Carey Rowland's Blog

Labor

2010-09-06T22:25:25Z

Stretch forth your cables of steel, oh laboring ones!
Roll out your wheels of copper and of glass.
Fling wide your golden gate;
Lift high your lamplight door.
We hear America singing,
her anvils of iron ringing,
chips of silicon bringing
hope,

The sky is not falling on disease-breaking stem cell research

2010-09-03T02:48:05Z

The slice-and-dice strategy that dehumanized mortgage-backed securities trading is now threatening to similarly commandeer regenerative medical ethics. Jeff Jacoby's statement
is typical of the trend that desensitizes our appreciation of human life and human potential.
He writes: "there is no moral obstacle to using leftover fertility-clinic embryos that would otherwise be discarded for medical research. Nor do I regard a microscopic cluster of cells as a human person entitled to full legal protection."

Now on the other side of the ethical divide comes Judge Judge Royce Lamberth, who, on behalf of a few plaintiffs and several other million conscientious people in this nation, decides to throw up the judicial warning flags on untethered embryonic stem cell research,
so that we are not sliding on some slippery slope of moral morass toward nanosurgical human trafficking by which unchosen potential persons are being frozen wholesale into an inventory of non-voluntary fetal sacrifice instead of being born into the robust life on this groovy planet.
So here come chicken-littleish federally-funded researchers whining the cassandra blues because the whole unbridled research universe is said to revolve around the totipotent Federal Government with its infinite supply of fiat quantitative easing and perpetual petri-dish cultured NIH funding.
Only a couple days ago, even though I love to listen to the timely and informative discussions on my favorite news-talk source, the Diane Rehm show (August 31st),
I was alarmed to hear Dr. Daley and Mr. Tipton protesting loudly that the sky is falling on stem cell research because without the feds all our research and stem cell lines are stopped in their nanoscopic tracks.
Not so.
There's nothing wrong with utilizing a few ethics-bounded parameters to level the funding field so that private investors can maintain an activating enterprise-based support for disease-breaking medical progress.
Consider, for instance, the progressive research being done at Geron Corporation.
Their recent news release reports a few favorable developments in stem cell research:

~"The FDA notification enables Geron to move forward with the world's first clinical trial of a human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-based therapy in man. The Phase I multi-center trial is designed to establish the safety of GRNOPC1 in patients with "complete" American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) Impairment Scale grade A subacute thoracic spinal cord injuries."

~"Thomas B. Okarma, Ph.D., M.D., Geron's president and CEO. 'Our goals for the application of GRNOPC1 in subacute spinal cord injury are unchanged - to achieve restoration of spinal cord function by the injection of hESC-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cells directly into the lesion site of the patient's injured spinal cord.' "

~"GRNOPC1, Geron's lead hESC-based therapeutic candidate, contains hESC-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cells that have demonstrated remyelinating and nerve growth stimulating properties leading to restoration of function in animal models of acute spinal cord injury (Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 25, 2005)."

That's good news for people who've suffered spinal cord injuries.

The experimental and clinical work being conducted by this one company alone is evidence that privately funded research can contribute greatly to medical improvement. We need not put all our embryos in one federally-funded basket.
Let willing investors, instead of overburdened taxpayers, take the risk on some of this experimentation. Require the feds to play by tighter ethical rules so that our developing standard regenerative procedures are founded (and funded!) on solid human rights practice. Furthermore, we can spread the money more equitably to better facilitate adult stem cell, and induced pluripotent adult stem cell, research.

