that a "style is the saying in the best way what you have to say. The what you have to say depends on your age." Mencken certainly said what he had to say about the age that he had been assigned to. When asked why, if he could find nothing to "revere" in the United States, he lived there, he replied, "Why do men go to zoos?"

Religion as generally practiced by the Americans of his day, he saw as a Great Wall of China designed to keep civilization out while barbarism might flourish within the gates. He himself was a resolute breacher of the Great Wall, and to the extent that some civilization has got through, he is one of the few Americans that we can thank. Plainly, so clear and hard a writer would not be allowed in the mainstream press of today, and those who think that they would like him back would be the first to censor and censure him.

As for Mencken himself, he wrote his own epitaph in 1921 for The Smart Set: "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." I realize that he has, viciously, used the G-word and, even worse, the long-since-banned H-word. But there he is. And there we are, lucky we."

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencken




________________________________



O'er the weekend [ 1/12/09 ], I attended a screening of a recent documentary film, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. It is the story of the famous 1968 football game in which Harvard staged a miraculous comeback to tie what has come to be known as "The Game." Down by 16 points with 43 seconds remaining, Harvard somehow managed to score two touchdowns and make both two-point conversions. The Yale team featured the inspiration for Doonesbury's B.D. ( Brian Dowling ) as well as Calvin Hill. Harvard's team included Tommy Lee Jones, of Hollywood fame and one-time Al Gore roommate.

One of the high points occurred when Tommy Lee Jones was asked if Al Gore possessed a sense of humor. The theater audience laughed heartily, clearly wondering if the notoriously wooden Gore ever enjoyed a juvenile laugh. Jones was clearly uncomfortable and was noticeably and obviously reluctant to talk about his former roomie ( as you can imagine, if Albert ever enjoyed a full-blown college binge drinking episode, you can bet your bottom dollar that Jones ain't gonna talk about it in public ). Digging deep and following an uncomfortable silence, Jones went on to describe Gore's utter delight at the discovery that he could play "Dixie" using a touch-tone telephone.

Amid the silence of the theater audience, I swear ya coulda heard a pin drop.

 

[trysail]

“Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction”
An Excerpt from the 2002 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation
By Warren E. Buffett © 2003

…the parties to derivatives also have enormous incentives to cheat in accounting for them. Those who trade derivatives are usually paid (in whole or part) on “earnings” calculated by mark-to-market accounting. But often there is no real market (think about our contract involving twins) and “mark-to-model” is utilized. This substitution can bring on large-scale mischief. As a general rule, contracts involving multiple reference items and distant settlement dates increase the opportunities for counterparties to use fanciful assumptions. In the twins scenario, for example, the two parties to the contract might well use differing models allowing both to show substantial profits for many years. In extreme cases, mark-to-model degenerates into what I would call mark-to-myth.

Of course, both internal and outside auditors review the numbers, but that’s no easy job. For example, General Re Securities at yearend (after ten months of winding down its operation) had 14,384 contracts outstanding, involving 672 counterparties around the world. Each contract had a plus or minus value derived from one or more reference items, including some of mind-boggling complexity. Valuing a portfolio like that, expert auditors could easily and honestly have widely varying opinions.

The valuation problem is far from academic: In recent years, some huge-scale frauds and near-frauds have been facilitated by derivatives trades. In the energy and electric utility sectors, for example, companies used derivatives and trading activities to report great “earnings” – until the roof fell in when they actually tried to convert the derivatives-related receivables on their balance sheets into cash. “Mark-to-market” then turned out to be truly “mark-to-myth.”

I can assure you that the marking errors in the derivatives business have not been symmetrical. Almost invariably, they have favored either the trader who was eyeing a multi-million dollar bonus or the CEO who wanted to report impressive “earnings” (or both). The bonuses were paid, and the CEO profited from his options. Only much later did shareholders learn that the reported earnings were a sham.

Another problem about derivatives is that they can exacerbate trouble that a corporation has run into for completely unrelated reasons. This pile-on effect occurs because many derivatives contracts require that a company suffering a credit downgrade immediately supply collateral to counterparties. Imagine, then, that a company is downgraded because of general adversity and that its derivatives instantly kick in with their requirement, imposing an unexpected and enormous demand for cash collateral on the company. The need to meet this demand can then throw the company into a liquidity crisis that may, in some cases, trigger still more downgrades. It all becomes a spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown.

Derivatives also create a daisy-chain risk that is akin to the risk run by insurers or reinsurers that lay off much of their business with others. In both cases, huge receivables from many counterparties tend to build up over time. (At Gen Re Securities, we still have $6.5 billion of receivables, though we’ve been in a liquidation mode for nearly a year.) A participant may see himself as prudent, believing his large credit exposures to be diversified and therefore not dangerous. Under certain circumstances, though, an exogenous event that causes the receivable from Company A to go bad will also affect those from Companies B through Z. History teaches us that a crisis often causes problems to correlate in a manner undreamed of in more tranquil times.

In banking, the recognition of a “linkage” problem was one of the reasons for the formation of the Federal Reserve System. Before the Fed was established, the failure of weak banks would sometimes put sudden and unanticipated liquidity demands on previously-strong banks, causing them to fail in turn. The Fed now insulates the strong from the troubles of the weak. But there is no central bank assigned to the job of preventing the dominoes toppling in insurance or derivatives. In these industries, firms that are fundamentally solid can become troubled simply because of the travails of other firms further down the chain. When a “chain reaction” threat exists within an industry, it pays to minimize links of any kind. That’s how we conduct our reinsurance business, and it’s one reason we are exiting derivatives.

Many people argue that derivatives reduce systemic problems, in that participants who can’t bear certain risks are able to transfer them to stronger hands. These people believe that derivatives act to stabilize the economy, facilitate trade, and eliminate bumps for individual participants. And, on a micro level, what they say is often true. Indeed, at Berkshire, I sometimes engage in large-scale derivatives transactions in order to facilitate certain investment strategies.

Charlie and I believe, however, that the macro picture is dangerous and getting more so. Large amounts of risk, particularly credit risk, have become concentrated in the hands of relatively few derivatives dealers, who in addition trade extensively with one other. The troubles of one could quickly infect the others. On top of that, these dealers are owed huge amounts by non-dealer counterparties. Some of these counterparties, as I’ve mentioned, are linked in ways that could cause them to contemporaneously run into a problem because of a single event (such as the implosion of the telecom industry or the precipitous decline in the value of merchant power projects). Linkage, when it suddenly surfaces, can trigger serious systemic problems.

Indeed, in 1998, the leveraged and derivatives-heavy activities of a single hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, caused the Federal Reserve anxieties so severe that it hastily orchestrated a rescue effort. In later Congressional testimony, Fed officials acknowledged that, had they not intervened, the outstanding trades of LTCM – a firm unknown to the general public and employing only a few hundred people – could well have posed a serious threat to the stability of American markets. In other words, the Fed acted because its leaders were fearful of what might have happened to other financial institutions had the LTCM domino toppled. And this affair, though it paralyzed many parts of the fixed-income market for weeks, was far from a worst-case scenario.

One of the derivatives instruments that LTCM used was total-return swaps, contracts that facilitate 100% leverage in various markets, including stocks. For example, Party A to a contract, usually a bank, puts up all of the money for the purchase of a stock while Party B, without putting up any capital, agrees that at a future date it will receive any gain or pay any loss that the bank realizes.

Total-return swaps of this type make a joke of margin requirements. Beyond that, other types of derivatives severely curtail the ability of regulators to curb leverage and generally get their arms around the risk profiles of banks, insurers and other financial institutions. Similarly, even experienced investors and analysts encounter major problems in analyzing the financial condition of firms that are heavily involved with derivatives contracts. When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don’t understand how much risk the institution is running.

The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear. Knowledge of how dangerous they are has already permeated the electricity and gas businesses, in which the eruption of major troubles caused the use of derivatives to diminish dramatically. Elsewhere, however, the derivatives business continues to expand unchecked. Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts.

Charlie and I believe Berkshire should be a fortress of financial strength – for the sake of our owners, creditors, policyholders and employees. We try to be alert to any sort of megacatastrophe risk, and that posture may make us unduly apprehensive about the burgeoning quantities of long-term derivatives contracts and the massive amount of uncollateralized receivables that are growing alongside. In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal…

 

[trysail]

Fear...........................................................................................Greed
^​

It is an absolute truth that there are always going to be some people who are never going to be happy in any human organization ( all of which are, by definition, hierarchical ). Hierarchical organization is the rule in every human endeavor, be it politics, business, religion or the academy. While degrees may differ, the principle is fact.

Some understand and accept that fact and recognize that social independence has a cost ( as well as risks and potential benefits ). The choice is yours ( it's called "freedom" ). Like it or not, homo sapiens is a social animal and that ain't gonna change anytime soon.

