Deep Blue Friday

  Ahhhhh, the joys of Black Friday.  Idiots in a mall to start things off. 

  

2 Typical Black Friday Shoppers

  You were off of work on Thursday.  You ate turkey. You watched football.  Maybe you drank beer. Whether you had Friday off or not, you were damn well going to make it in, to shop, not to the office, and get those special black friday deals. 

    You got to sleep early, maybe you even went and slept in your car, dedicated asshole shopper that you are.  Whatever the circumstances, you got there early. WAY early. You got to the mall before the sun did, before the warmth did, before anything but you and the other maniacs shoppers.

   You fought the cold. You fought the crowds.  You dealt with the smell of people who had the foresight to get to the mall early, but forgot their deodorant and the toothpaste and toothbrush.  You fought the rush and the crush.  You got your Zhu Zhu hamsters for your daughter.  You got that PSP 3000 w/Gran Turismo for your son.  You missed out on the “crocodile dentist chomper” game for your nephew Smedley, what the hell ever that is (the wife said get it, so you looked), but you got the boy some schweet toy cars.  Boys and cars, that mix never gets old.

   You spent 12 hours shopping, you got the Ipod at Wal-mart, the last one in the store, you kinda ran over the old woman to get it.  She got you back though, ran over your bad toe.  She apologized too, so you couldn’t say much, so you just mumbled a  “that’s OK” even though both of you knew it it was really about you almost flattening her.  Small price to pay.  

     $275, plus tax. 

    You got most of what you wanted.  Even that hot lil number for the wife at Victoria’s secret. Now your credit card is so hot your wallet is smoking, you’ve spent more than you have…  Again.  The bank account is significantly smaller than it was yesterday, and the car payment is due on Tuesday.  So is the rent.  Cable and the electric the week after. 

   Nice start to the Holidays, Isn’t it?  Makes you just wanna sing Christmas carols, Dun’it?

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   Easy for me to pontificate, I don’t have any friggin money.  But then again, who does? I wouldn’t have the money for retail therapy (as my wife likes to call mall excursions) of the kind i mentioned without knocking over a $^%#$% bank.

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    Happy to report that the stock market fell much less than I thought it would. Signs showed a big drop looming for Friday on the dow,  a 3+% drop early Friday morning, but the market only lost around 1.5% today, dropping 154 points.  We can hope that today’s market drop, caused in part by a weak dollar and billions in debt from Dubai, will even out and not be troublesome like the signs early friday morning indicated they would be.  It can’t be that bad. The Dax and the FTSE both ended Friday in positive territory. 

     Watching a bloomberg viddy (embedding for this viddy has been disabled, click here to watch it) talking about the Dubai debt crisis.   “Look where greed is going at the greatest pace…and they’ll see where the next problems are gonna unravel.”   Buddy, you are talking about WALL STREET INVESTORS.  These guys are f****** vultures, They live by the Gordon Gecko ”Greed is good” philosophy.  Follow your advice and you’ll have people putting their money in holes in their mattresses.

    Which I am sure a few are, but you don’t need to PUSH them to do it like that.   

   In the meantime, the people actually in Dubai are having a very rough go of it. I can sympathize with the workers being stuck in the middle here.

    

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     That’s it from here.  Later!

Today’s nuggets, Via Wikiquote: Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.   Cato

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.   Robert Louis Stevenson

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it— and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again— and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.   Mark Twain

Late Night Idle Talk

     I am hanging out, relaxing after a night of eating too much turkey and mashed potatoes and cake and pie and all sorts of goodies that are truly not at all healthy, and loving it.  Right now, a scant few hours after the carnage, I’m sitting in a fairly well darkened room, lit only with the light of computer screens and Christmas lights, the sounds of a computer game being played by my wife occasionally going “DING” in the background, with “Good king wenceslas” being sung by the Hereford Cathedral choir playing from my old computer speakers.  I can faintly smell the downstairs neighbors smoking, and can just make out the aroma of the leftover turkey that I brought back from my mothers house, after the annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage 2 miles north to mom and dad’s place for some festive noms.

     The thing I take from this day is a feeling of peace and happiness that I often get from these family get-togethers.  We are a close knit bunch, and have been since I can remember.  Times change, people change, but family is always family, being with them is being in a safe haven in a turbulent world, in a place to forget that the world is a weight on everyone’s shoulders, even if only for a few hours. 

   Joy to the World.  Life is good.

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     Life is good, and yet, there be turbulence on the horizon.  Apparently Dubai, a tiny oil rich nation on the Arabian peninsula, which has more recently come to depend on real estate, construction and it’s financial sector as well as oil, is flat broke. I mean stone flat broke.  The nations main investment company is seeking to delay payment on $59,000,000,000 in debt.  The fear is that Dubai may have to default, and it has a great many people rattled. 

