Weekend Research Report

I don't think it's a law that the states have to balance their budgets. If it were, our former Democratic governor and eight years' worth of Michigan state legislators would be in jail now. The states and local governments can certainly borrow money, otherwise Detroit would not be going through bankruptcy proceedings as we speak. I have never heard of a state going bankrupt, but I'm sure that other municipalities have, because I read in the newspaper that Detroit is the largest city to have done so. The only thing is that the states cannot print their own money like the federal government can.

The government is already taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, the only controversy is over whether they should do more of it or less.

According to Wiki, there are all kinds of populists all over the world. There are old fashioned populists, modern populists, neo-populists, left wing populists, right wing populists, and even ancient Roman populists (both Julius and Augustus Caesar, believe it or not). Populism is currently big in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Authorities are not in total agreement about the definition of a populist but, in general, it means anybody who claims to represent the interests of the general population over the interests of some kind of elite class. This elite class may consist of big government, big business, hereditary aristocracy, ecclesiastical authority, or all of the above. The American Populist Party that flourished briefly in the late 19th Century, which was officially named "The People's Party", was derived from several pre-existing groups that merged together. They were mostly agrarian types but, in those days, the majority of Americans were farmers anyway. The People's Party kind of fell apart after the Democrats co-opted most of their agenda and assimilated their favorite presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. That was neither the beginning nor the end of populism, it was just the part that they taught us about in school.

Wiki describes the Tea Party as a right wing populist grass roots movement. It consists of multiple local organizations (about 600 at last count) with no central leadership or authority. Although classified as "right wing", some of them advocate certain liberal agenda items like raising the minimum wage. Philosophically, there are two main branches to Tea Party ideology, primarily differing on foreign policy. One branch, called the "Paulites", follows the teachings of Ron Paul, and the other branch, called the "Pallinites" follows the teachings on Sarah Pallin. This is only a philosophical thing because neither Paul nor Pallin hold positions of authority in any kind of national Tea Party organization because there is none. I happened to catch "Washington Week" on TV the other day, and they were talking about a big split between the "Tea Party Republicans" and the "Establishment Republicans", which seems to confirm that the Tea Party is indeed a populist movement.

You and your Hippie friends certainly would have qualified as populists in your day, but what do you call a populist when he becomes the establishment? 

populism 5

I think it’s the law that all states have to have balanced budgets, though there is generally a lot of legerdemain to accomplish that. I’m just going to guess without looking it up, that your current gov balanced his budget by cutting taxes and services, that’s what the term balanced budget is usually code for. The reps were big on a balanced budget for years, then lost interest in it when they had the presidency, and now are interested in it again, though I have yet to hear them talk of the balanced budget amendment.

I don’t think anybody wants to make everybody receive the same income, but I think most people would like to make the poor less poor. How less poor is a matter of debate. But surely one percent of the population owning half the money is wrong (I’m not sure of the exact numbers, since they are becoming more extreme all the time, but I think this is close enough). I guess this is just my opinion, but I will stand by it.

So I’m okay with taking money from the rich to give to the poor, and to just even out things generally. I’m not sure how that can be done, because the rich, because they are rich, have a lot of power, and they don’t want to give up any of their money.

I’ve been reading a book, Through the Eye of a Needle, about the Roman Empire about the time the Christians were beginning to take it over. The Romans themselves had no problem with wealth, and they brought this attitude with them when they became Christians. The Romans also had a different definition for poor, they didn’t mean the rabble, but more like the unconnected, people who had no influence and didn’t have any influential people to advocate for them.

The original Christians were pretty poor, but as the religion spread out, richer and richer people were drawn into its net, and then these people came into it with all their money, and what were they to do with it. Traditionally a rich Roman was expected to share his wealth by building bathhouses and gardens and whatnot, and then the question when they entered into Christianity was would they build big churches or feed the rabble. I think this discussion is still going on today.

But I’m supposed to be talking about populism. I guess the thing that interested me about the tea party was the element of populism in it. On the left we had that Occupy movement which got a lot of press, but I always thought it was stupid because it thought it was above politics, and never really took a stand on anything specific.

The tea party however went right to politics, but still it’s kind of amorphous, it’s hard to tell who is in it and isn’t, and I suspect people are dropping in and out of it all the time, and politically some are libertarians and some are bible thumpers, and some are rich and some are poor. I suspect that their income is probably less than the national average, but not a lot less. And I am just guessing this because I don’t know of any demographic statistics on them. Some of them want to push the reps to the right and some of them say fuck the reps, we will force them to give us what we want, and if we get the chance we will take over the whole party. They call the establishment reps RINOs when in fact, they are the RINOs, because if the party doesn’t do their bidding they are all screw the party.

I guess what surprised me was that in some instances tea party types have come out against the chamber of commerce, indeed even against big business, and here is the heady whiff of populism.

Roughly we can say that as government is the institution of the dems, business is the institution of the reps. Mainline reps and dems may have different agendas but they respect their institutions. In my hippie days, the populist new left was anti government, and now we see elements of the tea party that are anti big business.  

They Are All Whores

A profit making business has to make money, or it goes out of business, unless, of course, they can get the government to bail them out. So yes, the primary focus of corporate executives should be on making money for the corporation. However, the way a corporation makes money is by providing goods or services to their customers. If the company does not provide quality goods or services at a competitive price, they won't stay in business for long, unless, of course, they can persuade the government to pass protectionist laws that give them an unfair advantage over the competition.

The government also provides services, but they don't have to make money doing it. They can operate at a loss as long as somebody is willing to loan them money. Government debt is not exactly the same thing as personal or corporate debt. They can keep refinancing their debt indefinitely as long as somebody is willing to buy their new paper. What they are essentially doing is "borrowing from Peter to pay Paul". A corporation or individual can only get away with that for so long, but the government seems to be able to sustain it forever. At least they have so far. Some people are concerned about that, and it is to those people that the businessmen who want to become politicians play. Businessmen do so brag about the quality of their products, it's called "advertising". When they are running for office, though, they focus on their ability to balance a budget because that's what they believe their target audience cares about. Our current Michigan governor ran a successful campaign based on just that. He did indeed balance the budget, but he pissed off so many people in the process that I will be surprised if he gets re-elected. Although governments don't have to make money, they do have to persuade people to vote for them so, in a manner of speaking, politicians are whores for votes, the same way that businessmen are whores for money. Nobody is giving anything away here, they are all selling it.

Up until about a hundred years ago, a lot of people believed that, if somebody was poor, it was his own damn fault. I don't think most people believe that nowadays. I think a lot of people care about the poor, they just can't seem to agree on what to do about it. Is it fair that some people are poor while others are rich? Of course not. Is it fair to take money away from rich people and give it to poor people? Maybe, to a  certain extent but, if you carry that to extremes, all it does is reduce everybody to the lowest common denominator. When everybody is poor, who are you going to take the money from then? I can see why the Democrats would want to do that, since poor people traditionally vote for Democrats. Logically, then, the Republicans should want to make everybody rich, since rich people traditionally vote Republican. For some reason, the Republicans don't seem to understand that, or at least they aren't doing a good job of publicizing it if they do.