The choice to be part of a human social organization carries with it both explicit and implicit social contracts. It is not freedom; it is a bargain. It carries with it compromise, responsibility and a requirement that one follow the dictates of the organization— that's why they pay you. As a rule, human social organizations are not organized along democratic ( small "d" ) lines and do not ( and never have and never will ) operate as democracies ( small "d"). Only juveniles recently seduced by the falsehoods of the academy, the truly naive and wishful thinkers think otherwise. The world doesn't function well if it has to stop and vote every time a decision needs to be made. The continuous whining of those whose childish desires conflict with the reality of the world is both boring and tiresome. Alright already— you think the world fucked you up the ass and owes you something and everything would be much better if the rest of us acknowledged you as Führer— we got that the first time— the 16,245 sniveling, narcissistic repetitions that followed are redundant.

"Whose bread I eat, his song I sing."

 

[JackLuis]

Nice Thread trysail.

Newspapers are full of untruths mascarading as facts.
Bankers are not your friends.
Politicans are liers and in this life you are on your own.

I get it.

 

[trysail]

"There was what I would call immoral, sensationalist reporting about the death of David Sharp, and scapegoats were found and lynched in newsprint and newsreel. Even my own situation, with its happy ending, was manipulated for dramatic effect to make better television. One of the problems was that the mainstream media took most of their information from a few Web reports from climbers at Base Camp who had little concern about the accuracy of their words. What they said was treated as fact and treated by the press as it wished. This hype meant that the press expected my story to showcase conflict between me and Alex, and me and the Sherpas who could not revive me. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In Kathmandu an Australian television crew interviewed me and Barbara for a segment to be broadcast on the Channel 7 show Today Tonight. At the time of the interview, I had thought that everything had gone well, with the drama of my exploits requiring no embellishment

One of the questions Today Tonight had asked was: 'Did you know that Alex told the Sherpas to leave you for dead?'

'Yes,' I had replied, without any indication of distress or disapproval.

However, the editor or segment producer had spliced in a different answer, one that I had given to a completely different question, presumably because they wanted some extra drama.

The first I knew of this was back in Australia, when Barbara, Dylan, Dorje, and I were watching a videotape of what had gone to air. There was footage of climbers in the mess tent at Base Camp listening to a radio conversation between Alex and the Sherpas.

It began with Alex saying, 'But now Lincoln is very bad. If possible, send one Sherpa up to help Lincoln. He is near dead also.'

Next came voiceover from the interviewer, with footage of Alex at his telescope peering at the mountain.

'This, we are reliably informed, is the voice of expedition leader Alex Abramov from Everest Base Camp, instructing the Sherpas to leave Lincoln and return.'

I was now on camera being interviewed with a surprised expression. Hesitantly, I said, 'Okay... That is news to me...'

Again there was voiceover from the interviewer: 'This is the first time Lincoln has been made aware of Abramov's orders.'

But I knew from Alex that I had been declared dead. My comment had concerned another issue altogether, and I immediately told my family as much. The question to which I had actually responded, with obvious surprise, had been: 'Did you know that Alex told the Sherpas to cover you with stones?' This was a totally different issue, and I had been stunned to learn that my death had been so definitive that a burial of sorts had been arranged.

'You know the man well,' said the interviewer. 'You must be pretty disappointed in hearing him say that. You're sitting here alive and well, admittedly with a bit of frostbite.'

'Look..' I began.

But the interviewer threw words at me.

'Shocked? Angered? Offended?'

'I guess I'm a little bewildered,' I said, meaning that I was bewildered to learn that a pile of stones was to have been my grave. 'I need to talk to Alex about that.'

'I would think so!' pronounced the interviewer, and the audience would have thought I was bewildered because I had been left for dead.

At the time of the interview, Alex had not yet told me about the burial plan, which in the end had turned out not to be feasible or indeed necessary.

Obviously, the truth was not being allowed to interfere with a good story. They already had the good story, so I assumed they had wanted to convey a sense of conflict between Alex and me or that he had attempted to keep the truth from me— neither of which had any basis in fact."


-Lincoln Hall
Dead Lucky
New York, New York 2007.


In May, 2006, at age forty-nine, Lincoln Hall— a highly experienced mountaineer who twenty-two years earlier had turned back five hundred feet from summiting Everest— was part of an Australian group attempting to climb the world's tallest peak. In that month, five people were to die on the mountain creating yet one more episode in the never-ending series of spectacles that is the media behaving like perfect idiots.

On his descent from the summit, at 28,200' ( 8,600 m. ), Hall suffered what was likely cerebral edema and collapsed. After heroic efforts to assist him, the Sherpas accompanying him were forced to abandon Hall as night fell and he was clearly all but dead. In the book, Hall takes great pains to absolve the Sherpas ( and Alex Abramov ) of any responsibility and acknowledges that their actions were absolutely consistent with accepted practice and simple self-preservation. Hall absolves everyone connected with the expedition.

Somehow— miraculously ( and there really is no other word for it )— Hall became the first human ever known to survive a night at that altitude on Everest. Discovered by four men ( Dan Mazur, Jangbu Sherpa, Andrew Brash and Myles Osborne ) who selflessly abandoned their own quest for the summit on the following morning, Hall lived to tell the story.

In the words of Myles Osborne, "Sitting to our left, about two feet from a 10,000 foot drop, was a man. Not dead, not sleeping, but sitting cross legged, in the process of changing his shirt. He had his down suit unzipped to the waist, his arms out of the sleeves, was wearing no hat, no gloves, no sunglasses, had no oxygen mask, regulator, ice axe, oxygen, no sleeping bag, no mattress, no food nor water bottle. 'I imagine you're surprised to see me here,' he said. Now, this was a moment of total disbelief to us all. Here was a gentleman, apparently lucid, who had spent the night without oxygen at 8600m, without proper equipment and barely clothed. And ALIVE."
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Hall_(climber)

It's a great yarn. I've climbed most of my life and, like so many, am fascinated by the question of what motivates anyone to voluntarily endure the horrific discomforts and risks that are an unavoidable part of high-altitude mountaineering. With all due respect to Sir George Mallory, as far as I'm concerned, "Because it's there" doesn't justify dying.

 

[trysail]

" 'Greatness of birth and the advantages bestowed by wealth and by nature should provide all the elements of a happy life,' wrote Louis's first cousin the Grande Mademoiselle in her final months. 'But experience should have taught us that there are many people who have had all these things who are not happy.' "


-Antonia Fraser
Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King
New York, New York 2006.


Louis XIV's seventy-seven years on earth defined an era. He was a serial philanderer ( like England's Charles II ) who begat no less than sixteen illigitimate children in addition to the two born in wedlock. He lived long enough to see most of them predecease him. In 1712, alone, measles(!) killed Louis' heir-apparent grandson ( the Dauphin ), the Dauphin's wife and their only child. In fact, in the space of only eleven months, Louis XIV lost his heir apparent son, grandson, great-grandson and a beloved granddaughter-in-law.

He was, of course, the "Sun King" and that certainly was the case for the vast family and court that revolved around him. The various rivalries and feuds among his wife, mistresses, children ( legitimate and illigitimate ) and courtiers nearly drove him around the bend.

Antonia Fraser has yet to disappoint me. Her books are always well written and researched. She has deep knowledge and perspective of 16th, 17th and 18th century English and French history.


_______________


"How we should go about living with grizzlies is not an easy subject. Half of our population considers grizzlies to be serial killers and the other half considers them a cross between Yogi Bear and Winnie the Pooh. But they are not serial killers, they are not harmless, and they are not our friends. They are wild beings, with all that connotes. For reasons I don't understand, many people have a hard time accepting that fact. As Aldo Leopold put it: 'Only those able to see the pageant of evolution can be expected to value its theater, the wilderness, and its outstanding achievement, the grizzly.'

On the other hand, no one should underestimate the horror of a grizzly attack. A small library of books describing such attacks is likely to keep you from ever hiking in grizzly country, especially alone. One factoid I can't get out of my head was reported by Dr. Steven P. French, a biologist who worked for the Yellowstone Grizzly Foundation: a grizzly may begin eating you before you die."


-Jack Turner
Travels in the Greater Yellowstone.
New York, New York 2008.


Jack Turner is undeniably an accomplished outdoorsman and mountaineer. Since moving to the Yellowstone area from California in the '60s, he has made a living as a guide and trek leader. The book is essentially a series of essays about several fishing and hiking outings he took over the course of a calendar year. Turner is also the prototypical eco-nut hypocrite, ranting and raving about the evils of fossil fuels and civilization whilst simultaneously enjoying heat, portable camp stoves and extolling the virtues of polypropylene clothing as he tools around Wyoming in his pickup truck. Notwithstanding, the book is entertaining reading for anyone interested in fishing, mountaineering, wolves, grizzlies, Yellowstone or the outdoors.


____________________


"The pegs were further away than he'd thought. He continued to traverse and the tug of the rope grew stronger; if he slipped, he'd swing a hundred feet or more— and as he reached the pitons his boot touched ice and he skated and fell. He swung on the end of the rope, describing an accelerating arc through the dusk. The swing itself was painless, exhilarating. He stuck his legs out as he gathered momentum and they took the impact when he at last collided with a corner. He had shut his eyes but they opened when he opened his mouth to scream.

Chris having heard the scream stood for a moment and then bent to pick up the rope but couldn't— there was still a body on the end of it. Even then he was surprised to hear Doug's voice again: I've broken my leg.