     The yen, the dollar, and markets around the world have reacted negatively to this.  For a while today (it’s past 3pm  in Tokyo as of this writing at 1:16am in New York) the dollar fell to a 14 year low before recovering somewhat.  The Hang seng is down 3½%,  the Nikkei is down 3¼%, as are the DAX and the FTSE futures. 

    A light trading day is usually what you expect to see on a half day like there is going to be today.  Even if there is a light day though, the market is probably going to tank.  The DJIA futures market, which i started looking at about an hour and a half ago, has lost about 70 points in that time. Not bad, but the market when I started looking at it, was already down over 180 points.  It is right now down about 2.5%.  Both S&P and  Nasdaq futures are down over 3%.  

     Market correction or global recovery losing traction? It took the fall of 2 financial giants, and the near sinking of AIG fed by bad mortgages and speculation to cause a disaster last year.  What will the near collapse of a wealthy nation due to billions in debt, (when there are nations{ahem} with trillions in debt) which in turn is causing people to run from riskier assets and causing jitters over worldwide credit do? 

    Just call my name, cause I’ll hear you scream….

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     MASTER.  MASTER.

    The music and the mood have changed quite a bit.  Gone is the mellow christmasy music, the METAL is flowing and it feels good.  Lots of metallica and Ozzy/Sabbath.  But that is only fitting i guess, reading the financial news when it’s bad gets the juices flowing a bit.  But I’m done with that for now, and I’m thinking I’ll just finish listening to “After Forever” and then toss on some more relaxed fair.  Tis almost 2 am. Calmness, Herr Rhino, no need to mosh right now.

     Ahhhhhh, a bit of Heitor Villa-Lobos.  Kinda thing that makes me grab the guitar and look at it and ask “what am I doing wrong, why can’t I play like that?”

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That’s it from here.  Later!

Today’s Nuggets, via Wikiquote: You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there… just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep ‘em showing up at those jobs.  George Carlin

Thanksgiving is not an anachronism whose time is past. It is much more than a holiday to celebrate a meal shared between the Pilgrims and Native Americans. It is a time to reflect and be thankful for what we have–not for what we cherish, desire or envy.   Ted Nugent

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.  John D. Rockefeller

What is it with people?

           There I was, just surfing teh intarwebs, armed only with my wits, my extremely non trusty keyboard (QWERTY sucks), and an old cold cup of coffee that wasn’t helping anyone, and all of a sudden, WHAM, it hit me.  I have been playing around on this @$%@^$# computer all day and I haven’t written  hardly anything… well, i did toss a blurb out in the rhino nuggets, but it wasn’t much.  Plus, Khlaid Sheikh Mohammed is dead meat on a stick no matter where he goes, doesn’t much matter where they hold the trial.  He must be held accountable, and he must be held accountable by “We The People” not the military, not just kept locked up in a cell forever.  Put him in a court and let him defend himself just like anyone else who went around killing people like a complete antisocial f****** nutcase.  Aaaaaaaand We do have the death penalty here, ya know…

      Onto other things.

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  I’ve been reading some comments on youtube that were attached to this particular viddy (after watching some keyboard cat goodness, of course), and I have to tell you, the Presidents opponents are both angry, and extraordinarily unintelligent, at least the ones whose fiction I read there.  A few tidbits for you to peruse:

Obama: At his SKIT SPEECH in “Asia”……”HEY ASIANS!……..if I can keep up the LYING BY OMMISION?……then we have a whole generation of kids in America !!! who ~mm~mmm~mmm!…..I will be turning over to you – and you can make them become Chinese SLAVE LABORERS – as their only career choice! ……..that is because I am here to destroy the FREEDOM OF AMERICA!….with some more loans and Liberal World AGENDA of COMMIES and CRACKPOTS and CULTS – I so admire! LET’s get er DONE!”(cheers follow)

Obama = another smooth talking, Muslim.

I didn’t know Kenya was a pacific region.

Here is a outline of Obama’s trip:

Blame America
apologize for America
America will not monitorize the debt (although we are already doing that)
America will give Billions for Global warming (or is it temperature change now??)
Fat ass michelle will once again barely fit on air force one do to her huge butt and hips.
America makes too much CO2 (it would be a lot less if Obama would just shut his trap.)

     Do you see ANY intelligent discussion above? Anything that could be construed as an honest political discourse? Me neither.

    A) Barack Obama is a Christian and was born in the city of Honolulu, on the Island of Hawaii, this has been proven, and the birth certificate is out there.  Pay f****** attention, dumbass.

   B) If we are going to lay blame for America becoming owned by Asia, that blame goes a long way back. Japan and China have been buying our debt in massive quantities for years.  China has been adding exponentially more American debt since the early 2000’s.  Japan since the 90’s.  And Great Britain and Germany have been major players for years.  Don’t hear complaints about them.  Or Luxembourg, or Caribbean banking centers, or any of the other 25+ listed nations that buy our debt.   And with all the debt they have been buying, the bulk of our debt stays here.  The last numbers I have seen have the foreign ownership of said debt at 27.9% of total.