Jesus said that a good tree cannot bear evil fruit, and an evil tree cannot bear good fruit. That must have been a metaphor or something because any fruit farmer will tell you that most trees have good years and bad years periodically. Sometimes the whole orchard has a good or bad year, but individual trees also do that, even if the rest of the orchard does the opposite. I think people are like that to some degree. There is some bad in the best of us and some good in the worst of us. Even if you take morality out of it, a smart person can occasionally come up with a really stupid idea, and a stupid person can occasionally come up with a really smart idea. That's why I believe in judging an idea on its own merits rather than by who it was who came up with it.

Wiki has several other articles about populism, and I plan to read some of them this weekend. Have a good one.

populism 4

Well I suppose like any two things, business and govt are alike in some ways and unlike in others. But one way they are not alike is that the aim of the government is to provide services and the aim of business is to make money. Maybe the government is a little like a nonprofit business, but you never see anybody saying they will run the government like a nonprofit business. In fact what these guys who are going to run the government like a business generally brag about is how much money their business made, and now that I think about it most of them seem to come from one of those companies where they toss money from hand to hand real quick so average Joe can’t tell exactly what is going on, but when it’s all done they have way more than when they started out, and they assure us that it was all created by them and none of it came out of our pocket. You never see somebody who came from a business where they made something, like crossbows or accordions, and they brag about how fine their products are and how happy their users are, it is all about how much money they made.

So what does it mean when they say that they are going to run the gov like a business, or more importantly what do they think the voter thinks they mean when they say they are going to run the gov like a business? What do you think they mean?

I was going to be objective about populism, contrasting the tea party with the left of the turn of the century, and maybe Huey Long who was vaguely left, and George Wallace who was vaguely right, but then I got into the subject of the tea party, who are obviously the populists of the right, and I just kind of went into a rant.

I do like certain aspects of populism, I do like the empowerment of the downtrodden. People on top, well some of them have just inherited it, but some have worked hard to get there, but once you get to the top you kind of want to stay there, you want you to keep what you have, you don’t want anybody else to have it, you don’t want to fund programs to help the poor, you don’t want to fund public schools when you are sending your kids to private schools. We’re all born equally into the world, but some are born into wealth and some are born into nothing. Is that fair? Should life be fair? The universe certainly doesn’t care, but we are humans, we know of the concept of fair, it feels like the right thing, we ought to do it.

There, that is my argument that the rise of the downtrodden is a good thing.   They should look at the landscape, see that they are being exploited, and vote the rascals out. That’s the good thing about populism.

But because they are downtrodden, they haven’t received much education, and they don’t know that much and their thinking is simple, but the world is complicated. And the rhetoric is so simple anybody can spout it, and they run the risk of following cranks and crooks. It’s kind of an odd thing the way we can love the talk so much that we don’t pay much attention to who is this guy who is doing the talking.

Back in hippie days there would be some guy who was talking for love and against the war, and so you assumed he had to be a good guy, but then he turned out to be burning you on dope deals and trying to steal your woman, and how could a person who said the right things be doing the wrong things?

This is a bit scattered but I will return to the subject in the next post.

I did want to say I agree with you about our loss of interest in the downtrodden. I can’t imagine a rep or a dem of today proposing a war on poverty.  And it used to be something to be proud of to be a working man, to come back from the mill and put food on the table for your family, anymore the mill workers have been pushed down so far that they are almost in poverty, and who anymore cares what happens to the poor?

The Business of Government

In a way, the government is like a business, it's just that it's a non-profit business. As the name implies, a non-profit business isn't supposed to make a profit, but that doesn't mean it can't have a budget surplus. A budget surplus does not become a profit until it is paid out to the owners or the shareholders. Any business can operate at a loss indefinitely as long as somebody is willing to keep pumping money into it. With a profit making business, that is not likely to go on forever but, with a non-profit business, it theoretically can. Many non-profits do charitable work, so people don't mind donating to what they consider to be a worthy cause, but people are not likely to willingly donate to what they consider to be an unworthy cause. The government can compel people to donate, but those same people can also alter or abolish the government if they become sufficiently disenchanted with it. Governments can also borrow money indefinitely, as long as somebody is willing to loan it to them but, when nobody is willing to do that any longer, the party is over. The federal government can also create its own money, but there are limits to that too. If they flood the market with too much cheap money, you get hyper-inflation, which adversely impacts the economy and really pisses people off.

When you started talking about populism, I thought you were in favor of it. You know, the empowerment of the downtrodden masses, and all that stuff. It now appears that you are against it, or are you only against it when the Republicans do it?  I looked it up on Wiki last night, and they said that calling somebody a populist can either be compliment or an insult, depending on whether or not you like the person and what he stands for.

I think that most American politicians are populists, or at least they pretend to be. If they were to campaign on the promise of advancing the interests of the elite at the expense of the downtrodden masses, I don't think they would be elected. It's not currently fashionable to talk about the downtrodden masses any more, though, now it's all about the middle class. Apparently they believe that most people consider themselves to be middle class, so that's the group they play to. My former colleagues at the paper mill didn't like to think of themselves as the middle class, that was for doctors, lawyers, and small businessmen, they preferred to think of themselves as "working class", which was somewhere between the middle class and the people who lived on welfare. All that class stuff is just in people's heads anyway, you are whatever class you think you are.

populism 3

One more thing about those markets. The commodities market is a zero sum game in that at the end of the day the winnings of the winners and the losings of the losers come out to zero. In the stock market there can be days where everybody wins and days where everybody loses, and like voodoo it only works because of what people believe.

That crossbow shooting accordionist is the perfect example of a populist. I guess he thinks that the crossbow and the accordion is what makes him a regular Joe, which maybe is true in the wilds of northern Michigan. And as a regular Joe that makes him not a politician, and since the gov is run by politicians, and it is all fucked up, the obvious solution is to elect people who aren’t politicians, like musical bowman regular guy Joe. See, there is a populist sentiment, keep it simple and put the blame on somebody.

That whole thing about running the gov like a businessman is a bunch of hooey. I don’t know how it keeps getting repeated over and over. If you ran the DMV like a business the only thing you would be concerned about is if the fees you collected were greater than your operating expenses. As far as how well it kept unqualified drivers off the road, that would be no concern of yours.

I want to distinguish between populism in places like Afghanistan or Africa where people vote for a symbol because they don’t know how to read, and the symbol they choose is the one for their tribe. People get in trouble for saying this sometimes, but some people are not ready for democracy, because outside of a narrow elite they have an illiterate mass.