Tales from the deep swamp

2010-08-31T03:00:39Z

Down in Luzianna, way past Opelousas and Atchafalaya... I heer tell dar be strange tales emanatin' from da swamps at night. Folks be sayin' that ole Uncle Remus musta resurrected hisself, cuz he be dun toolin' hisself 'round on Bayou Lafourche.
I woodn lie to ya now, and 'sides it aint just me sayin...
Ole Couvillion and his buddy Broussard say they was out haulin in the crawfish nets 'bout dark-thirty. And land sakes alive if Uncle Remus don't come slowly polin' the pirogue and stops right beside of 'em, an' ax dem if he could have some crawfish, wif him be'in so hungry an all havn come all way from Gawgia.
"Sho'nuff," say Couvillion.
So dey carrys Uncle Remus backs to de fish camp and boils up a bunch dem crawfish wif a mess a poke sallet and chased it all wif a sixpack Jax.
After dey be done eatin Uncle Remus ax if da crawfish be a'right or was it tainted wif the oil spill.
Broussard he start to get little uppity but thought better of it. "Now what you think, Uncle Remus? Wha'd it tas' like to you?"
"Well I reckons it be a'right. It sho'nuff tas' good to me, been long time since ah had a mess uh dem crawfish."
"Well, a'right den!" proclaims Broussard, and he be lol.
"I do thanx you for the crawfish, sho'nuff, br'er, " an he lean back and got real still.
By n' by, da frogs got loud and da night gots quiet and still, 'sept fo da sacalait slappin' de cattails and de crickets rippin in de cypress knees. The lucky ole moon be shinin' an de swamp rabbit be yawnin' an' by n' by Uncle Remus he say:
"I gots to tell ya 'bout da tar baby."
Br'er Couvillion open one eye and he say, "De what?"
"De tar baby," say Uncle Remus."
"You means de tar baby what br'er fox got hisself stuck to a'fore he try to t'row br'er rabbit in da brier patch?"
"No," say Uncle Remus, real slow. "D'is be a dif'rent kind tar baby."
"What kinda tar baby dat be, Uncle Remus?"
Uncle Remus, he look down at the firelight and he thought for a minute, wrinkled his forehead. Den he say,
"In de wake of dat Deepwater horizon sitiation, ole Br'er Pet and his den of foxy lawyers--dey be stuck fast to da mucka muck claims and deepdown damages an' can o' compensational worms' mire in da boggy courts, an' it be like a big judicial tar baby fo' years an years fo' Br'er Pet, an' dey will sho'nuff be stuck to dem spill lit'gations and lit'gators--as stuck as stuck can be."
"Cluster-stuck!" say Couvillion.
"Da's right," say Uncle Remus, an he look so sad. "An' wha's mo--dat aint all."
"What else?" ax Broussard.
"All dem claimants and plaintiffs--dey be juz as stuck, cuz you cant get no bloody oil out'a no turnup"
"Naw!"
"Sho'nuff," say Uncle Remus, real sad.
"What what in world we gon' do, Uncle Remus? We's 'bout busted up now already as it is!."
"Well, dey's one thing you gots to remember, br'er Broussard."
"Whas'sat, Uncle Remus?
Ole Uncle Remus he raise his head up slow and he look Couvillion and Broussard in der eyes, and he say, "When you be ass-deep in lit'gators, juz remember your objective was to drain de swamp."
Couvillion he gots mad. "So what, Uncle Remus! How you 'xpect dey ever gon' clean up dat mess wid all dem lit'gators ass-deep?"
"Call in Br'er Bird."
"Say what? Br'er who?"
"Br'er Bird. He be one fine bird for cleanin' up dis mess, ya'll. He be bo'n and bred for juz dis kind of mediation. He sho'nuff will get Br'er Pet and de plaintiffs both unstuck from dat litigious tarbaby. Why, juz yesterday I hear him say to Br'er Neil on de radio:

"Until Novermber 23rd, if you're eligible...and very importantly, you must be able to provide minimal documentation of your damage, I will cut you a check without any waiver of any rights...Of course I will (give you compensation). Prove it. Give me some indication...doesn't have to be a tax return. It can be W2s; it can be a profit and loss statement; it can be a checkbook; it can be the statement of your ship's captain, the statement, even, of your priest, but prove you've lost what you say you've lost. I can't just give away the money.I have to be ever vigilant about fraud, but I'll bend over backwards to help get you some emergency compensation."

(And to a caller): "Show me your contracts that you lost.That's the simplest way. Show me the canceled contracts. Also, show me where you were employed, where your business was. Was it on the Gulf? How close to the Gulf? How directly impacted by the beaches and the fish and the shrimp, and the oysters, and I'll try to do everything I can to get you paid."

"Sho'nuff?" say Couvillion.
"Da's right," say Uncle Remus. "Dat tarbaby be one helluva a sticky mess, but you gots to start somewhere to drain dat swamp, and it look to me like Br'er fine Bird gots a good startin' out place."
"You so right, Uncle Remus," say Broussard.
Den dey all t'ree lay back and snooze 'til mo'nin while dem crawfishes crawl in de traps

Mountaintop

2010-08-28T07:17:24Z

Mountaintop, a song

Well I walked out,
I walked out to Pisgah mountain.
Well ole Martin Luther King
he'd been up to the mountaintop
and I wanted to see what he had seen.
And ole Moses, oh
he'd been up to the mountaintop,
and I wanted to see what he had seen.
When I reached the top of Pisgah mountain,
what did I see?
I saw a promised land
just waiting for me
and waiting for all of ye.