His eyes filled. He shouted down to Doug to get his weight off the rope— it's impossible to descend a weighted rope. Doug had in fact broken both legs but he was able to haul himself onto a ledge, grunting in pain and noting with grim satisfaction that his arms and spine still functioned.

Chris as he backed from the summit into the night was thinking that Doug might yet die. There was no way to carry him down the West Ridge. He reached Doug— a figure huddled in shadow— and fumbled in the dark to rig another rappel. Another rope length would take them to a snow-covered ledge where they could try to dig a cave. Doug tried to stand. Chris heard bone scrape. Doug screamed again and fell to his knees; he paused there as if considering his next move and fell forward onto his hands. He would crawl."


-Clint Willis
The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing's Greatest Generation.
New York, 2006.


So as not to leave you in suspense, Doug [ Scott ] — with the assistance of Chris Bonington, Clive Rowland and Mo Anthoine— somehow managed to crawl down ( and that's not an exaggeration ) from the summit of the 7,285 meter ( 23,901' ) Ogre in the Karakorum Mountains of Pakistan in 1976.

Scott beat the odds. Of the constellation of climbers connected with Bonington, a sickeningly large portion died on mountains: Ian Clough, John Harlin, Dougal Haston, Mick Burke and Nick Estcourt— among others.

It's fun to read tales of Chamonix, the Eiger, Annapurna, K2, Changabang, Gauri Sankar, Mt. Blanc, Dunagiri and, of course, Everest. There's not the slightest doubt in my mind that it's a lot more fun to read about these places than to actually endure what Bonington and the boys did. No, thank you!

I've climbed in some of these places but I'm no masochist— and to do what these guys did, you have to be.


______________________

I just started Georgianna: Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman ( New York, 1998 ).

I'm three fourths of the way through The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson ( New York, 2008 ) and just finished Antonia Fraser's Love and Louis XIV: The Women In The Life of The Sun King ( New York, 1996 ). Johnson's book is a nice survey of the contributions of Galileo, Newton, Harvey, Lavoisier, Galvani, Faraday, Joule, Michelson, Pavlov and Millikan to science.

Bruce M. Beehler's A Naturalist In New Guinea ( Austin, TX, 1991 ) is a fascinating account of the author's lifelong study of the gorgeous birds of paradise. Beehler was one of a group of scientists who, in 2006, led an expedition that discovered a previously unknown and untouched ecosystem in the Foja Mountains of Papua ( previously known as Irian Jaya ). His 2008 book, Lost Worlds, ( New Haven, CT, 2008 ) is a semi-autobiographical account of that culminating expedition in which a large number of new species of birds, reptiles and mammals were discovered.

I'm slowly re-reading William Styron's Sophie's Choice ( New York, 1976 ).

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years ( Lanham, MD, 2007 ) by S. Fred Singer, Ph.D. and Dennis T. Avery is on-deck.

 

[trysail]

Oh, hell. Back in "Kolledge Days," the old frat boys used to host an annual grain alcohol party. Since the stuff was illegal in the state of New York, a road trip across the border to Connecticut was required ( where it was legally obtainable ).

In order not to kill the unsuspecting, the untutored, the naive or other innocent bystanders, the brewmeisters diluted the stuff ( somewhat ) with fruit drinks and god-only-knows-what else. Three 50-gallon rubber garbage cans were employed as containers and the resulting noxious ( and lethal ) concoction was ladled out to all comers.

A story ( possibly apocryphal ) circulated for years: one fair young lady was asked if she was enjoying her punch. She smacked her lips, said "it's delicious," and promptly collapsed unconscious on the floor in an advanced state of alcoholic oblivion ( I hasten to add that— behaving as honorable gentlemen— no untoward advantage was taken of the lady's disability ).

For sentiment's sake, I saved one of those infamous bottles and have lugged it around through all the travels of my years. Empty and thirty-six years later, its potency remains; a lighted match dropped into the bottle will STILL ignite the residual vapors. The bottle sits beside me as I write; it reads:

Graves
Extra XXX Fine
Grain Alcohol
U.S.P. 190° Proof
This 190° proof Alcohol is especially suitable for medicinal and scientific use, and is of the same high quality as has been applied by us to Physicians, Hospitals and Pharmacists in bottles since 1860.
DISTILLED FROM GRAIN
Bottled by
C.H. Graves Distilling Co., Cambridge, Mass.
​

 

[trysail]

Raines Faults Regulators for Fannie, Freddie Missteps
By Dawn Kopecki
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=am5u4LjKDCE0&refer=home#

This is priceless:
"Former Fannie Mae Chief Executive Officer Franklin Raines faulted regulators and housing officials for encouraging the mortgage-finance company and its competitor Freddie Mac to expand into riskier loans with limited oversight.

“It is remarkable that during the period that Fannie Mae substantially increased its exposure to credit risk its regulator made no visible effort to enforce any limits,” Raines, 59, who was ousted in 2004 and accused of accounting manipulation, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in Washington today."

I think this pretty well defines the word chutzpah. I swear to god, I'm not making this stuff up— here we've got a guy who was the CEO essentially saying:

"It waddn't me. I didn' do it. The devil made me do it. I dint know what I was doin' and IT'S YOUR FAULT for not stoppin' me from doin' it!
Why didn't you stop me?"​

 

[trysail]

The Calamity of Appomattox
By H.L. Mencken

"No American historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during the war? Could it have remedied its plain economic deficiencies, and become a self-sustaining nation? How would it have protected itself against such war heroes as Beauregard and Longstreet, Joe Wheeler and Nathan D. Forrest? And what would have been its relations to the United States, socially, economically, spiritually and politically?

I am inclined, on all these counts, to be optimistic. The chief evils in the Federal victory lay in the fact, from which we still suffer abominably, that it was a victory of what we now call Babbitts over what used to be called gentlemen. I am not arguing here, of course, that the whole Confederate army was composed of gentlemen; on the contrary, it was chiefly made up, like the Federal army, of innocent and unwashed peasants, and not a few of them got into its corps of officers. But the impulse behind it, as everyone knows, was essentially aristocratic, and that aristocratic impulse would have fashioned the Confederacy if the fortunes of war had run the other way. Whatever the defects of the new commonwealth below the Potomac, it would have at least been a commonwealth founded upon a concept of human inequality, and with a superior minority at the helm. It might not have produced any more Washingtons, Madisons, Jeffersons, Calhouns and Randolphs of Roanoke, but it would certainly not have yielded itself to the Heflins, Caraways, Bilbos and Tillmans.

The rise of such bounders was a natural and inevitable consequence of the military disaster. That disaster left the Southern gentry deflated and almost helpless. Thousands of the best young men among them had been killed, and thousands of those who survived came North. They commonly did well in the North, and were good citizens. My own native town of Baltimore was greatly enriched by their immigration, both culturally and materially; if it is less corrupt today than most other large American cities, then the credit belongs largely to Virginians, many of whom arrived with no baggage save good manners and empty bellies. Back home they were sorely missed. First the carpetbaggers ravaged the land, and then it fell into the hands of the native white trash, already so poor that war and Reconstruction could not make them any poorer. When things began to improve they seized whatever was seizable, and their heirs and assigns, now poor no longer, hold it to this day. A raw plutocracy owns and operates the New South, with no challenge save from a proletariat, white and black, that is still three-fourths peasant, and hence too stupid to be dangerous. The aristocracy is almost extinct, at least as a force in government. It may survive in backwaters and on puerile levels, but of the men who run the South today, and represent it at Washington, not 5%, by any Southern standard, are gentlemen.

If the war had gone with the Confederates no such vermin would be in the saddle, nor would there be any sign below the Potomac of their chief contributions to American Kultur—Ku Kluxry, political ecclesiasticism, nigger-baiting, and the more homicidal variety of wowserism. Such things might have arisen in America, but they would not have arisen in the South. The old aristocracy, however degenerate it might have become, would have at least retained sufficient decency to see to that. New Orleans, today, would still be a highly charming and civilized (if perhaps somewhat zymotic) city, with a touch of Paris and another of Port Said. Charleston, which even now sprouts lady authors, would also sprout political philosophers. The University of Virginia would be what Jefferson intended it to be, and no shouting Methodist would haunt its campus. Richmond would be, not the dull suburb of nothing that it is now, but a beautiful and consoling second-rate capital, comparable to Budapest, Brussels, Stockholm or The Hague. And all of us, with the Middle West pumping its revolting silo juices into the East and West alike, would be making frequent leaps over the Potomac, to drink the sound red wine there and breathe the free air.

My guess is that the two Republics would be getting on pretty amicably. Perhaps they’d have come to terms as early as 1898, and fought the Spanish-American War together. In 1917 the confiding North might have gone out to save the world for democracy, but the South, vaccinated against both Wall Street and the Liberal whim-wham, would have kept aloof—and maybe rolled up a couple of billions of profit from the holy crusade. It would probably be far richer today, independent, than it is with the clutch of the Yankee mortgage-shark still on its collar. It would be getting and using his money just the same, but his toll would be less. As things stand, he not only exploits the South economically; he also pollutes and debases it spiritually. It suffers damnably from low wages, but it suffers even more from the Chamber of Commerce metaphysic.