But in the US we have a pretty good, though shrinking, middle class. We have the elite, the middle class, and those thirty percent who think it would be a good idea to go to war in Ukraine, though they can’t find it on a map. The latter are the guys that the populist appeals to.

In a way these guys are proud of their ignorance. It separates them from the elites in the government or business or whoever they can be convinced is ruining the country. As an oldster like me Beagles, I think that you can agree that everything is more complicated than it looks like. They reject this out of hand. Everything is simple, do what feels right and you don’t have to think about it. Thinking about a complicated idea is anathema to them because they can’t stand that greyness that creeps in, clouding the black and white.

Kill all the assholes is the sort of slogan that appeals to them, because why, it makes perfect sense. But stopping to consider who is an asshole and who isn’t, that gets confusing, and it’s boring, and it’s an impediment to action.

These people are the natural constituency of the populist, who rides the wave into the House say, because that’s where most of them seem to be right now, but once elected they can’t accomplish anything because it’s their way or the highway. And once they are elected their constituency could begin to see them as a politician, especially if they bend their convictions to accomplish anything, and come primary time, there is bowman musician regular Joe usurping them.

One More Thing

Okay, just one more thing about high finance, and then on to populism.

The original cash contract helps the farmer, but all those derivatives only help the traders. It's like the stock market. The issuing company gets money from the initial public offering (IPO), which is when it first sells new stock to the public. After that, the traders buy and sell the stock between each other, and the issuing company doesn't get a dime out of that. On the other hand, if there was no stock exchange where stocks are bought and sold between individuals, a company might have a harder time peddling its IPO to the public. The reason most people buy stock is that they expect it to go up in value so they can sell it at a profit. If there was no secondary market for the stock, people would only have the dividends to entice them to buy the IPOs, and the dividends don't usually amount to all that much. I don't know this for a fact, but I'm guessing that the commodities derivatives trading has a similar effect on the marketability of the cash commodity contracts. If that's true, it would help the farmers and their customers indirectly, by providing liquidity for their contracts.

I have heard before that Plato believed that nation states should be governed by philosopher kings. I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect that Plato being a philosopher himself had something to do with that. If Plato had been a military man, he might have favored the notion of soldier kings, don't you think? There has recently been an ad running on our local TV stations about some guy running for something, I forget what exactly, but it doesn't matter because he's not in our district anyway. What this guy says is that people should vote for him because he has no political experience. He claims that the reason this country is all screwed up is that it's being run by politicians. He says that he is a businessman who knows how to balance a budget, and his other skills include playing the accordion and shooting a crossbow. What this country needs, he says, are less politicians and more budget balancing, accordion playing, crossbow shooters like himself. (I'm not making this up!)

I don't know a lot about populism so I suppose that will be this weekend's research project. From what you have already said, I gather that it's about regular people running the country instead of the fat cats or some other special interest group. It sounds good in theory, but has it ever worked in real life? My experience at the paper mill suggests that it's difficult to persuade regular people to take on positions of authority and responsibility and, as soon as they do, the other regular people disown them in what I call the "Who do you think you are?" syndrome.

Tell me more, why don't you?

populism 2

Nothing but a hound dog then Beagles, but you know that implies that you are crying all the time and that you ain’t never caught a rabbit.

I survived the info on the commodities market without my eyes glazing over and my chin smacking into the keyboard. But you know I have yet to see an explanation of how these contracts do anything for the market, how they make the life of the farmer or the baker or of the consumer any better. It’s like anytime you ask, suddenly the folks who claim that it does go into fast speaking fine print mode. It’s a little like when you ask the candidate if he is going to cut programs or raise taxes and he tells you he is going to um, cut waste, and, er, something else that he has a committee working on but he can’t tell you anything about it at the current moment.

Before I get into Napoleon who I didn’t really want to talk about, but I was just trying to get the subject away from the (big yawn) commodities market, I want to say something about those regulations to keep those fat cats from playing lose with our money. I think they are a good idea, because well, because of all the shenanigans that they pulled that got us into the trouble we are currently in. The fat cats (Republicans) fight them at every chance, and they also fight any money to enforce the regulations that we have now which is the reason the regulators have a hard time keeping up with the fat cat crooks.

I didn’t really want to talk about Napoleon, because I don’t know all that much about him. I had just seen a movie about the painter Goya where people are persecuted by the inquisition, but then Napoleon, under the guise of spreading the ideals of the French Revolution, invaded Spain and among other things kicked the inquisition to the curb. The other things consisted of killing a lot of Spaniards, looting the country of items of value, and just the greater glory of himself. But still it’s not like those Spaniards weren’t doing plenty of looting and pillaging themselves, and he did get rid of that awful inquisition, so isn’t that worth something?

Of course I get most of that out of the movie which played fast and loose with the facts to showcase it’s own little melodrama.

What I really want to talk about populism. Plato spoke of populism, I believe he thought there were three kinds of government possible: One was where all men were equal and all men had a vote. He dismissed this out of hand because he had no faith in Joe six pack. Then there was oligarchy which was where an elite ruled, but he didn’t like that because they would be squabbling all the time, and the third was an absolute king, which he thought was the best way if the king was a good guy, but he didn’t have much to say about what if the king was a bad guy.

Well he did have a little to say, I think he wanted potential kings to be chosen from an elite group who would be instructed in philosophy and would be philosopher kings, so you see way back then the new man concept was alive and well.

The United States didn’t have universal suffrage for the last hundred years, and in actual fact not until the civil rights act, fifty years ago. And some people are left out of the process now, but still we have something that looks like populism.

So let’s talk about populism.

Fat Cats, Cool Cats, and Running Dogs

I don't want to be a fat cat or a cool cat when I grow up, I want to be a capitalist running dog. That's why I chose the nom de net of "Talks With Beagles" instead of "Talks With Kitties". Wasn't it Chairman Mao who was always talking about capitalist running dogs? That's probably an insult in Chinese, but it loses something in the translation. By "running dogs", I assume that he meant hounds, and I'm an old hound dog if there ever was one, and damn proud of it.

I made a little more sense out of those commodities futures while you were gone, but there are still some parts of it that I don't understand. I got most of my information from the Wiki article "Commodity Market", although I did spin off on a few tangents. Some of it contradicted what I thought I already knew, and I was unable to find the article I read a few years ago. This may be because a lot of new regulations have been passed in the last few years, making my old source obsolete.

It seems that there are two main types of futures contracts, the "cash contract" and the "derivative contract". The cash contract involves real commodities, which are called "actuals", and the derivative contract is derived from that, which is why they call it "derivative". I don't know exactly how the derivative is derived, just that it is indeed derived from the cash contract. In the derivative contract, the commodity is called the "underlyer", and it seems to be kind of a shadow commodity that underlies the actual commodity in the cash contract. When the commodity trader doesn't want to take delivery, as almost all of them don't, he can weasel out of it by "taking an opposite position", which "zeros out" his account. In the cash contract, somebody actually does take delivery, but they didn't talk about that very much.