Well I walked down from the mountain
and into the town.
Well ole Martin Luther King
he'd been to see the big man,
and I wanted to see what he had seen.
and ole Moses
he'd been to see the pharoah,
and I wanted to see what he had seen;

The promised land is what you make it to be.
Struggle,
struggle to unwind
your unconstant state of mind.
Just take a walk up the mountain, my friend,
and you will see:
what goes on down in that dirty old town
is bound to be.
So you can make up your mind, my friend,
and make it up good.
Are you looking for the promised land?
Or are you dying?
Are you dying
in a wasteland?
'cause I may be asking you now;
I may be asking you,
but some day, Lord yeah,
He's gonna ask you too
and what you going to say?
What you gon'na say when my Lord comes on that day?

Carey Rowland copyright 1978

A "Ruling Class"?

2010-08-25T11:00:15Z

On the left, and on the right, politicos are grousing about being manipulated by a "ruling class."
So what else is new. It's always been that way.

got them sharia-sheddin' blues again

2010-08-22T17:51:21Z

On May 12, 1937, the archbishop of Canterbury placed a crown on the head of a young prince. In that act, the Church of England, a religious authority much stronger and older than any one man, proclaimed George VI the anointed King of Great Britain and its dominions. After the disruptive abdication of former King Edward, the restoration of British royal authority into the hands of a willing sovereign was a welcome relief for the English people. And all was once again well in the realms of the British empire, or so it seemed.

Couple years later, and all hell was breaking loose; the world was falling apart. Britain was fighting for its life to prevent Hitler and his crew of thugs from taking over. The Teutonic madman had usurped governmental authority from the whimpering sovereign of Hohenzollern of Germany,and was running roughshod over civilization, bent on conquering Europe and probably the world if he'd had half a chance.

King George VI of England ultimately had to lean on the common sense and fortitude of his vigorous people, their army, the RAF, and Winston Churchill's fierce resolve to prevail against the heathen horde that had sought to subdue them.
After that war to end all wars had subsided, after the Brits had repelled the Nazi war machine away from their obstinate island and had driven their blitzkrieging Nazi asses back into the forlorn fatherland. After that-- the English, having received no small measure of assistance from us, the Russians, all our other Allies, even the humbled French-- the formerly-fortuitous God-ordained English monarchy commenced to lapsing into a ceremonially opulent impotence.

But the Brits still cherish their Queen.
Even mean Mr. Mustard still loves to go out to Buckingham palace and catch a glimpse of her royalty on the occasional Sunday afternoon. They're clinging to a vestige of their former magnificence is what it is.

Most folks these days don't put much stock in that whole theocratic authority trip--divine right of kings and all that. We tossed out those antiquarian channels of governmental legitimacy a century or two back, when We the People, in the interests of liberté egalité fraternité, supplanted our churchified heritage with the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, scientific hypothesis, Darwin's Galopagosic observations, and Einstein's curved universe of relativity.

Hence has our hubric secularity at long last overgrown our outmoded religious foundations. This includes our moral moorings too. Having no basis, except the opinions of mankind, on which to determine what is right or wrong, we have forged a brazen new world in which anything goes--if it feels good do it: off-the-books accounting, infant selection, lady gaga libido, high-frequency-trading on steroids, heavy metal on meth and sado-machismo with online hyper-voyerism to whet the libidinous appetite.

While lapping up all this pleasure, wealth and leisure, we've managed to educate so many people now who've gotten the complicated world all figured out; we can view the overthrow of quaint queenly monarchies and past mythologies as progress, societal evolution, and good riddance.

In the midst of such widening post-modernity, the sun is definitely setting on the British empire, if it hasn't already. And little brother yankee Sam, so bright with energetic potential in the post-GreatWar suburban expansion, is lapsing into self-absorbed lethargy and self-medicated entitlement depression blues. Consequently, Chinese bureaucrats will soon be calling the shots on how we spend our federal reserve notes, and the sharp sword of sharia law will eventually slit through our aspinal moral mediocrity, as is now happening among the disoriented, burka-detesting citoyens of liberated France.

Will our long-sought secularity be any moral match for the long arm of Islamic Law? Will our watered-down, politically correct, hypersensitive "nigger"-eschewing egalitarianism even hold a candle of character to these burka-sizing self-righteous Mohammedans who are determined to compel us infidels to pray five times a day and cover our women so they won't look like Marilyn Manson on a bad day or Marilyn Monroe on a good one?

Western culture is on the skids. Where's some royal dignity when you need it?

That British empire-- fading as it is into the dust of history, that obsolete futile monarchy, that despised colonialism which had selfishly sought to sweatshopize the world while claiming to civilize it-- that same limey cartographying, meddlesome mandate-making meshugganism-- That same British kingdom had, in 1917, cleft ancient Palestine in twain. That same Balfour-declaring John Bull ridin' colonializin' fee fi fo fum empire had allowed a lapsed, stowaway dormant Davidic theocracy-- now a left-leaning democracy-- to insert itself right smack into the middle of the infidel-whippin' Mohammedan world. And what a mess it has been since then.

