Recently in politics Category

Frontline is airing a special tomorrow (9PM, May 12th) titled » The Madoff Affair. Should be an eye-opener.

A statement Madoff made in court following his arrest caught my attention cuz it reflected my impressions of the Wall Street culture .. (after I watched » Inside the Meltdown) .. that it seems like everything on Wall Street is about turning a profit .. at any cost .. regardless of the suffering & misery their actions might bring to countless Americans. And that enough is never enough.

Bernie MadoffHow can $50 billion not be enough? That's billion with a 'B' .. as in » $50,000,000,000.00 .. enough to turn 50,000 paupers into millionaires .. 25,000 hobos into multi-millionaires. Feed the hungry (steak & lobster for a lifetime).

Madoff's comments confirmed my impressions .. (nearly word-for-word) .. tho this mindset is difficult to understand, cuz life is short and (very obviously) no one gets out of here alive.

And I dare say he's not the only one. Madoff is merely the poster boy for Wall Street greed.

What kind of dysfunction drives such a culture? Hard to believe that greed alone is responsible .. and there are not more serious psychological defects at play.

Obama Comes to Town

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The Bug's school had a field trip today to Centennial Farms (at the Orange County Fair Grounds), ~ a mile from here. They have animals & farm stuff. We've been there dozens of times.

Obama comes to town

When I pulled up this morning however, a bunch of news trucks were parked outside the gate (Channel 4, 7 & 9, plus several others) with their tall, telescoping antennas. And there were folks stopping & checking everybody entering.

"What's going on?" I asked. "Why the news trucks?"

"The President's coming," said the lady who stopped my car.

"Obama?" I asked.

Been having ultra-realistic dreams about our new Prez (where I'm hanging out with him), and had one just last night .. so it felt kinda weird that he was coming to the same place I was going. (Haven't been there in a year.) Coincidental. Might share these dreams another time. So far tho, I've only told the Dog.

Anyway, after we parked, as we were entering the park area, here came 6 Secret Services dudes (actually 5 guys and 1 girl), walking out, crossed right in front of us (touchable distance), walking 2-by-2. Very sharply dressed. The real Men-in-Black. Here in the laid-back OC, they stood out .. (waay out).

They didn't say anything to me, but greeted the Bug warmly. I heard SS carries Uzi's, so I was looking for the bulge, but couldn't detect anything. [ No, I didn't say, "Hey, can I see your Uzi's?" ]

None of them were very big. I kinda expect people protecting the president to be 6-4, 250 lbs. In fact, they all looked kinda scrawny, if ya ask me. I mean, they certainly didn't look scary. If I didn't know better, I might've thought I could take all 6 of 'em. =)

Frontline is my favorite TV show. I like the way they take the viewer inside places we'd normally never be permitted. (Deep inside.) And I like their understated narrator » Will Lyman.

Hank Paulson: Secretary of the Treasury who presided over the economic meltdown of 2008

Yesterday they released a documentary titled » Inside the Meltdown. One of the most hair-raising programs I've seen.

Many smart people (and very highly-paid, too) were so enchanted by the glitter that they apparently failed to notice they were undermining the foundations of our economy. (Or maybe they did notice, but didn't care.)

Sad. Tragic. Disturbing.

Speaks volumes about certain parts of our culture and its priorities .. where profit-n-loss usurp right-n-wrong .. and even common sense gets shoved aside .. when there's money to be made. These people give capitalism a bad name.

It wasn't like nobody saw this coming, or didn't try to stop it. The Chairman of the FDIC, Sheila Bair, was one of those waving a red flag far back as 2001 regarding a potential crisis in the subprime market. (That had to be a frustrating experience.)

If you play the video-excerpt posted on THIS page, you'll hear Sheila say (in her own words):

"For years there were bills in congress to try to address 'predatory lending'. They just couldn't get the political momentum to get anything done. And I think that's because everybody was making money. It's very difficult to get the political will in Washington to move when everybody is making a profit."

On THIS page, we read reports of Bernanke telling members of Congress things like, "After today, we won't even discuss the Great Depression, because this is much worse. Nothing like this has ever happened before."

The new term we learn is » moral hazard (or lack thereof) .. tho I don't see how 'morals' has anything to do with it.

The big day came on Monday September 29, 2008, when the Dow plunged 777 points, its biggest-ever single-day drop .. shortly after the government (suffering from bail-out fatigue) let Lehman Bros fail.

Watch the remarkable hour-long special » HERE. What a picture it paints of how close to the edge we live, and the condition of our (fracturing) economic foundations.