Commodity futures are only the tip of the iceberg, there are all kinds of other derivative type products in the financial world, and they have been increasing exponentially during the last decade or two. Some experts believe that this is what's "wrong" with the economy and that we need more regulations, but the regulators are having a hard time keeping up with this stuff as it is. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the fat cats and high rollers are "all crooks and fools", I think you made a good point when you said that it would be better if all this money were to be redirected into some productive use. I don't know exactly how this could be accomplished, but I think it's worth looking into. Either that, or we could talk about the French Revolution, or both, your call.

populism

That first paragraph was spoken like a true commie, but now that I think of it, it could be a certain strain of tea partier, and finally I guess it is the rant of a populist.

And now that I think about it, you were a big fan of George Wallace, who was something of a populist. I believe you know this better than I, but before he got into that racist crap, wasn’t he kind of for the little (white) guy, who was getting cheated by the fat cats?

My favorite of those guys was Huey Long of Louisiana, the central character of All the King’s Men. William Jennings Bryant was not one that I favored, but I believe there were several lefty populists around the turn of the century. I suppose there was some of that in the new lefty types of the 60s, but their appeal was mainly with college student types.

Among the hoi polloi there are all kinds of soreheads, people who are not doing so well and being taken advantage of by those who are at the top of the heap who they think are fucking them over, and most likely they are, and the guy who took to the stump and said just that, well he became their leader. Back at the turn of the century it was the fat cats who were the enemy, and though the old left raised a ruckus, they were never able to take power and once the dems coopted their ideas the balloon deflated.

One thing I have to say though, is those turn of the century populists lefties adopted some pretty unenlightened ideas on race and women’s rights, and immigration.

Around the sixties, or most accurately when the civil rights bill was pushed by LBJ, the dems adopted progressive ideas on social issues which the repubs have been dropping like bad habits ever since, and now they have taken over the formerly radical states like Kansas, pointing at the gov, as opposed to the fat cats, as the real enemy.

But the thing about that populist vote is that it is a sorehead vote and doesn’t love anybody long, and now you see the tea party, and loath as I am to say anything good about it, I have noticed it spouting some anti fat cat rhetoric lately.

But the main problem with the tea party is it wants outsiders, it wants people it’s never heard of before and who have never done anything before, only they are untainted by that awful Washington, but because the tea party rhetoric is so simplistic anybody can speak it so you have all kinds of misfits losing to gaffes, and if they get into office they are prone to all kinds of scandal. And because they are unknowns they have to rely on the big pacs who are all run by fat cats to get into the primaries. So they are ultimately hopeless.

So come on over to the red side Beagles, we don’t have a chance either, but out hats are so much cooler than the hats of the tea party, and oh that bright red flag.

I Think I See Your Point

The thing about the shoes makes sense to me, and I'm not even a Commie. I always believed that doing productive work was more virtuous than shuffling papers, which is one reason I didn't go to college. The thing is, though, it's not nearly as easy to find a productive job these days as it was back in the 60s and, even if you do find one, they still want you to kiss their asses as if you were some kind of executive crawling your way up the corporate ladder. Of course they don't pay you like an executive, or even like productive worker. When they first started that shit in the paper mill, I told them that, if I wanted to kiss people's asses for living, I would have gone to college and gotten paid well for it. If I wasn't willing to do it for the big money, I'm certainly not willing to do it for the small money. Of course, the small money of those days would be considered big money today, adjusted for inflation. Let's face it, Ken, there is no future in working for a living in this country anymore. You and I got out just in time, but I feel sorry for the young kids starting out today.

I think that, if I was one of those young kids starting out today, I would try to find something in the financial field. I would have to go to school for it, and maybe serve some kind of apprenticeship but, once I learned everything I needed to know, I would become one of those plinky-plinkers, in business for myself, working from home, and kissing up to no one. There's no point in starting something like that now, since I can live as comfortably as I want to on the conservative investments I already have. I don't see any point in risking what I've got to gain something I don't really need, especially at my age.

While you're gone, I'll see if I can dig up anything more on the subject. I still don't plan on doing anything like that, but I'm kind of interested in seeing how it works. If you don't want to talk about it anymore, we can always go into that French stuff. That's another subject about which I only have superficial knowledge and wouldn't mind learning more.

oh well

Oh I suppose there is nothing wrong with the commodities market, I just like to make my Bohunk fisheye jokes and sometimes I am having so much fun with my rhetoric that I allow for a distortion or two. And with the alarming rate of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer I am revisiting my commie opinions and thinking maybe I should get back to them.

And I am sure the commies wouldn’t like the commodities market. One of those big time early commies used to use the example of shoes, like in what shoes did this guy make, like in what if instead of plinky plonking pork bellies all day for money, you made a pair of shoes and then sold them? Then you would have money and some guy would have a pair of shoes. But if you plink plonk all day, you have money, but nobody else has nothing.

Well I hear all that crapola about contracts going this way and that and lubricating market forces, but I never hear it explained any deeper than that, like how exactly, take it to me step by step and explain how the farmer and the baker both come out ahead on it.

But I suppose you could spend all your money on lottery tickets or down by the roulette wheel, it is your money and you can do whatever you want. But those are bad examples aren’t they, I should have said playing poker or sports betting where you could actually make a living.

I guess that’s okay, I disapprove of it in my new commie purity, but that’s no big deal.

But I think when you get higher in the financial world you get into well things where you are just pushing money around and keeping a lot of it to yourself, when you should be inventing Beagles’ global warming solutions or at least making a pair of shoes.

And I think we are kind of repeating ourselves.

Here’s one that came up with a friend from my watercolor class. Napoleon, did he do more good or did he do more bad? How about the French Revolution, good idea or bad idea?

See you next week.

It Ain't Necessarily So

I didn't have a lot of time on the weekend to look this stuff up, but maybe I will when you're gone this time. For some reason, I didn't readily find the article I read a few years ago. Maybe it's all been changed in typical Wiki fashion, or maybe I typed the wrong key words in the search box. Sometimes I get to clicking on things and end up somewhere, not knowing exactly how I got there. I used to have a similar problem with the old fashioned print encyclopedias. I would start reading something that caught my interest on the way to somewhere else, and pretty soon I would forget why I came there in the first place. As disorganized as I am about stuff like that, it's a wonder I did so well in school.