Thanks a lot, England.

Nevertheless, here we are in 2010. Mr. Ahmadinejad is strutting his authoritarian shiite around the world and who knows if the Persians have got evil intentions to nuke Israel or if Israel's just paranoid?

Who knew?

God help us.

Your link in the Money Chain?

2010-08-18T23:48:47Z

You probably learned about the Food Chain in sixth grade. It goes like this:
Tree draws nutrients from soil.
Beetle eats woody parts of Tree.
Bird eats Beetle.
Cat eats bird.
Wolf eats cat.
Wolf dies, decays to soil.
Tree draws nutrients from soil.
Its the food chain, a linked succession of life-sustaining events that stretches back to the dawn of time.
What about the money chain? Have you heard of that?
It goes like this:
Wheat draws nutriets from soil.
Farmer harvests wheat.
Farmer sells wheat to Mill.
Mill converts wheat into flour (value added), sells flour to bakery.
Bakery makes doughnut (value added to product), sells it to girl.
Girl takes doughnut (service added) to man stranded in his car in traffic; girl reaps generous tip.

This really happened. The girl's name is Stacy; the time was 1973; the man was in a long gas-station line because of the OPEC-generated fuel shortage; the Donut was a Dunkin', and I heard about this on All Things Considered.

The sequence of events illustrates the money chain.
Money is circulating every day among people everywhere. Its what people do. Some folks have a little extra, maybe enough to make an impulse purchase--like a doughnut--purchased merely because some energetic 7-year-old, gently guided by her father, provides the go-get-'em service while hungry people are stuck in a gas line.

Like I said, this really happened. During the gas shortage of 1973, a guy (thousands of people, actually) was waiting in his car in a long line of cars, to buy gas. Seven-year-old Stacy positioned herself in a parking lot where she could strategically approach the stranded motorists. It was an improvised opportunity borne of a a child's courage, her father's wise resourcefulness, a potential buyer's appetite relative immobility. young Stacy converted the circumstance into a profitable activity.

Stacy was thinking out of the box. Although the drivers' vehicles were motionless or crawling, the girl's neurons were firing on all cylinders, devising a way to make lemonade, as it were, out of a lemony situation.
Ventures like hers have made the USA the prosperous country that it is today.

Oh yes, we are still prosperous, relative to most the of people who live on this developing planet. We are still prosperous, even if many of us are stuck in the right place at the wrong time, or in the wrong place at the right time, or just stuck in the employment line, maybe a line like the one you'll see cast in bronze at the Roosvelt Memorial across the lake from the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.

What about you? Have you explored the money stream to see if there's a little liquidity stream pooling up in your environs where you might gather a few buckets of cash? Or some other resource. Have you checked it out? Have you opened your eyes, as Stacy did, to the possibilities for increase right around the corner from you, or a few exits down the beltway, a few stops away on the subway.
Or are you just waiting for something to land in your lap? Expecting a phone call from Employment Security? Listening for a knock on the door from the union boys?
Don't hold your breath; look around. You may find a silver lining in those clouds.

Its the American way, and the only way we'll ever get out of this mess, because I hate to tell ya, Virginia, but there ain't jobs out there for everybody. Some of us are going to have to spring out for the promised land. Better get busy and find something to do. You might be the next Bill Gates, or Oprah.

Thank you, K'Naan.

2010-08-17T21:56:26Z

Anatomy of a great song, from BBC interview,

and the "for Haiti" version:

'Isma'il, chill out! Yitzak, go sit in the corner.

2010-08-15T20:24:24Z

About 3000 years ago, a Hebrew named Joshua lead his people across the Jordan River, to its west bank, and defeated the native peoples there. It was a tenuous victory that lead to a shaky occupation which is still being uneasily enforced to this day.

1700 or so years later, another leader, Mohammed, was born in nearby Arabia; he initiated Islam, and propelled his followers to a wide swath of military victories in that same region of the world, what we now call the Middle East.

Roughly in the middle of history between these two military victors a man named Jesus was born in the west bank town of Nazareth. He walked around the countryside teaching parabolic truth, preaching life after death with repentance from sins, and telling the locals that they should love and pray for their enemies. He also founded a religion.

Each of these three peoples of the Book has, over time, generated some pretty decent devotees. But each group has also produced a fringe of zealous followers who thought they were doing God a favor by killing members of the other tribe(s).

In spite of it all, over a few millenia of time, the human race strove mightily to evolve and improve itself. Two or three hundred years ago, a select group of enlightened Europeans threw off the bloody religion thing altogether and decided to strive for some rationality and order in society instead of the incessant blahblahblah of religion and the constant yadayadayada of dogmatic bickering.