    Meaning that 72.1% of it stays here in America, it doesn’t leave these shores. So much for the thought of our children being sold in slave labor to china by way of other nations owning us.  Better way to put it is WE ARE BROKE AND WE HAVE BEEN FOR AGES.  This sucks, tis true, but blaming The President, and China, and foreign interests is bullshit from the get go.  There’s enough blame to go around for everyone. 

    And there is no liberal world agenda. 

    C)  America will give billions for Global Warming, and we won’t monetize (not monitorize) the debt? Umm…WTF is that about? Monetization was necessary due to the amount of pressure the financial system was under due to the banking system collapse in 2008.  And we have been monetizing some portion of the debt for a while now.   Or what else do you call what’s happening with Freddie mac and Fannie mae? And who the f*** are we giving billions to for global warming?  Ya need to explain a wee bit more there, laddie. 

    D)  Since when does Michelle have a fat ass?  My guess is that guys wife weighs 400 pounds and has more cellulite than the entire city of Louisville Kentucky.

    Everyone is entitled to an opinion.  But some opinions have a more firm basis in fact than others.  I’m not perfect in this, I have been wrong on a great many occasions, but not here.  Misinformation and plain nonsense of the type written by these …crazed xenophobes doesn’t make those opinions valid, it lessens the value of what is written by these writers.  In the end, opinion without fact is useless to the world.

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     To end with something completely off topic … SCREW YOU ARRINGTON! Play him off, keyboard cat!

    

   Later!

Today’s nuggets, by Plato, Via wikiquote:   When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong … And so the rhetorician’s business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.

Truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Last edit – 12:59am  11/14/09

What do Karl Eikenberry and Carrie Prejean have in common?

      Not a whole friggin lot…except they both appear in this blog.

        

It’s completely confidential and you are being inappropriate”

“I think you are being extremely inappropriate right now and I am about to leave your show.”

Dog reviews Carrie Prejean's book

    At which point, had I been Larry King, I’d have said good riddance to that little lump of annoying twaddle that is Carrie Prejean.  Normally I try to tackle weightier issues, but just for a minute, I’ll go here.  If she had said to him that even the reason for settlement in her case wasn’t up for discussion, which she didn’t do, I think I would almost see a reason for her little girl hissy fit, which is what this is, I have seen grown women defend themselves, and it doesn’t look like this, she’s having what looks like a pre-teen snit. 

     She just wants face time, which would explain her not leaving the set when she got all huffy there.  Spoiled little rich kid, that’s how she comes off. 

     The botox beauty queen has just about milked this whole “put upon” thing for all the publicity it is worth.  Larry was just asking Miss Idiot a simple question, and she couldn’t handle it, which amazes me.  What would she have done with the press exposure had she won her stupid miss pretty crown? It would prolly have killed her, she should be happy she lost that pageant, she can’t handle the spotlight.

    Maybe she needs to do a second porn viddy or have some more plastic surgery or something.  Whiny lil shit.

    That was fun, but now it’s onto more weighty issues.

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    An Afghanistan strategy emerges, finally. What I mean by that is that President Obama has made the rather sensible decision to put into any plan that comes out an exit strategy, regardless of the size of the troop increase that will come out after he gets back from his week long trip in Asia.  Former ”Commander of the Combined Forces in Afghanistan” and current U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry said that any additional troops in the region would make the Afghan’s more dependent on the U.S. and would not be a wise choice given the amount of corruption in Afghanistan under the Karzai Administration.

  

     That’s what this situation needs.  The President listening to voices on the ground that know the situation, like Eikenberry, not republicans, who say the President is dithering, not pundits and other media types who confuse the issue by making their opinions known without the knowledge  necessary to even speak on the subject.  Judgement based on expert knowledge. And let the Afghan’s pick up some of the slack for their own damned issues. 

     With the right training and the right mindset, they can handle the Taliban themselves. We have to go hunt Bin Laden, and he’s in Pakistan, so spending long years with the Afghan’s, when the real issue is in Pakistan makes very little sense. Get what we need done to fix the issue, which means fight through this slog, train the Afghan’s to fight and fend for themselves while we both fight Al-Qaeda and get Bin Laden, fix it right this time, and be done with it.

    Good on you, Mister President.  Take the time you need to get this done right. Don’t speed through and fuck it up, like Bush did with Iraq.  Democrats always have been better with foreign policy, and here’s your proof.

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   That’s it from here. Later!