When the paper mill was closing down, we all had to roll our retirement funds over into some kind of IRA or else we would have had to pay a big tax on it. They gave us some classes on the subject and I did some independent reading and talked about it a lot with my colleagues. We had about a year's warning that the mill was closing, which gave us time to make decisions and plans. Before that, the only thing I knew about the stock market was that, if you get involved in it, you will end up jumping out a window sooner or later. Having recently been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the computer age, I knew that the biggest barrier to understanding anything new is getting over the notion that you're not supposed to understand it. The next thing you need to do is realize that you don't have to learn everything there is to know about a subject, you just need to learn the parts that pertain to what you are trying to do. You can always look up some of the other stuff later as the need arises.

Like I said, I soon decided that complicated high risk investments like futures contracts were not my cup of tea, but that doesn't mean other people shouldn't do it. If somebody wants to put their time and money into something like that, what's the harm in it? It's their time and money after all, it's not mine and it's not yours. Just because somebody gets rich doing something that you or I choose not to do doesn't necessarily mean that they are crooks or fools. Of course some of them are probably crooks or fools, just like some poor people are crooks or fools. Being rich or poor doesn't necessarily make you a good guy or a bad guy, any more than being White, Black, Hispanic, or gay does.

crooks and fools

Well blah, blah, blah, this still doesn’t pass my Bohunk fish eye test. I suppose at best it is some big gambling fandango. The winners crack jokes and the losers say deal. If it’s a zero sum game the only losers are the suckers and hell, we have more of them then we know what to do with. And they are only in it because they think they can make a living out of being just a little bit smarter than the guy next door, and both of them plink plink plonking on their keyboards buying and selling stuff that basically does not exist and with no more expertise than the folks on derby day betting on a horse because they like its name or the colors of the jockey.

And here’s another thing. Used to be they bought and sold these things down the street here. It was a fascinating show that I took visitors to. As the clock neared, I think it was eight o'clock this mob of oddly dressed folk would gradually assemble from idle milling to peak positions, a bell would go off, and they would be off, yelling and screaming and pointing at each other, and it looked for all the world that they would be coming to blows. Notes were passed, totals were tabulated, I assume fortunes were made and lost. It went on like that all day, until maybe five, and then it would begin again the next day. Now it is all bytes streaming here and there, maybe there are a thousand more trades made per second or whatever. So if this is such a whizbang thing that helps the farmer and the baker, how come farmers and bankers aren’t richer, why isn’t bread cheaper? Every now and then there is some glitch and the system crashes and maybe is down for a few hours, and you know, nothing much happens in the way of oh, financial collapse and the end of the world.

I believe you are aware that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Did you also know that jobs in financial gobbledygook are also exploding and that is where you find most of the rich getting richer. Our best educated minds are not working on Beagles inventions for forestalling (for purposes of discussion only) they are pushing around decimal points and getting fabulously rich on it.

You know those commie slogans that sounded so good in the sixties but became a little dated over the last thirty years are beginning to sound better and better lately.

Having a visitor and taking a trip down to Indy this week. I may be able to squeeze out a post tomorrow, but after that I will be out the rest of the week.

What's Wrong With That?

What's crooked about buying low and selling high? Isn't that how everybody makes their money? In the case of us working stiffs, what we are selling is our labor or our time, which cost us nothing to obtain. Our time is financially worthless to us unless we can find some profitable way to spend it. The boss's time is valuable because he can make more money doing boss stuff than he can punching out parts or whatever he hires us to do for him. Sure he makes more money than we do but, if it wasn't for him, we wouldn't be making any money at all. Well, that's not exactly true, we would probably be making money somewhere else, but not as much as we are making where we are, which is why we are where we are instead of somewhere else. Of course there are other considerations, but I'm just talking about economics here.

This reminds me of an old joke, stop me if you've heard this one: Two Polacks bought a bunch of Christmas trees in Cheboygan for ten dollars apiece, loaded them into a truck, took them down to Detroit, and sold them for ten dollars apiece. During the drive home, the one Polack said, "How come we didn't make any money on this trip?" The other Polack replied, "I think we need a bigger truck."

I didn't quite understand how that arbitrage thing worked but, after your explanation, I think I understand it better. If the price on the spot market is substantially lower than the price on the futures market, they buy on the spot market and immediately sell on the futures market, and vice versa. This would have the effect of bringing the two prices closer together  by re-balancing the supply and demand. You're probably right that they don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it to make money. It might be crooked if they conspired together with the intention of artificially manipulating the market, but they wouldn't necessarily have to do that to make it work. All they would need to do is to individually and independently see that there is an opportunity to turn a profit and act on it. Am I still missing something here?

Another thing I don't understand is the relationship between the real wheat being sold on the spot market and the fake wheat on paper being sold on the futures market. I could see it if a flour mill bought some wheat futures because they suspected that the price of wheat might be higher later on than it is now. If the price did indeed go up, they could then take delivery on their contract instead of paying the currently higher price on the spot market. But, from what I read on Wiki a few years ago, I don't think that's what happens. What happens is that the flour mill sells it's futures contract and uses the money to buy real wheat. As near as I can tell, the exchange buys back all the contracts just before the delivery date, so no real wheat changes hands as a result of the contracts. It's been awhile since I read this stuff so, if I have time this weekend, I'll re go look it up and see if I can make more sense of it now than I did then.

Have a good one.

yes they are

I don’t know Beagles, you don’t think they are all crooks? Maybe you have lived too long in the noble north where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and so on, and have lost the old Bohunk fish eye.

When some stranger knocked on the door my mother would open it just a crack and give the guy the full fish eye and say, “You’re trying to sell me something aren’t you.” the implication being that whatever he was trying to sell her was a piece of junk, and ultimately he was out to cheat her. Of course he’d protest that nothing could be further from the truth and his sole purpose was to, to, oh inform her on the latest advancement in science (this was way back when an advancement in science didn’t necessarily have to do with a new app for your super duper phone).

And she knew better, but she would let the guy in anyway, just to confirm what she already knew, that the guy was there to cheat her, and when he finally revealed himself, he had better grab his hat on the way out because she was not going to bother opening it again and throwing it out after him.

She has taught me a lesson I have taken through life: always assume the other guy is out to cheat you, and it has served me well.

Actually my brother in law had a commodities account at one time, for the sake of the family I put a bit of my money into it. I got monthly reports, it went up, it went down. One day somebody fucked up on the decimal point on the report and I had made ten million dollars. Well I was a millionaire for a bit, so I guess that made it all worth it.

But maybe in the commodities market where everybody is dedicated to um, helping out the farmer and the urban wife baking her bread, oh and making an honest living by buying and selling stuff that they have only the slightest idea of what it is but that doesn’t matter because they will never see it anyway, why surely honesty is the order of the day.

That ten percent, my lad, is called a margin. It’s the way people used to buy stocks before 1929. What it means is that whenever the price drops too low to cover that other ninety percent, your money is gone justlikethat, like the morning dew, like the glory that was Rome.