Intelligent people of these modern centuries steadily supplanted the ole time religions with enlightened social and political maneuvering, accompanied by military prowess that turned out to be quite impressive, not to mention pretty damned explosive in its impact upon all mankind.

Consequently, people in our postmodern world have finally come to the realization that religion is obsolete, and even unnecessary.
In recent centuries, folks have had the existential power of dynamic ideologies to infuse meaning and purpose into their lives. Some of these posto-religio movements became, in their heyday, seriously potent in their persuasive encounters with proponents of the opposite purpose. The big clash, of course, has been the whacking of Capitalism's exploitative hammer against the sharpened sickle of Communism, which produced some freakin' incendiary sparks on the anvil of tedious time.

But hey, as the tri-pronged dialectic and dwindling resources steadily deter all hot military/industrial wheels from their slow slogging toward destructive fates, even these two C-bound titans of ideology eventually cooled to a smoldering slag of pragmatic society-building, and were cast upon the long and winding road of proletarian planetary progress.
Thus does the dust of yesterday's enlightened ideologies settle along the earth-frackin' faultlines of a brave new, monetizing world. Its a reality check for concerned citizens everywhere, prozac time for zealots.
I mean
Marx is dead. Lenin has bit the dust. Stalin was snuffed out. Hitler fucked himself and his entire nation, along with the whole world. J.D. Rockefeller ran out of dimes; Rhodes toppled from life. Roosevelt went on to that great new deal in the sky.
Nixon and Breshnev fell to a ghastly glasnost in the cold ground. Mao's in a maosoleum, and one morning in American Reagan didn't wake up.

Freemarket and statist economic fixes merge under Mr Obama, as they had begun to do under Messers Deng and Gorbachev twenty years ago.
The dust settles. The canon fodder of cold war dims to a dingy roar of superpower-enabled warlords and puppetary politicoes in distant developing nations.We lift the curtain of rigidly organized contention, open our eyes to a brave new world of perestroika, detente, diplomacy and open doors and we see in the secularizing wake of the progressive post-20th century world...

It's the religion, smartypants! Islam vs. Everybody else?

New fire, old ice

2010-08-14T12:30:05Z

If Robert Frost were alive today,
he might revise his Fire and Ice;
Just what he'd write I cannot say,
though he may roll over once or twice.

Some say our economy will perish in deflation,
while others will say inflation.
From what I've tasted of consumption,
I hold with inflation, as the more likely presumption.
But if I had to stare stagflation down
I think I know enough of unpaid bills
to say deflation does confound
and kills,
and makes us still recession bound.

From jellyhead to crowing glory

2010-08-11T07:23:45Z

Knowledge is limitless as the universe, extensive as Hubble images of distant nebula, intense as the intricacies of DNA. It just goes on forever. A person could acquire knowledge all his life and only scratch the surface of all that is happening.

Human history is full of wise people who acquired copious knowledge: Moses, Socrates, Confucius, Newton, Einstein, and many more. But the world we live in requires limiting knowledge, because too much of the stuff overwhelms us. History is also full of smart people who were frustrated because the general tide of human activity is determined more by baser instincts than by smartness. Most people are more concerned about being fed and comfortable than they are yearning for knowledge.

In ancient times, the wisdom given to Moses compelled him to write a book about the origins of the human race. Many people today consider Genesis a collection of myths or Hebrew/Chaldean folk tales. I don't see it that way. I believe that the work of Moses was divinely inspired. If you can attempt viewing it, as I do, beyond the veil of time and evolving human knowledge, you will see that it is raw truth.

That's not to say that its revealed truth is necessarily congruous with our ongoing revelation of scientific discovery. When Moses did his research many millenia ago, he had no benefit of Hubble telescopes, the scientific method, libraries or Google. Because his treatise is not equipped with these contemporary intellectual supports, we jaded moderners tend to dismiss the Genesis account of creation as something quaint and anthropologically curious, and therefore of lesser value than scientifically established knowledge. I do not see it that way. Moses was, like, the Einstein of his time.

According to Moses, there were two trees in the the Creator's garden about which he had given humans specific instruction. Adam and Eve, first prototypes of civilized humans, were commanded by God to eat from the tree of Life, but not to eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good/Evil.This makes an awful lot of sense when you think about it, because knowledge is as limitless as the universe, whereas life itself--well, it must go on.

You see, Moses wasn't forbidding knowledge; he was putting it in its rightful place. Knowledge is quite stimulating, and at times very useful, but it does not sustain the spirit of God which inhabits the tree of life.

