It happened again

I came in from watching debacle TV, leaving the DJIA down some 150. By 10 or 15 minutes later, it was down 300. I took a nap and when I got up, the market was down around 680. Maybe I should skip the naps. I've been watching debacle TV as I was watching the Weather Channel a few weeks back. Hurricanes seem more easily predicted than any course in store for us here. It's not reassuring to see most of the people on the business channels. They seem to be mostly guys with grating East Coast accents and slicked-back hair, more like second-rate real estate salesmen than masters of the universe.
On the brighter side of life, sportsman-author Kenneth Reese hollered me over this morning as I was perambulating the pup and asked did I want some flounder, as he'd had a great night, finding the bay bottom practically paved with flounder. He later brought by an ice chest full of nice fish and gave us three. Dinner tonight was a broiled flounder and a bottle of white. It does soothe the pain to dine well. Wonder what tomorrow will bring, both for debacles and for dinner.

Crime in **Adrift

Though I skipped it, my wife caught the monthly city council meeting last night. She reports on police activity this month: "At the city council meeting tonight the acting police chief reported that during mandatory evacuation for Hurricane Ike Seadrift had one crime. Someone broke into a shed and stole 2 cases of beer for a hurricane party. Culprit was apprehended; he paid for the beer, and the shed's owner declined to press charges." A perfectly understandable and necessary bit of scrounging and properly excused by the victim.
In another cops and courts tidbit, our local police chief was found not guilty on a goofy charge of official oppression. We went in to town and caught the testimony Tuesday morning. The purported victim was a mumbling, brain-fried doper already convicted for stealing copper; on the stand he was completely unconvincing. Other prosecution testimony was not much more plausible, the DA seemed befuddled by it all, fumbling for questions when he had a witness on the stand, and the jury was reportedly out for only half an hour, which means they probably went out, agreed on 'not guilty' in one quick vote, and had a cup of coffee so as not to appear too hasty. As a homeowner and taxpayer, I hope the trial didn't cost the county much.
Tali Villafranca was defense attorney and ran the DA nuts with objections during questionings. It's a good tactic to keep an opposing lawyer from getting a rhythm going. Tali used to do it well with Dexter Eaves. I love trials.

DJIA down 500+ again

I laid me down for a siesta this afternoon with the Dow at –threesomething and awoke with it –fivesomething. Can't turn your back for a minute. I don't even have much stashed and have lost 40% of it this year. A joke I read somewhere: Forget putting all the money into gold. The situation is serious ... I'm putting all the money into rice.. OK, I really haven't lost a penny until I cash something in, but still ...

Eternal verities

Roger Cohen, writing on the Opinion page of the NYT, cites a Kipling poem, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" as apropos to our world today and particularly the political and economic situation. I love it when Kipling gets some proper respect, because he knew a thing or two. Part of the poem reads

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

Read the entire poem here
Cohen writes

How could it happen? That outraged question springs now to everyone’s lips. But from Dutch tulips to Californian dotcoms, great heists have happened and will again. No flight from reality is as sweet as the illusion that money grows on trees.

Read all the Cohen piece here. Kipling was no fool, and requirements of decency and honesty will assert themselves even in a scoundrel time.

What's the difference ...

between Sarah Palin and W?
Lipstick.
I watched the VP debate last night, but only with one eye and precious little enthusiasm. I think Joe Biden is an old hack who demonstrated himself dishonest back in the 80s, while I find Sarah Palin frightening. Anyone who thinks the deity favors her pipeline is scary. All she had to do to win in the debate was not to make as big a fool of herself as she has been lately. She didn't, so she did, at least to her devotees. I look at her and see a face that should be beaming out from a display class ad for real estate. She looks like a successful real estate broker and seems to think with the same Babbity single-mindedness, as if she had internalized all the trite maxims of the local boosters ... lots of vague cheerleading and piety and an overarching idea that cutting taxes is the only efficacious exercise of government power [and this from the governor of a state that battens on federal money].
From the blog of Tim Egan on the NYT:

George Bush entered the White House as a proponent of a more humble foreign policy and a believer that government should get out of the way at home. He leaves as someone with a trillion-dollar war aimed at making people who’ve hated each other for a thousand years become Rotary Club freedom-lovers, and his own country close to bankruptcy after government did get out of the way.

Read all the Egan stuff here. I'm sorry there does not remain time for an effective third-party movement to arise in the next four weeks.

Pow! right in the liver

Wife went to town yesterday and at the customary burn rate of ca. $40/hour spent a couple hundred bucks. Nothing spendthrifty, just essentials. As expenditures like that are likely to trigger little fits of frugality, she brought home liver for dinner. It's something happens pretty often. We both like liver ... I cook it Italian with lemon juice, sometimes capers, sometimes basil, or cook it with bacon and onions. It's always soothing to look at the price sticker on top of the little container. It's been .99 for a pound for years. One buck for animal protein for two with a scrap usually left over for the pup. Yesterday, the sticker read $1.49. I dunno if there's a slot in the inflation stats for the price of liver, and I hope this isn't the first splash in a tsunami of rising prices. [About the Italian-style liver: slice it very thin, like a quarter-inch thick, dredge it in a little seasoned flour, cook it quickly in a mixture of butter and vegetable oil, then squeeze a lemon into the oil left in the pan and pour it over the liver. The lemon cuts that livery whang that even liver lovers sometimes find objectionable.]

The Panic of Aught-Eight

A historian named Scott Reynolds Nelson writes a fascinating piece on the current economic upheavals in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

If there are lessons from 1873, they are different from those of 1929. Most important, when banks fall on Wall Street, they stop all the traffic on Main Street — for a very long time. The protracted reconstruction of banks in the United States and Europe created widespread unemployment. Unions (previously illegal in much of the world) flourished but were then destroyed by corporate institutions that learned to operate on the edge of the law. In Europe, politicians found their scapegoats in Jews, on the fringes of the economy. (Americans, on the other hand, mostly blamed themselves; many began to embrace what would later be called fundamentalist religion.)

Nelson maintains that the circumstances parallel another, earlier crash than the Great Depression of the 1930s that was so vivid in the memories of my parents' generation. Read the whole piece here.