Normally your mention of those angels who drop in every now and then to set things straight just because sent me to the wiki which informed me what it was all about which was:

In economics and finance, arbitrage (/ˈɑrbɨtrɑːʒ/) is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. When used by academics, an arbitrage is a transaction that involves no negative cash flow at any probabilistic or temporal state and a positive cash flow in at least one state; in simple terms, it is the possibility of a risk-free profit after transaction costs. For instance, an arbitrage is present when there is the opportunity to instantaneously buy low and sell high.

Or to put it in Bohunk, “A bunch of crooks.”

The reason that a big scandal is generated whenever one of them is caught with his hand in the cookie jar is that they are pros and they can generally slip their fingers in and out and nobody the wiser. The scandal is that someone did it so badly as to get caught.

They Can't All Be Crooks......Can they?

I found the same definition of "petard" that you did, but I thought that couldn't be it, so I kept looking and was unable to find anything else. Funny how we think we know something for years and years and then come to find out that it ain't so. That's why I seldom claim to know something for absolute certain anymore.

I became interested in commodities futures a few years ago when I heard that you can do it on the internet now. I eventually decided it was not for me, but I learned some interesting things along the way, mostly from Wiki. What surprised me was that nobody ever gets to see the actual commodity or hold it in their hand. In theory, the person who holds the contract at the time it comes due has to "take delivery", but that almost never happens. Even if the contract holder is somebody like a grain elevator company that could actually use the wheat, they sell their contract and use the money to buy real wheat. I think the contracts all end up being reabsorbed into the exchange that brokered them in the first place. I'm not sure what they do with them, but I'm pretty sure that they never get to see the wheat either. Before the contract expires, the traders keep tossing it back and forth between each other like a hot potato, and nobody wants to be the one holding it at the end.

Another thing I learned is that you only need to put up about 10% of the face value of the contract to buy it, the rest of the value is carried on the books as a debt that you owe to the exchange. The debt is paid out of the proceeds when you sell the contract. I don't know what happens if the price really tanks and you can't sell it for anything close to what you owe on it. Maybe they make you jump out of a window or something.

Another thing I learned was that the current price of an active contract usually stays pretty close to what people are currently paying for the real commodity on the "spot market". If it drifts too far away from that, there are people called "arbitrageurs" who step in and buy up enough of the commodity or the contracts to shock the prices back into what they consider the normal range. These guys don't work for the government or anything like that, I think they just do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Well, maybe not, maybe they have such a big stake in the market themselves that they can't afford to let it go haywire, and they can afford to do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn't happen.

While I'm sure there are crooks on Wall Street, just as there are crooks an every other street in the land, I don't think that they're all crooks. It might look like that to the average civilian because we don't understand all the ins and outs of the system. The fact that a big scandal is generated when one of them gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar tells me that it's not the sort of thing that happens every day.

big time traders

When I looked it up in wiki shibboleth was something people could use to see if you belonged to their in group. Maybe it would be something like you’d meet a guy on a train who claimed to be from Chicago, but you would be suspicious so you’d talk about how it never gets too cold at Wrigley Field and if he agreed you would know he wasn’t from Chicago. In wartime it was used by soldiers to detect infiltrators, for instance they’d ask who won the world series last year. That didn’t fit what I was thinking about at all.

But then I looked outside wiki and I found that it could be the mores of a group that would tend to be outdated and a little arcane and that is what I meant.

But petard is spelled petard, and what it was was this little bomb about the size of a quart of milk and you would run up to the enemies gates and set it off (it had an often unreliable fuse) and run like hell, but because of that unreliable fuse it might go off before you got out of your range and you would be hoisted into the air. Not quite the way we think of the word hoisted now, and probably why you and I thought it must be a spear-like thing from which the victim dangled. Another interesting fact I found out on wiki was that petard means fart in French.

Well see, even with your dashing way with words I was scarce able to keep my eyes open during your explanation of options. I’ve heard all this before, after all it all originated right down LaSalle Street a few blocks from where I lived. Did you know that way back when after a farmer harvested his crops he couldn’t just sell it to some fancy pants guy? He had to haul it around from city to city across those muddy roads they had way back then until he found somebody who would pay him something the farmer thought acceptable.

So commodities is a definite step up from that, and despite what I said earlier, I don’t think that it actually lines the pockets of the traders. Well it lines the pockets of certain traders, but others lose their pants. I believe at the end of the day if you add up all the winners and losers it all comes out to a big fat zero, a zero sum game.

So why do they do it? Well why do people play roulette, or much worse video poker? But it’s more like real poker where you can actually win money, whereas video poker the longer you play the surer you are to lose. With poker you can make money off the other guys who don’t play as well as you do, also you can cheat. I think this is what goes on in commodities trading. These guys know the ways of the market, and every now and then the big guys get together and pull off some scam on the poor suckers.

The funny thing is that over the longer run you can use things like knowledge of what the weather is going to be like or if cheerios is going to use some wheat in their mixture and you can have a handle on the way wheat is likely to go. But the shorter the run less predictable the price is, like over the long run you can bet on temps getting higher, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a bad winter every now and then, and even in that bad winter you might get a warm day now and then.

Well there is this whole thing about randomness, is their a pattern to it, mathematics says sort of in certain cases, but not really. Well this is not purely random, there are factors like those long term things and probably if the commodity went up the day before it is more likely to go down the next day, and probably daily weather has some effect, and the fate of the local sports team, and even if these guys can get a .0001 edge they will make a fortune so they conjure these elaborate computer programs, but then so do their opponents. And surely, well we know they do because some to do end up in the slammer, they get together in the club and set down their cigars and hatch out some plan. I think Beagles should be glad that in the old days you had to do loathsome things like wear a suit and live in a big city to get into the game so he never got into it otherwise greater Beaglesonia might be the size of one of those Yukon deeds you used to get from

Quaker Oats.

A Piece of the Action

I thought I knew what "shibboleth" meant, but I looked it up and found out I was wrong. I was right about it being Jewish, though. I still think I know what "petard" means, but I think you're spelling it wrong. I think it's something like "pickard" or "picard", but I couldn't find it under those or any other spellings that I could think of. Be that as it may, I still think it's a type of spear or pike. In the old days, soldiers would sometimes stick the head of a defeated enemy on their spear point and carry it around like a trophy. To be hoisted on your own petard, is when your enemy defeats you and displays your head on your own spear, I suppose to keep from getting his spear dirty. As a  modern figure of speech, it means you screwed yourself while trying to screw somebody else. Funny, though, the Blogger spell checker says that your spelling is correct and mine is incorrect. Let me know what you find out.