Today’s nuggets, Via marksquotes:  Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.  Thomas Jefferson

Speak seldom, but to important subjects, except such as particularly relate to your constituents, and, in the former case, make yourself perfectly master of the subject.  George Washington

The mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest, is but too often drowned, before public bodies as well as individuals, by the clamors of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain.  James Madison

Anagram: Too Much Sugar/ Hug Our Mascot

        The title has it about right, ladies and gentlemen, I went to a party for my nephew James, 4 years old and happy just being a

Toys for Boys

dude.  I ate all the food on earth and had enough sugar to kill your average human.  Lucky for me I’m slightly above average, or else that would’ve been my ass!  Seriously though I was out, had fun hanging with the kids.  Everybody had fun, and right now I am still buzzing from all the sugar I had before.  I’m thinking of downing some painkillers just to handle the inevitable crash that’ll happen in a little while. 

    The little guy got a million little toys.  He got a boatload of Matchbox Monster truck stuff, He got a bunch of Thomas the Tank engine stuff, a few toys, a few books.  He got a lot of other stuff.  His favorite toy was not something he got as a present but one of the lil party favors they were handing out to all the kid.  A little glow stick with a connector that makes it a little glowstick, i dunno, necklace type of thing.  He was the Happiest little dude I have ever seen.  He was happy when he was beating the tar out of the little gravedigger monster truck pinata that were my brother James picked up for his sons birthday.  He was happy when his father and I were indoctrinating the child.  “Repeat after me, James, Flyers…”  “Flyers…” “SUCK”  “SUCK…hehehehe”  He was just loving every minute of just being a four year old.  That kind of joy, that happiness just being in the moment with a few simple trinkets, that is something that an adult could really learn from. 

     Happy Birthday James!   

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    Onto slightly more weighty issues. 

       The joy that is the situation with Iran’s Nuclear facilities has been thrown into rather more sharp focus lately.  The Iranians are capable of making a nuclear weapon, so say senior staff  members of the IAEA.  They apparently have been working on a weapon since approximately 2002, which is kind of surprising, seeing how the U.S. said in 2007 that they weren’t capable of building a weapon and had given up working on one in 2003.  The report does state that this conclusion is tentative, but nevertheless this is a somewhat startling revelation. 

 

Toys for Big Boys

   More startling is the fact that the outgoing head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has tried, and been successful for a while now, to squash this report and keep it from coming out.  Read this, and this, and in particular check the date of release of the second document.  Now I am unsure if that is an internal release date, or if the document was released to the general public at that time.  

     One wonders why this didn’t get more press, it should have.  Maybe this got press, but I am having trouble recalling much of any coverage on IRAN GOING NUCLEAR out there on the news last year.  It would have been a HUGE political football during the campaign.  You’d figure that would have gotten more press, until you take into account Mr. ElBaradei and his Pro-Iranian stances.  He has been a stalwart in some areas, a good man, doing much for nuclear nonproliferation, but he has time and again turned a blind eye to Iran in his tenure as head of the IAEA.  Anything that happens with Iran and nuclear weapons here is clearly and directly on the head of Mr. ElBaradei.

    The hardest part of building the weapon is enriching the uranium to make the warheads out of, and the Iranians  have already learned how to do this, with the unwitting help of Mr. ElBaradei and his non-action on Iran and it’s nuclear intentions and capabilities. More on this as it becomes available.

    Boys and their toys.  What can you do as a citizen but shake your head and ask why this is happening?

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     That’s it from here, except the viddy.  Part of the time at the party we were watching sports, mostly The Notre Dame – Washington football, but there was also some Ranger hockey.  That is what I wanted to watch, to be honest, and I caught a few minutes of it there.  Twas nice.  It was even better when I got home and watched the Rangers soundly beat the Ottawa Senators 5-2.  It was a very well played game, not perfect but well played.  Highlights were Michael Del Zotto’s first NHL goal, which turned out to be the game winner, the play of Marian Gaborik, speedy smart player as always, and of  course the magnificent play of King Henrik, and a happy little fight at the end of the Game between Aaron Voros and Mike Fisher.  Aaron whupped his ass, Fisher fought hard, but Aaron beat him, and beat him but good.  But you be the judge.  Watch and Enjoy

   

    It was one helluva home opener for the Rangers.

    G’night!

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Today’s Nuggets, By Albert Einstein, Via wikiquote:  The position in which we are now is a very strange one which in general political life never happened. Namely, the thing that I refer to is this: To have security against atomic bombs and against the other biological weapons, we have to prevent war, for if we cannot prevent war every nation will use every means that is at their disposal; and in spite of all promises they make, they will do it. At the same time, so long as war is not prevented, all the governments of the nations have to prepare for war, and if you have to prepare for war, then you are in a state where you cannot abolish war.
This is really the cornerstone of our situation. Now, I believe what we should try to bring about is the general conviction that the first thing you have to abolish is war at all costs, and every other point of view must be of secondary importance.

I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.