No doubt the Confederates, victorious, would have abolished slavery by the middle of the 80s. They were headed that way before the war, and the more sagacious of them were all in favor of it. But they were in favor of it on sound economic grounds, and not on the brummagem moral grounds which persuaded the North. The difference here is immense. In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished. The triumph of sin in 1865 would have stimulated and helped to civilize both sides.

Today the way out looks painful and hazardous. Civilization in the United States survives only in the big cities, and many of them—notably Boston and Philadelphia—seem to be sliding down to the cow country level. No doubt this standardization will go on until a few of the more resolute towns, headed by New York, take to open revolt, and try to break out of the Union. Already, indeed, it is talked of. But it will be hard to accomplish, for the tradition that the Union is indissoluble is now firmly established. If it had been broken in 1865, life would be far pleasanter today for every American of any noticeable decency. There are, to be sure, advantages in Union for everyone, but it must be manifest that they are greatest for the worst kinds of people. All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters."

Published in The American Mercury, Sept., 1930, (The Vintage Mencken, Gathered by Alistair Cooke, Vintage Books, 1955, pp.197-201)

______________________________________________________


The New Deal

by H.L. Mencken, from A Mencken Chrestomathy.

From Wizards, Baltimore Evening Sun, May 27, 1935. I offer this as a specimen of my polemic against the New Deal, which started in the Spring of 1933 and went on until the approach of the American entrance into World War II adjourned free speech on public questions. I choose the following because it recalls facts about the New Deal personnel and modus operandi that tend to be forgotten.


I take the following from the celebrated New Republic:

In the Autumn of 1933, after General Johnson and his Blue Eagle had done their part, business began rapidly to decline. On a train coming back from a social workers' meeting, Harry Hopkins and his assistant, Aubrey Williams, discussed with apprehension the coming Winter. ... Hopkins said: "Let's take a real crack at this. Let's give everyone a job." The title, the Civil Works Administration, was contributed by Jacob Baker.​

And the following from the eminent Nation:

It is characteristic of Hopkins that he wasted no time meditating upon the stupendous problems and conflicts such a revolutionary scheme might engender. He talked it over with his aides -- Baker, Williams, and Corrington Gill -- and from their discussion there emerged an equally brief memorandum outlining the scheme. With this memorandum in hand he trotted off to the White House one Wednesday afternoon in November. He went merely to enlist Roosevelt's interest. He expected to be told to develop the idea and come back with a fuller outline. He still expected that when he left the White House that evening. But it so happened that he had caught the New Deal Messiah in one of his periods of infatuation with the spending art, and Hopkins literally woke up the next morning to discover that Roosevelt without furthur ado had proclaimed the CWA in effect.​

The money began to pour out on November 16, 1933, to the tune of a deafening hullabaloo. By December 1 more than 1,000,000 men were on the CWA pay roll; by January 18, 1934, the number reached 4,100,000. Press agents in eight-hour shifts worked day and night to tell a panting country what it was all about. The Depression, it was explained, was being given a series of adroit and fatal blows, above, below, and athwart the belt. In six months there would be no more unemployment, the wheels of industry would be spinning, and the More Abundant Life would be on us. Brains had at last conquered the fear of fear.

What actually happened belongs to history. By the opening of Spring, Hopkins has got rid of his billion, and the whole scheme had blown up with a bang. The wheels of industry resolutely refused to spin. The More Abundant Life continued to linger over the sky line. There ensued a pause for taking breath, and then another stupendous assault was launched upon the taxpayer. This time the amount demanded was $4,880,000,000. It is now in hand, and plans are under way to lay it out where it will do the most good in next year's campaign.

Go back to the two clippings and read them again. Consider well what they say. Four preposterous nonentities, all of them professional uplifters, returning from a junket at the taxpayers' expense, sit in a smoking car munching peanuts and talking shop. Their sole business in life is spending other people's money. In the past they have always had to put in four-fifths of their time cadging it, but now the New Deal has admitted them to the vast vaults of the public treasury, and just beyond the public treasury, shackled in a gigantic lemon-squeezer worked by steam, groans the taxpayer. They feel their oats, and are busting with ideas. For them, at least, the More Abundant Life has surely come in.

Suddenly one of them, biting down hard on a peanut, has an inspiration. He leaps to his feet exultant, palpitating like a crusader shinning up the walls of Antioch. How, now, comrade, have you bitten into a worm? Nay, gents, I have thought of a good one, a swell one, the damndest you ever heard tell of. Why not put everyone to work? Why not shovel it out in a really Large Way? Why higgle and temporize? We won't be here forever, and when we're gone, we'll be gone a long while.

But the Fuehrer? Wasn't he babbling again, only the other day, of balancing the budget? Isn't it a fact that he shows some sign of wobbling of late -- that the flop of the NRA has given him to think? Well, we can only try. We have fetched him before, and maybe we can fetch him again. So the train reaches Washington, the porter gets his tip from the taxpayer's pocket, and the next day the four brethren meet to figure out the details. But they never get further than a few scratches, for the Fuehrer is in one of his intuitive moods, and his Christian Science smile is in high gear. Say no more, Harry, it is done! The next morning the money begins to gush and billow out of the Treasury. Six months later a billion is gone, and plans are under way to collar five times as much more.

Such is government by the Brain Trust. Such is the fate of the taxpayer under a Planned Economy. Such is the Utopia of damned fools. I have been careful to take the evidence from unimpeachable sources. If it had come from the Congressional Record I'd have been suspicious of it, for both Houses, as we heard lately from the Fuehrer himself, are full of liars. But the Nation and the New Republic always tell the precise truth, and in the precise sense that it is defined by all idealistic men. Both were howling for a Planned Economy long before the Fuehrer himself ever heard of it, and both hailed the setting up of the Brain Trust as a step forward in government comparable to the Northern Securities decision or the emancipation of the slaves.

Well, then, who is this Hopkins who had that facile inspiration on the train, and made off with that billion so swiftly and so light-heartedly, and is now preparing to get rid of $4,800,000,000 more? I turn to the Nation and the New Republic again: the former printed a monograph on him on May 22, and the latter on April 10. He is, it appears, the son of an honest harness-maker in Sioux City, Iowa. In 1910 or thereabout he was graduated from a fresh-water college in his native wilds, and made tracks for New York. In a little while he had a nice job with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and then, in 1918, he got a nicer one with the Board of Child Welfare. By 1922 he was beginning to be known as a promising uplifter, and in that year, the Red Cross made him its divisional manager and wikinski at New Orleans. In 1924 he was back in New York to take a better job with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and a few years later he fell into a still better one as director of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association. Here he shined so effulgently that when, in 1932, the Fuehrer, then Governor of New York, set up a Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, good Harry was made its director at $12,500 a year. His translation to Washington followed naturally. When he arrived there, according to the New Republic's biographer, he was "received uproariously by the Administration's left wing, and within three months was a national figure." Of such sort are the wizards who now run the country. Here is the perfect pattern of a professional world-saver. His whole life has been devoted to the art and science of spending other people's money. He has saved millions of the down-trodden from starvation, pestilence, cannibalism, and worse -- always at someone else's expense, and usually at the taxpayer's. He has been going it over and over again at Washington. And now, with $4,800,000,000 of your money and mine in his hands, he is preparing to save fresh multitudes, that they may be fat and optimistic on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November, 1936, and so mark their ballots in the right box.

About his associates in this benign work for humanity I can tell you less, for the Nation and the New Republic have failed, so far, to print treatises on them, and "Who's Who in America" is silent about them. "Who's Who" is so hospitable that no less than 31,081 head of Americans, male and female, qualify for its present edition. They include all sorts of one-book authors, third-rate clergymen, superannuated Chautauqua lecturers, and neighborhood busybodies, but a diligent search fails to reveal the Hon. Messrs. Jacob Baker, Aubrey Willians, and Corrington Gill. There is an Ezra Baker who is chairman of the Bunker Hill Monument Association and was formerly chairman of the Boston Licensing Board, and a Rev. George Randolph Baker who is associate secretary of the Board of Education of the Northern Baptist Convention, but the ineffable Jacob is non est. Among the Williamses there is an Anita who is a professional uplifter down in sunny Tennessee and refuses coyly to give the date of her birth, and a Charles B. who is professor of Greek and ethics at Union "University" in the same great State, and an Edward L. F. who is a lecturer in Summer schools, a Rotarian and the editor of the Kadelphian Review of Tiffin, Ohio, but I can't find the genius, Aubrey. Finally, there are eight Gills, including one who wrote "Forest Facts for Schools" and another who is an Elk, a Knight of Pythias, and a Woodman of the World, but nowhere in the book is there any mention of that inspired young man, Corrington.

Of such sort are the young wizards who now sweat to save the plain people from the degradations of capitalism, which is to say, from the degradations of working hard, saving their money, and paying their way. This is what the New Deal and its Planned Economy come to in practise— a series of furious and irrational raids upon the taxpayer, planned casually by professional do-gooders lolling in smoking cars, and executed by professional politicians bent only upon building up an irresistible machine. This is the Fuehrer's substitute for constitutional government and common sense.

 

[harrlequin]

'nuf said?