All those speculative financial products, like futures contracts and hedge funds, come under the broad general category of "derivatives". That's basically a vehicle for repackaging risk into smaller units and selling them off one piece at a time. Say this farmer wants to plant a thousand acres of wheat this year, but he needs some help with the planting costs and he is nervous about putting all those eggs in one basket. So he sells this futures contract to somebody who wants a piece of the action but doesn't want to buy the whole farm. What the farmer is doing is sharing his risk, along with the profits he hopes to make if everything goes well. With the stock market, you might want to buy a bunch of this company's stock but, like the farmer, all that risk makes you nervous. So you buy some of the stock and also buy an option to buy more of it, on some future date, at today's prices. If the stock goes up you will be buying the second portion at bargain rates. If the stock goes down, you can let the option expire and you're only out the nominal fee that you paid for it. You will have lost money on the first portion, but not as much as you would have lost if you had bought all that stock at once. The guy who sold you the option was betting that the stock wouldn't go up, but he didn't risk as much as if he had sold you all his stock in the first place.

The reason the high rollers fool around with all those derivatives is so that they can keep all their money in the game, while mitigating the risk that playing the game entails. Derivatives are usually pretty liquid, which means you can always find a buyer if you want to dump it and put your money into something else. You may lose money in the process, but hopefully not a much as you would have by holding onto the derivative long term. One reason a guy might want to sell a product at a loss is that he thinks he sees something better and wants to put his money into that. Another reason might be that he thinks the price will go down even further and he wants to cut his loses and get out while the gettin's good. For every person who wants to sell, there is somebody else who wants to buy, if the price is right. If the buyer and seller agree on the price, they make the trade.  If they can't agree on the price, they continue to look around for a better deal. That's why it's a full time job, not recommended for the likes of you and me.

If I was a younger man, I might be interested in getting into that line of work. One reason I never did was that you had to live in the city and wear a suit and tie to do that stuff in those days. Nowadays, you can do it all on your computer from the comfort of your own home, but you still have all that stress. Who needs that at my age?

petards and shibboleths and other fancy stuff

You’re right in that what are called big words, are frequently not big words in the syllable department, they are mainly just unfamiliar words. There is always a danger for those of us who read a lot where we read this word that we really like, and we would like to work it into our conversation, but we have no idea how to pronounce it. Generally we can get away with it because our friends have not heard the word before, but every now and then some learned guy comes along and corrects us and we look like fools, not just because we pronounced the word wrong, but because we were pretentious enough to use it. We are hoisted by our own petards. I think I looked up what a petard means once, but I have long forgotten what it was, but I know that it exists, and that one can be lifted by one. I wonder about the part with ‘my’ petard. Is it the sort of thing that a person owns? Is it the sort of thing that you could carry around and maybe put into the umbrella stand, and when asked what is that odd thing one could reply, “My petard,” and since nobody knows what a petard is they couldn’t challenge you, and maybe they would think it was pretty cool and they would start carrying around their own petards, but of course they wouldn’t be real petards, just whatever it was you called one and then, but I digress.

Swearing is an odd thing. I think I picked it up just hanging around Talmans and smoking cigs and trying to look tough and cool. I remember at one point early in college I got a phone call from a girl early in the morning when I was still hungover and I told this story about what happened over the weekend and it was fucking this and fucking that and then when I realized what I had been saying, to a girl, I was totally embarrassed and apologized profusely.

But when I became a hippie we swore all the time. It was something everybody did to show how free and open we were and not bound by the shibboleths of the establishment (I am going to look up petards and shibboleths right after I post this). But I had to remember to curb this when I was in politer society. Every now and then something would slip out, but this happened less and less as hippiedom died out and I merged back into regular society. Anymore it’s almost like a beeper effect where when I am about to say fuck some voice intercedes and asks if I really want to say this and maybe I do and maybe I don’t.

I think the whole concern is overdone. There are only like six or seven words and there are only so many ways you can arrange them, and it all sounds the same. Every now and then some so-called reporter may claim some female rock start swears to make a longshoreman blush, but it’s not like you can go any deeper than saying fuck a lot, there is not that much to it.

I have the same impression as you about the hedge funds, sort of a hedge on a hedge, with probably a bit of folderol folded in, a little sleight of the hand where the fast-talking money man is asking you which shell do you think the money you invested is under, and oops, it turns out it is this other shell, and your money is gone, or possibly it is in the shell shifter’s pocket.

I have heard commodities explained to me, and to some extent it makes sense but then it seems to take a quick twisty turn and loses me. I guess the main thing I think of is that this money that the winners take away in their pockets where does it come from? I turn my Bohunk fish eye on it and I think it has to come from the growers and the eaters. And these hedge fund things they are just commodities squared, or cubed, or more likely in one of those eleventh dimensions that those string theorist guys talk about so knowingly.

And now they have these computer analog thingies where they can make like a trillion trades a second and nobody knows what is going on. Every now and then there is some computer glitch and the board is off for an hour or two and what happens, nothing. The birds still sing, outside my window the cars continue their endless drive over the lake shore drive bridge, in the north country Beagles nods off waiting for a dear in his cozy blind.

The hell with them all, let’s close them all down. But then we would have to give them a hearing, and as they spoke and spoke my eyes would glaze over and I would soon be in slumberland. One thing these hedgers have done is taken potentially the most interesting subject in the world, money, and made it boring. We are all in their thrall.

Swinging Both Ways

Get your mind out of the gutter, this has nothing to do with any kind of sex!

 It may be true that language is used to keep people in their place, but the people themselves are at least partly to blame for this. I have occasionally been criticized for using "big words" when the word actually wasn't all that big, maybe two or three syllables. I can't think of an example right now, but it usually involves a word that is not commonly used by the person with whom I am talking. I think that, when someone says "big words", what he really means is "unfamiliar words". It's not necessarily that the person doesn't understand the word, or that he's never heard it before, it's just a word that he and his friends don't normally use. The reason they don't normally use the word is that they don't want to come across as some kind of intellectual, like that was a bad thing or something.

One of the first things I learned in the army was how quickly a closed group of people can evolve a language all their own. We all noticed that, after only a few weeks of basic training, we had adopted a dialect that would seem strange or even incomprehensible to the civilians back home. It was a running joke that we were worried that, when we went home on leave, we would sit down at the dinner table and casually say, "Pass the fucking salt." It wasn't just the profanity either, there was all kinds of military jargon, interspersed with foreign phrases and mispronunciations that we picked up from the sergeants. I don't know about the other guys, but whenever I went home on leave, and after I had been discharged, all that stuff quickly fell away in a matter of days. I think that was because people kept interrupting me and asking me to explain what I had just said, and I got tired of doing that. It kind of defeats the whole purpose of communication if nobody knows what you're talking about.

That's probably why subcultures, countercultures, and even mini-cultures develop their own mannerisms of speech. I don't think they do it on purpose, it's just natural to want to be quickly understood by your associates, and it's less important to be understood by outsiders. The more isolated a group is from the general public, the more quickly they will evolve their own dialect and, the longer they are so isolated, the more likely it is that their dialect will evolve into a totally different language.