I'll tell you how all this rumination started. A couple of days ago, I heard on my nearby public radio station, WFDD, two very different perspectives that pertain to this conundrum, but they were right next to each other in time. The contrast between Dr. David Linden's mind-opening knowledge of neuroscience, and Ms. Gerry Patton's account of her lifelong struggle to find the right hairstyle, is quite stark. I've been thinking about the difference between their two perspectives for two days now. And yet both of these precious people, miles apart in their perspectives, represent together the great, fascinating spectrum of human experience. There is so much that could be written about this, you know, but instead of attempting to uncover all the nuances of truth from both sources I will simply supply two audio links and two quotes from these two amazing people whom I heard on a sunny Monday morning, talking about a little something they each have learned in this life.

Dr. David Linden, neuroscientist, talking about 600 million years of evolution and how the life process had patched together, from disparate genetic parts, the human brain, said this:

"A miracle happens. You have enough neurons in this cortical circuit, massively interconnected, and somehow, what emerges from that are these amazing human traits - the ability for me to know what you are thinking based on social cues that you give me, other forms of observational learning and high-level cognition."

What I like about this statement from Dr. Linden is his use of the word "somehow," and that's what I've been contemplating for two days.
Meanwhile, in Winston-Salem, NC, an hour-and-a-drive from my home, Ms. Gerry Patton offered, after describing the lengthy quest for her optimum hair expression, this kernel of wisdom:

"After many years of searching and finally accepting that the good Lord knew what he was doing when he placed this hair on my head, I'm working with it and loving it...I'm growing locks...Now I'm happy and nappy...He gave me something extraordinary and beautiful, a head full of kinky hair and now I found a way of letting it be my natural crowning glory."

What I like about this testimony from Ms. Patton is her use of the phrase "the good Lord knew..."

And both of these extraordinary people I heard on public radio within ten minutes of each other. It takes all kinds to make a world, you know. Thank God for diversity

Jobless slap rap

2010-08-07T15:45:57Z

You,
yes you,
who are standing in line
for a Roosevelt dime
waiting for something to happen--
come hear my rappin'.
You,
yes you--Who
absolved your responsibility
to contribute to GDP?
Who gave you permission
to cease your rendition
of providing some good
for your ones in the 'hood?
Who gave you permission?
who assumed your submission--Who
let you off the hook?

Go read a book,
at the very least--
since your employment has ceased.
Who
pushed you off the mandela?
some paper-pushin- fella?
Just because times are hard,
go plant crops in your yard!
Was it the local unemployment cadre?
It warn't your madre
and I know it warn't your padre!
Was it the hard-hearted capitalists,
or statisticizing mapitalists?
--stacking up their productivity,
rationalizing insensitivity
drivin' up their stocks
with their class-war locks
to keep you off the clocks
and away from the docks?
Was it them?
--must 've been him!

Have you now joined those ranks,
(be glad you ain't in the tanks!)
job-seekers forever spurned
--as Wessel termed,
the "permanent cadre of unemployed?"
perpetual evidence of the null and void?

Yes, you can do that
said the rat in the hat.
We'll give ya permission
along with remission.

Hey! what you gon' do?
asks 353732
Denial, delay and willful delusion
have now become your dismal conclusion?
Did you fall in this hole,
just to get on the dole?

Naw, man.

Step up; hold out your cup.
Keep your place in line
for your Roosevelt dime.
Your situation is surely a sign
of our worst and best time.

But you,
you hoo!
Maybe now's the time for you!
Just do what you've needed to do--
its a blessing in disguise,
as you may surmise,
an unplanned prize,
just you realize.

You gotta know when to hold 'em...

2010-08-02T22:30:24Z

Its quite a thrilling game we've got going out there; the stakes are higher than ever.
Gary Dorsch wrote this on Seeking Alpha, about the ace up Mr. Bernanke's sleeve:

"Bernanke acknowledged that the US-economy faces an 'unusually uncertain time,' but if necessary, he hinted the central bank would resort to 'Quantitative Easing,' (QE), or printing vast quantities of US-dollars, in order to prevent a deflationary spiral."

What the Fed Chairman should have said is:
Since deflation is now a real threat to the US economy, we now have justification for printing more money, which is what we were going to do anyway.

Or, as the cowboys of the Old West used to say: Ride 'em till they drop.
Or, as the ole dairy farmer used to say: Milk her for all she's worth.
Or, as the ole truck farmer used to say: There's only one way to get blood out of a turnip--keep a-squeezin'.

