September 30, 2008

The check is in the mail


Well, hey there people. I have been away, but now I am back. Soon I will have to go away yet again and shortly thereafter I will once again return to divulge the mysteries of the mundane and to complicate that which usually needs no explanation.

The wedding and the weekend went off without a hitch, ahem, uh but there is just one teensy detail that was overlooked before we hit the highway home. The groom asked for my memory card so he might download and print the pictures I took. He told us that he would return it the next day but he left it in his friends computer and so I am now waiting for the return of my SD card and therefore by association, so are you.

Ain't it great to have something in common.

In the last ten days or so I, like many others, have had a crash course in international economics. I have read more and understood less than at any time in my life.
One of my students, a professor of the aforementioned subject sat down with me and tried to walk me through the global ramifications of the miasma of greed and irresponsible money management. The entire time he was making everything try to fit together in a way I could understand he was also apologising because, and he put it this way: "There is no simple explanation nor resolution the awful instability of the system." Being that he has studied and worked with a Nobel prize winning economist, I have a strong tendency to believe what he says.

I also have a strong belief in another person's opinion.

"Kilgore Trout, the ornithologist's son, wrote in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: "The Fiduciary is a mythological bird. It has never existed in Nature, never could, never will."

Trout is the only person who ever said a fiduciary was any sort of bird. The noun (from the Latin fiducia, confidence, trust) in fact identifies a sort of Homo sapiens who will conserve the property, and nowadays especially paper or computer representations of wealth, belonging to other people, including the treasuries of their governments.

He or she or it cannot exist, thanks to the brain and the ding-dong, et cetera. So we have in this summer of 1996, rerun or not, and as always, faithless custodians of capital making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety.

For Christ's sake, let's help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it is.

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.

Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful."

Kurt Vonnegut.


I like ice cream. Its like eating an instant smile. I am on a diet so now I have to find something else that will put a grin on my face.

My sister sent me the most kick ass care package from home. An entire box of Halloween goodies. Not just your local Milky Way and Snickers bars These are the ultimate in grotesque: Road Kill snacks, vomit pouches and spider sacks.
I am hoping that this year we can really get folks into the spirit of things.

Thanks Sis!- Answer yer goddamn phone will ya!

Time to fly. The punnery has run dry and I have used up my allotment of words for the evening.

Talk soon, real soon.




16 comments:

Grant said...

The religionists have pretty much killed Halloween down in the Southeast, so do your best to spread the cheer in Japan.

Megan said...

Glad you're back, sorry you're leaving again, it's just an endless circle!

I like the Vonnegut quote.

Mona said...

yeah, bail them out you rich & wealthy...

uh. huh! what am I saying...

Let me try again:

Bail out the rich & the wealthy , you poor & hardworking!

Kurt said...

No Halloween in the Southeast! We need a Constitutional ammendment to bring back Halloween!

lime said...

vonnegut makes sense to me. gonna share what your student had to say?

NYD said...

Grant~ I have always found religious irony to be sadly amusing. It's not about paganism these days- it's about candy. Have they outlawed St. Valentines day too?

Meagan~ The magic and fascination of circles is that they are endless. I wish my life was a circle.

Mona~ I hear you, woman. Yet we poor dumb mules ain't got no more to give.

Kurt~ Go Kurt! It's a grassroots campaign. We're back in the 60's yippie!!!!


Lime~ The gist of what he said came down to this: the only truly unprecedented/ unexpected occurance was the utterly bodacious scale of the mess.
Japan suffered much the same thing back in the eighties during it's economic bubble and it still hasn't resoved itself yet. Lot's of folks lost their jobs due to "restructuring" and many banks and businesses had to either merge or drown in their own debt accrued by a tremendous amount of bad paper. What he couldn't understand was the removal of government restrictions and safeguards that had been in place for more than 75 years.

What he didn't talk about was where the money comes from to fix the whole fuck up. The way it looks to me, it can only come from one source- there is only one source. The general public. Whether in the form of taxes from govt. intervention or price increases due to involvement of private business and industry to conglomerate and help their staggering brothers.

Make sense?

Anonymous said...

Okay so you got the package, I'm thrilled and what made me smile even more is that you really enjoyed my choices, something that is rare and in between. My phone on the other hand has been giving me trouble, but alas I do have that other line downstairs that still works wonderfully well. I know, you'd rather call me on my line, so be it. All in all, I was worried that everything would be stopped at the border, I'm happy to say you recieved it complete and without problems.
Hope you have the best Halloween this year with them. WE'll see what I can get next year, maybe I can find more disgusting and nasty stuff....hee hee.

Your wonderful sister.

JBG

The Grunt said...

Going fast on your cycle might be a good ice cream smile substitute. And since you are in Japan, you should buy yourself an Edwards electric guitar--their Les Paul copies are top notch. I wish I could get one here--that or an old Greco "Super Real" or Tokai "Love Rock" series (Japanese electrics are sweet). Anyways, that guitar through a nice tube amp will put a permanent grin on your face. Just learn some AC/DC chord progressions and watch your windows shatter, your pants flap from the speakers, and the cops busting down your door.

Grant said...

Don't be silly. Valentine's Day is all about candy and parties and dressing up, whereas Halloween...

Oh, dear. It appears the religious people are not so consistent after all.

h said...

My Church sponsors an alternative to Halloween here in the Southeast.

Virtually every kid who attends admits that is was MUCH MORE FUN than Halloween. They get to play catch with a BaseBall All-Star and play Tennis with a Wimbledon Champion and lots of other stuff.

If that's "killing" Halloween in the minds of Anti-Christian bigots, sobeit.

Anonymous said...

Halloween is sadly neglected here, except in some neighborhoods (where I have always taken my kids). It's a shame, really - a candy-based holiday is a good thing.

Anonymous said...

I believe that I have only a few options left:

1 - run up and down my street naked, ringing an old schoolyard bell and yelling "Bring out yer dead"

2 - grind codeine into coffee until its a thick paste and then plaster my entire body with it until nothing hurts anymore...

3 - stop reading the news and do nothing but pixel art and graphics until my eyes wither and fall out of my head...

I can't wait for the photos darling, you always have the neatest stuff!

Serena said...

Vonnegut was one smart dude. Glad you survived the wedding and hope you get your memory stick back ASAP. Those treats from home sound great. Enjoy!

X. Dell said...

Um, I think I'd stick with a Snickers bar.

At the last corporate job I had, my boss called me in and asked me to monitor the derivatives market. I protested that I knew nothing about the subject. It didn't take me long to figure out that no one did. Even experts admitted to not understanding them fully.

What's worse is that the more abstract the capital, the more powerful it seems to be. I'm not surprised that there are a lot of things coming to a head. I'm not sure about crises. Thus, your student's comments ring true to me. Doesn't seem like there is a quick fix that would allow the status quo to remain.

Allan said...

Mega-props on the KV quote.

Reading the comment above...years ago -as a temp worker- I was tasked with approving first-time (subprime) homeowner loans, something I knew nothing about:

Me: The computer says I can't approve this. Not enough client revenue.

Boss: Here's how you override that. (gives code)


And here we are!

lime said...

thanks for taking time to condense his message. yep, makes plenty of sense to me.