*deep longing sigh*

 

[trysail]

The suggestibility of humans never ceases to both amaze and depress me. I am constantly dumbfounded by people's ape-like tendency to follow a crowd.

Notwithstanding the name of the species, individual H. sapiens doesn't much like to think and is naturally codependent.


"Most men would rather die than think. Many do."
-Bertrand Russell

 

[trysail]

Here are the guys who detonated the financial weapon of mass destruction:


Joseph Cassano— remember that name. When the history of the current fiasco is written, the general public will discover that the trail leads back to him ( the investment world already knows ).

Cassano and his compadres were specifically located ( in London ) so that they would be beyond the reach of U.S. regulators. It was they who wrote the billions of dollars of credit default swaps ( using AIG's then "AAA" credit rating ) that provided the cover for the creation and marketing of all the mortgage-backed toxic waste. AIG's imprimatur allowed the financial alchemists to magically transform sub-prime garbage into what was marketed (to fools and idiots) as "safe."

For anyone with any knowledge of capital markets and investing, it comes as no surprise that the heritage of the current debacle can be traced back to Drexel, Burnham. That firm spawned swindlers, Michael Milken being one of the foremost.

Cassano was ground-zero in the daisy chain.

ETA: Along with, of course, the Congress of the United States whose creation of and meddling with Fannie & Freddie provided the fissile material.



#####################################




We all know that you can write laws, regulations and codes of ethics 'til the cows come home and it has never and will never prevent bad actors from playing their appointed role in life. I've seen it throughout my career.

Read the whole sorry tale:
NY Times
September 28, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/business/28melt.html



########################################




It's as old as cat and mouse. See Inland Revenue v. Her Majesty's subjects, also Internal Revenue Service v. U.S. taxpayers and Revenue Canada v. Canadians. As surely as rules are made and the sun rises, there will always be smart, highly paid lawyers with plenty of motivation to figure out avoidance/minimization schemes. There is, of course, nothing that is either illegal or unethical respecting tax avoidance. If you don't want to pay sales tax, it's as simple a matter as saving and not spending. If you don't want to pay capital gains tax, don't sell. See also: gun control, driving and mobile ( cell ) telephones.


#########################################




As long as there are rulemakers there will be ( and have always been ) rule-benders/avoiders/stretchers/breakers.

I have this little hypothesis about humanity: 90% of folk at least make an effort to observe the "conventions that enable people living in proximity to one another to get along reasonably well" [ lacking any better way to put it and not really wanting to use words like rules, laws, civility, "do unto others..." or others that some find "loaded" or offensive ], it's the other 10% [ (5?) (2?)% ] who don't who make life miserable for everybody else [ i.e., thus creating the necessity for written rules, the IRS Code, the Federal Code, etc., etc. ].

Unfortunately, as I've said before, you can write rules, regulations, Codes of Ethics, etc. until the cows come home and it won't stop bad actors from playing out their role in life. The minute you ( or anyone ) writes a rule that someone finds constricting, there'll be somebody out there either ignoring it or trying to figure a way around it. Then, of course, there's the old problem of "one man's guerilla is another man's freedom fighter." As we discover around here, it can get mighty damn difficult to define things.

I really don't want to get into an attempt at counting "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin," but a semblance of a ( weak but nonetheless ) fair case can be made that a substantial portion of the burden of laws, rules and regulation does, in fact, fall on the folk who observe them. It is, of course, obvious that the very folk at whom they were aimed are the ones least likely to observe them.



#########################################





Accounting rules are another venue where there will always be a minority who will "game the system," some of them bend/stretch/break the rules, others engage in outright fraud. You've come fairly close to describing a part of why the ex-CEO of Enron is currently enjoying free room and board at taxpayer expense and--- you've nailed the regulatory time lag. A goodly portion of the time, regulators aren't aware of the existence of a problem until it rears its ugly head in the form of injured parties crying foul.



##########################################





By comparison to the government pension nightmare, the private sector's sins are chickenfeed ( government pension fund accounting standards are notoriously lax by comparison to mandated corporate accounting standards ). If you think corporate pension practices are dodgy, you haven't seen anything until you've seen the completely deceptive thimblerigging that state and local governments and authorities practice— it's one more accident waiting to happen. This is a long and extremely depressing article; be sure you're sitting down and have access to strong drink before you read about the lovely ticking time bomb the politicians have placed in every citizen's wallet:

( This following is a very brief excerpt from )
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=alwTE0Z5.1EA&refer=exclusive

...Public pension funds across the U.S. are hiding the size of a crisis that’s been looming for years. Retirement plans play accounting games with numbers, giving the illusion that the funds are healthy.

The paper alchemy gives governors and legislators the easy choice to contribute too little or nothing to the funds, year after year.

The misleading numbers posted by retirement fund administrators help mask this reality: Public pensions in the U.S. had total liabilities of $2.9 trillion as of Dec. 16, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Their total assets are about 30 percent less than that, at $2 trillion.

With stock market losses this year, public pensions in the U.S. are now underfunded by more than $1 trillion...

 

[trysail]

OPHIDIOPHOBIA​

I have an established route for my run. Living, as I do, within a couple of miles of where I was born and raised and within several hundred yards of where my father was born ( quite literally, in his mother's bed ), I know the area and its topography well. I've walked, run, driven and ridden these roads and paths my whole life. I know who used to live in which houses, I know where they went to school, I knew their parents and I know where most of my schoolchums are even to this day. The woods and streams of my youth lie within the watershed in which I now reside.

My running route follows an abandoned railroad right of way. It passes a lake that was originally dammed to create a reservoir, then the site of an old gunpowder mill. Most of the rail has been removed from the roadbed and all that remains to mark it are crossties ( sleepers, for you Brits ) and ballast. The route continues upstream alongside one of the reservoir's feeder streams eventually crossing the stream on a wood trestle and reaching my turnaround point. A series of planks have been professionally laid and affixed across the wood trestle to permit a safe and easy transit by hikers and runners.

Two days ago, as I approached the trestle, I noticed a young man and woman staring at the outer section of the bridge. Usually when I reach the crossing, anyone who's standing on it makes an effort to clear a path. This time, however, the pair pointed and the guy said, "There's a snake there and I don't want you to get bitten." Those words were, of course, more than enough to stop me dead in my tracks. There's little in this world I hate and fear more than snakes.

I slowly approached the fellow and followed the direction of his finger. Sure enough, there in the hollowed end of a rotting timber, was a goddamned snake... and it was a fairly big one, too. As it was balled up, all I could easily and safely see was a fairly thick part of mid-section; it was a mottled brown and black and I guess it had a 2-3" circumference. I asked if they'd been able to identify the frickin' thing. At first they said it was a "garter snake" with an air of certainty, then they said "maybe it's a water snake" and finally they admitted they didn't have any idea what it was. I couldn't see its head and I was damned if I was going to get anywhere near enough to the thing to place myself within the fartherest imagineable striking distance.

It was a lovely cloudless day and I was running well. I wanted to continue my run but I was having visions of flashing fangs, timber rattlers and four puncture wounds. I considered that continuation meant running this particular gauntlet not just once— but twice. I was wrestling with all the nightmares I get whenever I encounter snakes. Lest there be any doubt remaining, let it be known that I really, really loathe the damn things.

I backed off a few steps and began considering alternatives. Would it be possible to leave the planked section in order to hop from timber to timber on the far side of the trestle, thus remaining well out of striking range? That would maximize the distance but I was also hearing potential snickering... "Hey, d'jou hear about that damned idiot fool ____; he fell off the bridge across the _____ while he was out running. The dope was trying to avoid a snake and damn near managed to kill his'self."

After at least a minute or two of considering all sorts of things, I started to get angry with myself. The odds of the thing striking me if I ran past the spot quickly really weren't all that high. I did have to admit that there was a small possibility that the snake had already been alarmed by the two others and might feel threatened. I reasoned that if I took a running start and sprinted, the odds were that— even if it was in "fight" mode— a strike would likely miss. I made my mind up; that's what I'd do. I'd just deal with a return crossing on the way back.

Fortifying my resolve with a minute's worth of nervous pacing, I asked the young woman to make way telling her that I intended to sprint past. I closed my eyes, put my head down and ran like bloody hell. With my heart pounding and adrenalin flowing, I ran past the spot as fast as I could. To my immense relief, I passed safely over.

On my return trip, I never even hesitated, reasoning that the best strategy was to pass by as quickly as possible with the least possible warning to my potential assassin.

The unfortunate truth is that I'm never going to be able to run across that damn bridge again without thinking about the possible presence of snakes.