Or, as the young entrepreneur used to say: If life gives you lemons, make lemonaade.
Or, as the Fed now says: If life gives you deflation, make inflation.
Or, as the Chinese bond-buying bureaucrats must surely be a-sayin': Those Americans, Bernanke and Geithner, are the smoothest poker-playing buckeroos that ever caught a QE ride this side of the Potomac trail.
The poker-faced twins from the Fed-town sure know how to, as Gary says, keep their "gunpowder dry."
It just may work; its how the West was won, and maybe the East too...

CR: Glass half-Full

What works in China

2010-08-01T20:52:08Z

Reading about China in The Economist this morning got me started on a memory.

About a year ago we traveled to Beijing. There we visited the Forbidden City, which had been, for many centuries, the epicenter of power wielded by 24 Chinese emperors.

I and my family had entered the Tiananmen gate and walked with our guide through the entire length of the compound, about 3/4 of a mile, to the Schwumen gate on the north end. Although commoners had been forbidden to enter the place until 1925, plenty of them were there when we ambled through on that sunny July day of 2009.

Toward the end of our northward trek, our guide explained that we were viewing the residence of the former royal families.

I entered a room where an older man was using a small paintbrush to apply calligraphy to a silk banner. Our guide introduced him as a nephew of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, the last emperor of China. I asked the calligrapher a few questions about Pu Yi, and he told me I could learn more about the former emperor by reading his autobiography, which could be purchased from a vendor nearby.

And so I did. For 75 yuan, I purchased and read the life story of the child-king who had been ejected from the Forbidden City by the National Army of Feng Yu-hsiang on November 5, 1924. Pu Yi was 18 years old when that had happened.

His story, From Emperor to Citizen, is an amazing first-person account of world-changing Chinese revolutionary events and personal metamorphosis.

He describes how, in sixty years, he had outgrown being a silver-spoon royal baby to becoming an angry prisoner, and ultimately an old man. Through the crucible of time he had made peace with his life, his nation, and his new role in world vastly different from the one in which he had started. On the final page of his story Pu Yi wrote:

"...when I was in total despair about myself and felt that I could not bear to live a moment longer--at those times these Communist Party members had held firmly to their belief that I could be remoulded and led patiently to becoming a new man."

And that he did. His life story is a saga of tribulation and transformation by which he became, in the end, a "new man." He wrote the above words in the early 1960s, shortly before his death.

Pu Yi's enforced re-education, subsequent reconciliation with the Maoist rulers, and his testimony of self-actualization, represent quite a different experience from that of many other Chinese.

The lady Nien Cheng, for instance, In her 1986 book, Life and Death in Shanghai, recalls a conversation with a party worker who had previously known Nien's dead daughter. The young woman had said:

"The new Party officials (who had been) promoted during the Cultural Revolution (1966) were never idealists in the first place. They saw the Cultural Revolution simply as an opportunity for personal advancement, and joined the Revolutionaries to realize their ambition."

Like anywhere else on earth, the changes that were going down weren't all about ideology and societal improvement. Life is much more complicated than that.

Ms. Cheng also shares her talk with a Mr. Hu, who had been a friend of her deceased husband. Describing one incident during the "Cultural Revolution" of the 1960s,Mr Hu said:

"I was thrown out of my house by the Red Guards just like all of us. And I have had my share of misfortune. But we mustn't dwell on the past. We must look ahead and be thankful we have survived."

Although Mr. Hu's trouble was an injustice not easily forgiven, his emphasis on the future instead of the past is a valuable lesson for all of us world citizens-- Chinese, American, or whoever.

Nevertheless, we understand that reconciliation with past abuses does not constitute endorsement of those events. We all know that.

We also see, in retrospect, that the whole of China has itself survived those treacherous political abuses, and maybe even purged itself of some of the oppressive measures that defined that chaotic era. Many changes have come and gone.

After Mao's death, and after the judgments upon the vestige of his wife and her gang, Deng Xiaoping managed to emerge as China's primary leader. His leadership de-emphasized the communist ideology that had driven the revolution and its oppressive aftermath. The reforms of the '70s and '80s sought to replace the old communist model with a hybrid plan that could tolerate capitalist practices. It appears that the burden of Chinese leaders turned, pragmatically, from fomenting revolution to getting everyone fed, housed, and employed. Part of the new program was that folk could even put aside some yuan along the way.

From this American's perspective (and I only spent two weeks there) that emphasis on provision and security is still, for the most part, motivating the Chinese government and the CCP.

Make sure all citizens are fed, housed and busy. Sounds like what our nation and its government are attempting to do today in the USA, though we have also cultivated a noble heritage of preserving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all, or at least trying to.

Yet so many of us these days are thinking about ways to keep ourselves fed, housed, and employed. On the other side of the world, and by different means, folks struggle with the same challenges. The thought brings me full circle to the origin of this little rumination, which started this morning with my reading The Economist article about the expanding economic clout of Chinese workers. It is similar to the influence that American workers had on our productivity during our century and a half of dynamic expansion.