Today is Martin Luther King day. I find it interesting (and coincidental) that the very next day we swear-in our first black president. What are the odds these two (seemingly unrelated) days/events would occur consecutively?

Martin Luther King Jr.

I've always been good in math. I got the highest grade, for example, in my (first) Calculus class .. even after I opted to skip pre-Calculus, and hadn't had a math class in/for 10 years. (Pre-Calc is now a mandatory prerequisite, I hear.)

I also got the highest grade in my Statistics class (taken the same semester as Calculus). The professor who taught my 'Stats' class taught two classes that semester. He told me I got the highest grade in *both* classes.

Depending on how you categorize the variables, the odds of these two days/events occurring consecutively..

.. would be between 1-in-365 (the number of days in a year) and 1-in-133,225 (which = 365x365, since each event could theoretically fall on any given day).

I could spend today's entire entry discussing the nuances associated with probability & statistics, but my point is » the odds are miniscule .. no matter how you dice the math.

My brain, for some reason, seems predisposed to identify the statistical curios associated with seemingly unrelated events ('coincidences'). It's not something I try to do, mind you. Just seems to occur on its own.

We know that the inauguration date would've been the same whether Obama or McCain was elected. And (we know that) MLK could've been born on any day. Moreover, his birth (which we celebrate with today's holiday) obviously had nothing to do with our presidential inauguration.

So the proximity of these two events seem totally unrelated (from a design standpoint). Yet in reality, and certainly in influence, they are obviously very much related. So much so that many feel the accomplishments of one man could not exist without the efforts of the other. (See my point?)

I'm not drawing any conclusions .. merely identifying a curious coincidence. And it's obvious the work MLK did back in the 60's preceded Obama's rise to the presidency (chronologically). So even the ordering of the consecutive days aligns correctly with historical events.

Went to Tom's last night for a house-warming party. He recently sold his townhome and moved into an apartment.

President-elect Obama & family

I said, "Dude, turn on the elections." He hadn't yet set up his cable TV service, so he dug out an old set of rabbit ears from a storage box, and spent 20 minutes trying to get a signal.

We watched the election returns on his (new) plasma TV .. connected to a (old) set of rabbit ears.

The signal periodically faded, then returned. Interesting how we watched history being made via the old (rabbit ears) and new (plasma TV). Kinda symbolic.

Everybody was wiping tears. (Tho for different reasons.) Some felt history books a hundred years from now will point back to this night as a major milestone (.. for better or worse, which remains to be seen).

No Desire to Rule the World

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There's a scene in The Gladiator (Best Picture, 2000) where Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor, 160-180 A.D.) shares with Maximus (his General) that he's dying, and tells him he wants Maximus to replace him and lead Rome after his death.

Marcus Aurelius | Roman Emperor 161-180 A.D.

"I want you to become protector of Rome after I die .. to give power back to the people, and end the corruption that has crippled it. [long pause] Would you accept this great honor I have offered you?"

Maximus responds: "With all my heart, no."

The ancient emperor grabs Maximus by the head and implores, "That is why it must be you!"

The implication here is that the very desire for this power (» ruler of the most powerful empire on the planet) disqualifies one for the job. (A political catch-22, if you will.)

Indeed, it has been my experience, working in large organizations, that people who crave power the most tend to suk the worst at exercising authority.

Maximus for President!

Realize I'm making coarse generalizations, but certainly, anyone who wants to be president (or even a senator) would've long since passed the threshold of any power-craving test we could concoct.

I see less of a problem however, with the people themselves than with the system that puts them there. Most agree our current system of government does not attract the best and brightest minds our nation has to offer.

Along these lines .. I must ask » what is it that drives a person to desire such lofty positions of authority? .. especiallly when approval ratings sit at all-time lows, and few trust a politician to do what he/she says. And does mere presence of this desire prognosticate anything (as Marcus implies) about the likelihood of their becoming a noble, effective leader?

The gang at YaBB released an updated version of their forum script » YaBB 2.3. Radified has been using this free (open source) Perl-based script since 2001.

The Choice 2008: A Frontline special

Sounds like a significant upgrade. Lots of features added and bugs fixed. I stayed up late last night (1AM) and installed a new/clean copy.

It takes a while to dial in the new forum, but I've done it many times before, so I know the drill. All appears to have gone well, after a little glitch.

The Rad forums contain nearly 40,000 posts, in roughly 5,000 threads, some of which have accumulated more than 100,000 page views. We specialize in backing up your hard drive with a cloning program, such as Norton Ghost.

Frontline Launches New Season

In other news » tonight on PBS, Frontline airs its first program of the new season, titled » The Choice 2008, featuring an in-depth look at our presidential candidates.

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