 

[trysail]

PARTIAL INVENTORY OF BOOKS

AUTHOR TITLE
__________________ _______________________________________

Mark Twain Life On The Mississippi
A Tramp Abroad
Puddn'head Wilson
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Following the Equator
Huckleberry Finn
(See also Library of America edition & University of California edition)
The Oxford Mark Twain (29 volume collection)

Justin Kaplan Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain

"E.F." Mr. Garrick's Conduct As Manager of The Theatre-Royal
in Drury Lane, Considered in A Letter Addressed To Him
( A broadside dated October 18, 1747 )

Providence Journal Souvenir of General Lewis Richmond

Joseph Heller Catch 22

James Joyce Ulysses
Portrait of The Artist as A Young Man
Dubliners

William Styron Lie Down In Darkness
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Sophie's Choice

John Irving A Prayer For Owen Meany
The World According To Garp
Hotel New Hampshire
Cider House Rules
3 By Irving (Setting Free The Bears, The Water-Method Man,
The 158-Pound Marriage)
A Son of The Circus
The Fourth Hand
Until I Find You
A Widow For One Year

Ernest Hemingway The Dangerous Summer
Death In The Afternoon
The Old Man and The Sea
The Sun Also Rises
Across The River and Into The Trees
A Moveable Feast
A Farewell To Arms

Tom Wolfe The Right Stuff
A Man in Full
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
I Am Charlotte Simmons
Bonfire of The Vanities

Thomas Wolfe Of Time and The River
You Can't Go Home Again

Edward Bellamy Looking Backward

Dorothy Miner A History of Bookbinding

Wallace Gray From Homer to Joyce

Evelyn Waugh A Handful of Dust
Decline and Fall

The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume I)

Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure
Tess of The D'ubervilles

John le Carrè The Quest for Karla (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People)
The Russia House
The Little Drummer Girl
The Constant Gardner
The Secret Pilgrim
Our Game
Single & Single
Absolute Friends
The Night Manager

Richard Adams Watership Down
The Girl In A Swing
Plague Dogs
Shardik
Maia
Traveller

Alan Paton Cry The Beloved Country

Richard H. Dana Two Years Before The Mast

Richard Ellman James Joyce
James Joyce
Oscar Wilde

William F. Buckley, Jr. Airborne
Atlantic High
Racing Through Paradise
Wind Fall

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Randolph S. Churchill Winston S. Churchill - Youth
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William Blake Songs of Innocence Quaritch Facsimile Edition


David McCullough John Adams
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Earl Weaver It's What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts
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Charles Mackay, L.L.D. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds

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Lewis Carroll Sylvie And Bruno
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Robert Smith Surtees Handley Cross; or Mr. Jorrock's Hunt
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Joseph Addison & The Spectator (8 volumes)
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Alex. Chalmers A History of the Colleges, Halls, and Public Buildings Attached to
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Homer The Odyssey
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Thomas Wolfe You Can't Go Home Again
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Giorgio Vasari Lives of the Painters (4 volumes)
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Rupert Brooke 1914 & Other Poems
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William Makepeace Vanity Fair; A Novel Without A Hero
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F. De Kerchove International Maritime Dictionary

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Kenneth F. Brooks Run To The Lee

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Joseph M. Coale, III Middling Planters of Ruxton, 1691-1850

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National Audobon Society A Field Guide to The Night Sky
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Roy Blount, Jr. Robert E. Lee

 

[trysail]

I dig this shit. Everytime there's a blizzard, all movement essentially ceases. 99% of people don't set foot outside their doors. In years past, I've skiied down what is normally the busiest street in town with nary an automobile in sight. I've chased down herds of deer.

The quiet is wonderful and the brief reversion to an almost primeval state refreshing. It permits and encourages exploration on foot of places where one wouldn't normally go.

I've got my clothing for blizzard exploration down to a science. I wear a pair of foul weather bibs atop a pair of blue jeans. Above comes a layer comprised of a tee shirt, a chamois shirt, a goose-down parka and the piece-de-resistance, my Henri-Lloyd foul weather jacket. A pair of ski gloves go on my hands. My footgear consists of a well-broken-in set of waterproof hiking boots and my headwear is a baseball hat topped by the hood of my Henri-Lloyd top.

Dressed in this fashion, I am warm, 100% waterproof and ready to set off for miles and miles of cross-country exploration. It's a wonderful way to spend a day like this.

ETA:
The final count was 20.5". That puts it among the biggest snowstorms of all-time.

The Area's Big Snowfalls
22-23 January, 2016........29.2 inches (#1)
15-18 March, 1892..........16.0" (#12)
11-14 February, 1899......21.4" (#8)
16-18 February, 1900......12.0" (#19)
27-29 January, 1922.......26.5" (#4)
29-30 March, 1942..........22.0" (#7)
15-16 February, 1958......15.5" (#13)
11-12 December, 1960.....14.1" (#15)
5-7 March, 1962.............13.0" (#16)
29-31 January, 1966........12.1" (#18)
19 February, 1979...........20.0" (#10)
10-11 February, 1983......22.8" (#5)
22 January, 1987............12.3" (#17)
13-14 March, 1993..........13.0" ( in Philadelphia )
7-8 January, 1996...........22.5" (#6)
25 January, 2000............14.9" (#14)
15-18 February, 2003......28.2" (#3)
19 December, 2009.........20.5" (#9)
5-6 February, 2010.........25.0" ( #2)
9-10 February, 2010.......19.5" (#11)

https://www.weather.gov/lwx/winter_storm-pr#TopDaySnowfall

Source: http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/20...eorology-solves-the-mystery-of-record-snows/3 ​

 

[trysail]

At least once a week ( and frequently more often ) during the winter, I climb aboard what I like to call "the instrument of Medieval torture" otherwise

known to modern man as an Elliptical Cross-Trainer.


There I do battle against the forces of age, gravity and indolence. As a generality, I despise this kind of exercise much as I hate weight-lifting and such similar masochistic endeavors. I prefer and actually enjoy other forms of exercise that are "fun" such as tennis, squash, hiking or bicycling. I also do a fair amount of running which I generally enjoy although the enjoyment depends on the distance. Beyond a relatively easy lope of, say 3-4 miles, running becomes an exercise in endurance, desire and self-discipline. The same is true of my battles with the Elliptical machine.


My standard routine calls for a 25-minute bout with the machine at a resistance level of "12." Based on past experience, I know that in order to reach my minimum distance target of 3 miles, it is necessary for me to maintain an average speed of roughly 57 revolutions per minute ( "RPMs" ) for the 25-minute period.


For better or worse, the fact is that I'm one of those people who want to test myself to see how fast I can do things and to see if I'm capable of improving my performance. It's not pure masochism so much as a mix of curiosity and self-contest.


I've always found that mental gymnastics are a real help in enabling me to endure and overcome the mental pain, exhaustion and discomfort that accompany attempts to improve my performance. My "personal best" thus far has been a distance of 3.43 miles in the allotted 25-minute time period; at the end of that particular effort, my pulse had reached 156.


The head games start as soon as I begin. If I'm going to cover 3.43 miles, I know it is imperative that I average around 60 RPMs. That's not easy to do in the early going so I have to keep an eye on the RPM gauge and make a conscious effort to maintain that rate. I try to allow my mind to wander through the early minutes. Frequently, I'll imagine that I'm on skis and poling my way through a snow-filled glen while periodically looking at the RPMs— all the while studiously attempting to avoid looking at the elapsed time for fear of both discouraging myself and a desire to focus my attention elsewhere.


At around 6-minutes, I'll check my progress by multiplying my distance by 4 to see if I'm on pace. Obviously, I need to have covered a minimum of 0.75 miles by that time. If I haven't, I need to step up the pace.


I try to force my mind to wander some more. Sometimes, I try to recall a novel word or a conversation. I occasionally find myself constructing a sentence or a paragraph.


The next mark comes at 12½ minutes; obviously, I need to have recorded a minimum of 1½ miles. If not, "Step up the pace! Move it!"


By this time, I'm sweating profusely. Beads of sweat gather on my forehead and I follow their path as they course down my nose and fall to the machine's base. If they seem to refuse the dictates of gravity, I'll snap my head, flinging droplets in all directions.


The real struggle tends to begin around 16 minutes; to be on target, I have to have covered at least 2 miles by this point. I'm not happy; this has become "not fun" and is, most assuredly, "work." The mental gymnastics and the mind games come to the fore. I tell myself, "C'mon, you've only got 9 minutes left. That's a piece of cake. You can do that easily." The interior monologue is a sure sign that I really don't want to be doing this. It becomes nearly impossible for me to avoid looking at the elapsed time. My discomfort and anerobic respiration can no longer be suppressed and insist on attention.


"Fuck," "Goddamn." "18 minutes, only 7 to go— you can do this— you've done it a million times before."


"Shit, you can't quit now. That'd be stupid. What's the sense of quitting when you've already got all that time behind you."


"20 minutes! C'mon. Only 5 to go; it's a piece of cake."


By now, I'm seriously considering quitting or at least wondering why in fuck I'm doing this. This self abuse is really stupid. I know; I'll think about how good it's going to feel when I get off this fucking machine.


"Keep going."


At this point, I'm making all sorts of promises. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called it "bargaining."

Bargaining — "Just let me live to see my children graduate."; "I'll do anything for a few more years."; "I will give my life savings if..." The third stage involves the hope that the individual can somehow postpone or delay death. Usually, the negotiation for an extended life is made with a higher power in exchange for a reformed lifestyle. Psychologically, the individual is saying, "I understand I will die, but if I could just have more time.**

At 23 minutes, the machine automatically reduces the resistance level for a 2-minute "cool down" period. I don't want that, so I have to pull one hand off the hand levers to readjust the resistance level back up to "12." This is not as simple an operation as it sounds because I'm trying to keep my balance and maintain or increase the RPMs while simultaneously punching the resistance control. I am sucking air and within sight of the end of my anerobic capacity. Now's the time to sprint to the end.