China has come a long way since those dark days of civil war. Haven't we all?

Searching for an authentic basis for realistic optimism

2010-07-31T17:17:42Z

Economic growth has always been driven by emerging nations.
As the sun once set on the British Empire, it is now, in its unstoppable path from east to west to far east, now going down on the the good ole days of the good ole USA. The time of our manifest destiny expansion is winding down.

Now we have, instead of the good ole days for which we older Americans yearn, the good new days, which our children and grandchildren will inhabit, while we take on more passive, though hopefully wiser, roles. Our golden age of adaptation is begun. We need to adjust our goals and practices to accommodate the great moving mandala of opportunity.

Can we meet the challenge of our age, or will we atrophy into welfare statism while crying prescription-drug-laden tears into our beer?
The times they are a changin'. We must rise with our acquired storehouse of knowledge (one if by land) and wisdom (two if by sea). Here's the first principle for our next phase of development:
Necessity is the Mother of Innovation.

Our great growth phase is over. Merryn Somerset Webb, in a valiant search for the occluded silver lining, grapples with this inconvenient truth in her article in yesterday's Financial Times.

She passes along a statistical observation which she had gleaned from James Anderson, which points out that the rate of global growth peaked in the mid-70s at 5%. "Since then," notes Ms. Webb, "it has been around a respectable 3 per cent."

It seems to me that this "rate of global growth" slowing coincides with the big-picture decline of our own overall economic growth. It is a natural development that, we now find, has landed us in the present predicament, not unlike the "stagflation" of that late 1970s malaise.

But our present malady is surely more severe, and much deeper in its effects upon our comfortable existence.

And its root cause is this: the torch of economic dynamism is now being passed to a new set of runners. The new movers and shakers of capitalistic endeavor of our era have, in this round, a little more state-controlled coordination than in previous thrusts. Like it or not, this is the way things happen in a planetary development fueled upon fewer resources than we humans had before. The Hegelian dialect is surely demonstrable here in the great scheme of things. Capitalism and Statism are merging, as we speak, to produce something entirely new--something that is intrinsically more restrictive than the old models, and yet somehow, necessary. It is the way progress happens in the 21st century.

Conservatives are not comfortable with this. I am, myself, a conservative, but also a realist. Good ole-fashioned competition, in the future, will require more exquisite channels of organization. And there's no way we Americans, for instance, can perpetuate this prosperity thing without playing by the new rules. Those new regs, dictated not by us fat'n'happy yankee consumers but by the new kids (China) on the capitalist block require more correlation with government.

Read 'em and weep, free-market absolutists.
Nevertheless, there is hope yet for us entrepreneurs and wannabees. There is most assuredly a worldwide thrust of free enterprise, also by necessity, on the micro level. This is happening in China, and it can happen again here. Like the great irony of life itself, in order to think big, we must again learn to think small.

The new young-bucks in the global chemin de fer are now laying another BRICK in the superstructure of planetary wealth and development. Merryn Somerset Webb also mentions in her FT article the somewhat symbiotic interplay of imitation and innovation by which economic processes expand. These principles for efficiency and improvement mortar together the fundamental building materials: capital, education, and technology transfer.

All together they constitute a new economic lattice-work that will surpass our obsolete edifices.

These inevitable changes will hit some of us pretty hard. But as the old gaming challenge goes: Put up or shutup. Or written another way: Quit y' er whinin. Get used to it. Or stated yet another way:

Do or die.

While we have a dire need to renovate the way we comfort-seeking Americans do things, what we really need now in the face of such challenges is optimism.

President Obama, among many hope-seeking others, supplies it. Yesterday he told auto workers: " Don't bet against the American worker. Don't bet against the American people." Jackie Calmes reports in her New York Times article that our President hopes to drive the now-subsidized automakers toward overhauling their operations and make necessary sacrifices.

Sacrifices? Yes.

In other words, change with the times. Necessity is the mother of Innovation. We've got some Federal Reserve Notes to send in your direction, but you've got to make good use of them.

Is that possible? Is it possible that highly-institutionalized, multi-layered redundant American industry can figure this stuff out and make best use of both governmental loans and stockholder investments? Is it possible they (we) can emerge from this camel through the eye of a needle downsizing tribulation better equipped to prosper in future conditions?

Our life depends on it.

You carmakers--both owners and workers--better get busy doing the right things to make us leaner and stronger, not fat and happier.

That kind of surgery doesn't happen without a few cuts.
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Meanwhile, back at the tranche: Has anyone built any trains in this country lately? Do we even know how anymore?