When the "finish line" is in sight, I usually get a "second wind." It comes from the knowledge that this isn't going to go on forever. It's time for maximum exertion and a sprint to the finish.


"24 minutes. 1 minute to go." Life exists in 15-second increments. I know I can sprint for a minute or so. The RPMs start to climb to around 67. At 24½ minutes, I try to kick a bit. At 24 minutes and 45 seconds, I call on whatever's left in the tank. My breathing is rapid and loud.


The beeper goes off at 25 minutes. My pulse is up to 156. What's the damn distance? God damn.



___________________
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kübler-Ross_model

 

[trysail]

I hate D.C. I hate big bureaucracies. I hate all the people who have come here to feed on the government trough. They've ruined the state and the region.

Sixty years ago, Maryland and NoVa were largely rural, agricultural and possessed some of the most gorgeous countryside on the face of the earth. Today, it's all been paved over with horribly ugly developments. The regional culture has been all but effaced by the influx of people with no understanding of what they've destroyed. Many of them are horribly impolite and possess no manners. What was once a paradise is now a mess. My ancestors lived in what was an Eden and would be disgusted by what has occurred.

The Chesapeake Bay has been destroyed by the pollution from all the development:


Byproducts Of Washington, D.C. Smother Chesapeake Bay
by Elizabeth Shogren


When Anne Croft fertilizes her tiny lawn in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood, she has no idea that she's contributing to the pollution that still vexes the Chesapeake Bay after 25 years of cleanup.

The federal and state governments have spent several billion dollars to meet a pledge to restore the bay's health, but the nation's largest estuary is still one of the country's most polluted waterways. Pollution so starves the Chesapeake Bay of oxygen that each summer, a stretch of it dozens of miles long is unsuitable for fish or most other creatures. And crab and oyster populations are at tiny fractions of historic levels.

President Obama is launching a new cleanup strategy and warns that if states do not reduce pollution, the federal government will take over the job.

Byproducts Of Modern Living Affect Waterways
But experts say a big part of the problem is that each of the almost 17 million people living in the Chesapeake's huge watershed contributes to the bay's bleak condition. Exhaust from their cars, detergent from their dishwashers, fertilizers from their yards, and waste from their septic and sewage systems are some of the many sources of the nitrogen and phosphorus that plague the bay.

These nutrients stimulate too much algae to grow. Bacteria that eat the algae suck so much oxygen out of parts of the bay that fish and creatures have to swim away to survive. The algae and sediments in the runoff also make the water murky, killing underwater grasses that provide safe nurseries for the bay's famous crabs and many fish.

Many people, like Croft, are unaware that their ordinary activities have this harmful effect.

On a crisp fall day, Croft is trying to make sense of the directions on a bag of fertilizer.

"That's not very clear," she says as she fills a fertilizer applicator. "So I'm going to have to sort of just wing it. I'll just put a bunch in there, and I'll go back and forth over it a couple of times, and I'll just call it a day."

Croft knows the bay is polluted. She used to teach fourth-grade history in Maryland, and spent about two weeks each year focusing on the Chesapeake. Still, she didn't think she could be part of the problem.

"I guess I don't think about where the water runoff goes in the city," she says.

Raw Sewage And Fertilizer-Spiked Stormwater
Dottie Yunger thinks a lot about it — a lot.

On a rainy autumn day, Yunger is in Croft's neighborhood watching water run into a sewer.

"The stormwater that's collected from last night and through today is running down the street and into this storm drain," she says. "And if anybody has used any pesticide or fertilizer on their lawn, that gets picked up with the rainwater."

Yunger is the "river keeper" for the Anacostia River, which flows through the east side of Washington, D.C. She's the chief advocate for one of the shortest and dirtiest tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay.

Two kinds of pollution are the prime culprits for robbing the bay of oxygen — nitrogen and phosphorus. Ten percent of the nitrogen and even more of the phosphorus in the Chesapeake come from fertilizers that wash off lawns and golf courses.

And fertilizer isn't the only problem.

In the District of Columbia and lots of other cities across the bay watershed, stormwater flows through the same pipes as the sewage. When it rains hard, sewage treatment plants can't handle all the volume. So they divert the stormwater and the sewage into the rivers.

"So every time it rains really hard in the district and you flush your toilet, you're flushing your toilet directly into the Anacostia," Yunger says.

It is cold and raining heavily when Yunger takes me out on the Anacostia in a small boat. As we approach the ballpark where the Washington Nationals play, Yunger remembers a conversation she once had there.

"It was after a particularly large rainstorm. And I remember something really smelled, and I turned to my husband and said, 'What stinks?' And he said, 'Your river stinks.' And he was right."

It can take as little as a quarter of an inch of rain for the local utility to release raw sewage and stormwater into the Anacostia, according to the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority. The district's sewer system sends about 2 billion gallons of the untreated stuff into bay tributaries each year. All together, about a fifth of the nitrogen and phosphorus in the bay come from wastewater treatment plants throughout the bay's huge watershed, which includes parts of six states and Washington, D.C.

'When It Rains, I Panic'
The Anacostia is an urban river, surrounded by asphalt, cobblestone, cement and other hard surfaces. In undeveloped areas, the earth soaks up the rain and filters the pollution. But in urban areas, there's nothing to absorb the rain or pollution.

As we motor past the Washington Navy Yard, Yunger points out a big drainage pipe funneling runoff into the river.

As we ride under bridges packed with cars, trucks and buses, Yunger explains that a lot of the water pollution comes from vehicles. They leak gasoline and oil onto roads, and the rain washes it into waterways. They also pump exhaust into the air, and when it rains, the rainwater brings the pollution into the water.

About a quarter of the nitrogen pollution in the bay comes from the air — much of it from exhaust from factories, power plants and vehicles.

Yunger says most people think rain has a cleansing effect on the environment, but she knows differently.

"I used to love a rainy day. Now when it rains, I panic. Because I know that here in the Anacostia, if it rains very hard, that water is going to end up untreated into the river. The Anacostia is going to flow into the Potomac, and the Potomac is going to flow into the Chesapeake Bay, and we're going to be adding more pollution into the Chesapeake Bay," Yunger says.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121588652



Original Chesapeake Bay Foundation bumper sticker ( c. 1966 ):
SAVE THE BAY

More appropriate Chesapeake Bay Foundation bumper sticker ( 2010 ):
PAVE THE BAY

Suggested future Chesapeake Bay Foundation bumper sticker:
Where are you from? Go back

 

[trysail]

"There was, of course, one somewhat unusual note in Moses' introduction of Ickes. 'There have been times,' Moses said, 'when in contemplating our Washington partner, I have been tempted to go back for inspiration to the letter which Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote to Lord Chesterfield about the famous dictionary which the great scholar announced that he had finished with comparatively little assistance. I have always considered this letter to be one of the finest pieces of polite vituperation in the annals of English literature.' But no reporter thought to analyze the letter and see its application to Roosevelt and Ickes. Ickes even wrote in his diary that he was quite pleased by the introduction.

If the Old Curmudgeon had attended Yale and had taken Chauncey Brewster Tinker's course on "Johnson and His Circle,' his pleasure might have been somewhat diluted.

Professor Tinker had delighted in telling his students— including Robert Moses, president of Yale's version of Samuel Johnson's Kit Cat Club— the story behind the great scholar's letter. Setting out on the task of compiling his great dictionary, the scholar had appealed for the financial assistance he desperately needed to Lord Chesterfield, who had encouraged him to expect it, but had then rudely rebuffed him. When, however, after seven years of privation and hardship, the work was completed and acclaimed, Chestefield had attempted to represent himself as Dr. Johnson's 'patron' and thus take some of the credit for it. It was then that Dr. Johnson wrote to him: 'Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached the ground, encumbers him with help?' He added: 'I hope it is no very cynical asperity to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself."​

-Robert A. Caro
The Power Broker: Robert Moses And The Fall of New York
New York, New York 1974.


Before Bob Caro's best-selling and widely acclaimed biographical trilogy of Lyndon Johnson, his biography of a now-largely forgotten giant in New York City's history was also a best-seller and was the "breakthrough" book that established Caro's reputation and career. Occasionally mentioned in the same breath as Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., Strachey's Queen Victoria and Ellman's James Joyce, the book is a fascinating account of both a man's life and fifty years of New York City history.

Moses became everything he originally set out to fight; eventually his behavior was indistinguishable from that of his enemies: "the end justifies the means." He became a consummate Machiavellian and martinet.

__________________________________

"They stripped the bodies and scalped some of them, though most of the soldiers had hair too short for the effort. Then, as the men of the village threw themselves on their ponies and rode south toward the bluecoats standing on the high point near the river, the women, boys, and old men who had waited on their ponies out of range arrived to help kill the wounded and begin the important task of mutilation. Many warriors had died, but far more wasichus lay dead along this ridge. There were skulls to crush, eyes to tear out, muscles and tendons to sever, limbs to hack off, and heads to separate from bodies. These soldiers would not move through the next world in comfort."​

-James Donovan
A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn, the Last Great Battle of the American West
New York, New York 2008.


I am not alone in my long fascination with the Battle of The Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell's 1984 Son Of The Morning Star was my first encounter with a detailed account of the event and its protagonists. That was followed by Dee Brown's 1970 Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Robert M. Utley's 1993 The Lance And The Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull and Steven E. Ambrose's 1975 Crazy Horse And Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors. There is a rumor that Nathaniel Philbrick has a book in the works on the subject— Philbrick has yet to disappoint.

A Terrible Glory is eminently readable, nicely illustrated ( I don't recall having seen photographs of the Crow scouts White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin, Curly and Goes Ahead or of the noted mountain man/scout Mitch Boyer or the Arikara interpreter Frederic Gerard heretofore ) and Donovan related several events leading up to the dénouement that were new to me.

__________________________________

"A young representative of the Manny company, Ralph Emerson, had come on from Rockford, Illinois, and struck up an acquaintance with Lincoln. They took long walks of evenings. Emerson told Lincoln that the study of law interested him; he had read a little and believed he might choose it for a life work. He wanted to ask a question. 'Mr. Lincoln, is it possible for a man to practice law and always do by others as he would be done by?'

Lincoln's chin dropped lower into his bosom as they walked the grade of a long Cincinnati hill in the quiet of evening haze and the peace of hours after sundown. When Lincoln spoke at last he had no answer to the young man's question. And the young man decided that the lack of an answer was in itself one; he decided not to be a lawyer, and said afterward, 'That walk changed the course of my life.' "​

-Carl Sandburg
Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years
( Sangamon Edition, volume II )
pp. 42-43
New York, N.Y. 1947.


Lincoln remains an enigmatic character. By no means an abolitionist, he was as much the puppet of the martinets who installed him at the pinnacle of American politics as those who suffered the consequences of his actions. He could easily have steered the country clear of the immense bloodletting of the War. The ultimate outcome would, arguably, have been unaffected. Sandburg's prose and work justifiably remain required reading for anyone interested in the puzzle that was Lincoln.

__________________________________

"It was a good regiment," he said. You might even say it was a beautiful regiment until I destroyed it under other people's orders."

"But why do you have to obey them when you know better?"

"In our army you obey like a dog," the Colonel explained. "You always hope you have a good master."

"What kind of masters do you get?"

"I've only had two good ones so far. After I reached a certain level of command, many nice people, but only two good masters..."

There was nothing to it, gentlemen. All a man need ever do is obey.​

-Ernest Hemingway
Across The River and Into The Trees
Chapter XXXI
New York, N.Y. 1950.


"Whose bread I eat, his song I sing."

__________________________________

"In running Buffett Partnership, Warren declined to inform his investors as to what they had their money in. He was confident that if he did, then— like his sister many years before in their flutter in Cities Service Preferred— they would pass on their concerns, send him suggestions, and take up his time in other ways. Since time was his chief resource, he sought above all to avoid being put in that position."​

-John Train
The Midas Touch: The Strategies That Have Made Warren Buffett "America's Pre-eminent Investor"
New York, New York 1987.


Unlike virtually every other successful investor, Warren Buffett has gone to great lengths to make his investing philosophy and methods accessible to the public. It's all there; all anybody has to do is read, study and follow it.

__________________________________

 

[trysail]

It's quite an image. I vividly recall sailing through these islands. Guadeloupe and Marie Galante lie to the south with Antigua and Barbuda above, Montserrat lies invisible below the huge ash cloud ( from the 11 February partial dome collapse of the Soufrière volcano ). Nevis, St. Kitts ( St. Christopher ) and "Statia" ( St. Eustatius ) are off to the northwest. Oh, what glorious broad reaches they were in the stiff tradewinds! We'd clock off mile after mile in the rhythmic ocean swells with nary a worry or any need to touch a sheet. Our only company— flying fish and the occasional pod of dolphins.

The only anxieties were those that accompany every landfall. Have I allowed enough leeway for set and drift? Running aground on the windward side of a reef in a foreign land will ruin your day. Where is that damn red buoy?

 

[trysail]

Thomas Jefferson’s copy, with 42 errata corrected in his hand

53. NEILSON, WILLIAM. Neilson's Greek exercises. Abridged and revised in syntax, ellipsis, dialects, prosody, and metaphrasis: to which is prefixed a concise, but comprehensive syntax for the use of colleges, academies and schools. By the principals of Baltimore College. Baltimore: printed for proprietors by Swain & Matchett, 1809. $75,000

First American edition (the book was first printed in Edinburgh, 1806); 8vo, pp. viii, 171, [1]; text in Greek and English; contemporary full mottled calf, recased and with a mid-20th century rebacking in morocco, old red morocco label preserved on spine; edges worn; good and sound.

Thomas Jefferson's copy, with his block initial marks at signature I ("T"), and at signature T ("I"), and with approximately 42 corrections and amendations in his hand in the text, on 32 pages. Most of the corrections amend the spelling of Greek words by crossing out or underlining the improper letter, and inserting, usually with a caret in the margin, the correct letter. Many of the corrections are to the Greek, but several also correct errors in the English, such as where her has corrected "Ulyssus" to read "Ulysses" by crossing out the "u" and inserting the "e," or inverting "Is it" to "It is" in a declarative sentence.

All the corrections are listed in the errata at the back.

Jefferson's use of block initials at signatures I and T began in 1815 after the sale of his so-called Great Library to the Library of Congress; prior to 1815 his books were marked with cursive initials. Some signature marks of this period were not made by Jefferson but rather by family members. That this particular volume has so many corrections in Jefferson's hand makes it seem plausable that the signature marks here are his.

Poor, Nathaniel P., Catalogue. President Jefferson's Library, 1829, no. 851; see also Bear, James A., Jr., Thomas Jefferson's Book-Marks, Charlottesville, 1958; "Jefferson, the Book Collector," in The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, Vol. 29, No. 1, January, 1972, p. 32-48.

 

[trysail]

Investment Returns: Chart of Day
By David Wilson

July 1 (Bloomberg)

The CHART OF THE DAY shows the annual rates of return from investing 60 percent of assets in stocks and 40 percent in bonds over five-year periods. The percentages are a typical benchmark for asset allocation. MSCI Inc.’s All Country World Index and the Barclays Capital Global Aggregate Bond Index, two of the broadest market gauges, were used in the calculations.

Last year’s figure was 4 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Five-year returns fell short of this threshold four times earlier in the decade. They hit bottom at 1.1 percent for the period ended in 2002, the same year that the 1990s Internet bubble finished bursting.


Investors ought to expect “low single digit” percentage returns on stocks annually ... As for bonds, yields of less than 3 percent on global indexes are a harbinger of their future performance ... The Barclays Capital index had a 2.54 percent yield as of yesterday.

Five-year returns averaged 11.7 percent during the second half of the 1990s, as the chart depicts. Since then, they have exceeded 10 percent only once: in 2007, the end of a five-year bull market for stocks.



http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a6RNNuM1wYrM

 

[trysail]

It was hotter than it's been in prior years and the humidity made it uncomfortable. The lack of wind was evidenced by the absence of the kite-boarders who have always provided entertainment. It wasn't 'til week's end that we were finally able to get our kites airborne. On the ocean, bottlenose dolphin made appearances most days, patrolling the beach and feeding in twos and threes of northbound or southbound groups. Their proximity to the beach always astounds me; they are no more than twenty yards away from the breaking surf in water that can't be much deeper than five or six feet. They glide along the shore well within reach of strong swimmers or surfers.

The house is— as ever— comfortable and accomodating. Overlooking the beach and the ocean, it's a throwback to a simpler age and stands in stark contrast to the modern houses lying all around.


Bicycling and running were suppressed by the intensity of the heat and humidity. Perhaps I'll never run the entire seven miles again; I hope that's not the case but it's an undeniable fact that fifty years of running, tennis and skiing have exacted a toll on my knees ( that's bone on bone you're feeling and that doesn't reverse ). The park is— as always— a wonderful escape from the oppressive heat generated by the asphalt and concrete of the roadways and rooftops. Bald cypress ( taxodium distichum ), the signature loblolly pine, osprey, eagles, herons and Spanish moss are everywhere. There are places where the Spanish moss grows so thick that it's easy to imagine that one is enclosed in a small room with walls made of the stuff.


Fields of maize and soy fringed by stands of loblolly stretch across a landscape that's as flat as a billiard table. Roads and yards are full of the warm colors of blooming crape myrtle. It makes the driving and the landscape much more pleasant.

1 Maine
2 New Hampshire
3 Vermont
4 Massachusetts
5 Rhode Island
6 Connecticut
7 New York
8 New Jersey
9 Pennsylvania
10 Maryland
11 Virginia
12 North Carolina
13 Georgia
14 Florida
15 West Virginia
16 Ohio
17 Tennessee
18 Michigan
19 Illinois
20 Minnesota
21 Missouri
22 Louisiana
23 Oklahoma
24 Nebraska
25 Texas
26 Colorado
27 Utah
28 Washington
29 Delaware