I don't know a lot about those hedge funds, but I have picked up a little of it from watching the Bloomberg Channel. I think that a hedge fund is just a mutual fund that deals primarily with hedges. Okay, a hedge is just a way of, like, hedging your bets. I understand it better as it applies to commodities futures. A farmer plants a bunch of wheat and sells a "futures contract" on part of the expected harvest. They frequently do this to pay for the costs associated with planting, but that's not important for our purposes here. What both the buyer and seller of the contract are doing is betting on what they think the price of wheat will be at harvest time. If the price goes down, the farmer makes out and, if the price goes up, the buyer of he contract makes out. Actually, the contract will likely be bought and sold multiple times before the wheat is harvested, but that's not important for our purposes here. Like I said, the farmer makes out on the contract if the price goes below that, because he has already sold the wheat at the higher price. At the same time, he is losing money on the real time wheat that he has to sell, but the gain he made on the contract helps offset that loss. As the harvest time approaches, the farmer might re-evaluate his position and buy the contract back, in which case he may lose money on the contract, which is offset by the gain he made selling his real time wheat. I think the reason the farmers hedge their bets like that is it enables them to keep all their available land in production. Otherwise, they would have to make a decision each spring about how much wheat to plant and what other crops to plant to make up for the wheat that they didn't plant. I think that hedging in the stock market works somewhat the same way. They buy and sell these options, betting on what the price of the stock will be in the future. This enables them to keep all their money involved, while mitigating the risks they are taking. They don't gain as much if their bets pay off, but they don't lose as much if they don't.

There are two main categories of people who put money into the stock market, investors and speculators. Hedge funds and futures trading are for the speculators, and are not recommended for the investors like you and me. It's a full time high stress job for people who thrive on that sort of thing, not for the aged, the infirm, or the faint of heart.

empowering ourselves

You’re right that the Oxford comma doesn’t have much to do with Oxford. In some places it is known as the Cambridge comma, and who knows what all. At some point Oxford probably endorsed it and the name got connected to it. A guy named Pete who I used to know in Champaign briefly worked in a liquor store at a time when we knew another guy named Pete, so he became Liquor Store Pete. Fifty years later he is still known as Liquor Store Pete.

The word I hate the most is utilize, which means simply use, so why use a longer word when a shorter word will do just exactly as well? Well we all know that a longer word always sounds more high toned. And I guess it sounds more scientific and specific. It seems like a lot of these kinds of words come from the military and to a lesser extent the government.

Speaking of the government, well more specifically the politicians is one I really hate, the phrase that passing some bill or electing some jerk will empower people, and you wonder gee how will it empower them and then you realize that the phrase itself has no meaning. When I worked for my little state agency I remember how I would go on rants there about the stupid phrase, and I guess it is a show of the high regard in which they esteemed me that the next time we revised our mission statement, there was the word empowerment plumb in the middle of it. Not only did we prepare the workforce for the twentieth century, now we also empowered them.

I am proud that I spent eleven years serving, and empowering, the people of the state of Illinois and never ended up in the slammer.

When I had my brief flirtation of becoming a lawyer, (I think I would have wowed them at courtroom theatrics, but at poring over dusty tomes late into the night, probably not), I ran into standard written English which is the form that you have to use in your lawyerly writings. I perused its canons for a bit and I saw where it didn’t approve of talking about a bunch of people. Well that’s a bit stodgy, but then the phrase has a sort of slangy sound to my ear. But then I learned that you can’t even refer to a bunch of bananas. What the hell? What is it, a conglomeration of bananas?

Part of the reason I never became a lawyer. Well compared to the poring over dusty tomes late into the night not so big a reason, but anyway I never empowered myself in the law, and I never got to pride myself over that.

Well you know me Beagles, I have always prided myself on being a man of the people (except when the people don’t share my views on a subject, and then I scarcely admit to knowing them), and this rubbed me the wrong way. This whole thing where only the language that the upper crust speaks is worthy and other forms are wrong is just another way to keep the uppers up and the bottoms on the bottom. Well that may be just a sentiment of the sixties, the sort of thing you could roar at a demonstration and all your buddies would reply, “Right on.” In the cold light of day, you have to wonder why THEY (the upper crust) would even bother with using language to keep the lower crust down when they have so many other more effective tools, like paying to elect gasbags and all that hedge fund type of crap where they come back dripping with money.

What the hell does hedge funding have to do with making shoes, growing corn? Oh, it performs some important sort of market function, they tell us in their breezy standard written English, nothing you would understand, all you need to know is that by not cracking down on banking practices you are actually empowering yourself, and you could empower yourself even more by voting for Joe Blow who is against ever raising taxes on us job creators, make that job empowerers.  

Weekend Research Report

I'm with the Oxford guys on that comma thing, although I didn't know that the Oxford guys had anything to do with it. I was taught that both forms are correct, but I always preferred the Oxford way because it more clearly expresses the thought, like you said. I was not aware of the controversy about "hopefully", and I still don't see what's controversial about it. People make up new words all the time, indeed, all words were once new words. What does bug me is how people say "I have always prided myself" instead of "I have always taken pride". I mean, how does one pride oneself? Come to think of it, "taken pride" doesn't make a lot of sense either. It probably would be more meaningful to say "I have always felt pride", or "it makes me proud". I mean, how exactly does one "take pride"?

I did some reading on Wiki this weekend, but I didn't take notes or quote any sources because I couldn't find one that supports my position. Wiki has a lot of material on global warming, and I couldn't possibly read it all, so I kind of scanned around to get a general idea of what's out there. Like that Mars thing, there are numerous proposed  solutions to global warming, but most of them have not gotten off the drawing board because their authors haven't been able to persuade anybody to finance them. I didn't find anything like my carbon sucking machine, but there is one proposal to put a bunch of giant mirrors into orbit to reflect some of the Sun's rays away from the Earth. I think that one is at least as absurd as my proposal, and yet there are learned men out there who seem to take it seriously. One technique, called "carbon capture", has actually been tried a few times, and it works, but it's too expensive, raising the price of electricity by 40%. The idea is to filter out the carbon dioxide from the smoke before it even goes up the smokestack. This gas can then be injected deep underground, where it can be used to force more oil and natural gas out of formations that have been considered depleted.

I found considerable discussion about how green plants take carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground, which is how all that fossil fuel got there in the first place. Proposals to enhance this effect range from saving the rain forest to genetically modifying plants so that they will do more of what they already do. I did not find anything about plant growth spontaneously increasing as the world gets warmer and wetter, which would make global warming self limiting, probably because no one has figured out how to make money from that. (That's an opinion, not a fact.) One fact that I did write down is that the government sold the last of its GM stock on December 10, 2013, but that doesn't have anything to do with global warming.

language wars

I read a bit about languages, and one thing that stands out is the difference between spoken and written. We are born to speak languages. If people don’t have a language when they are growing up they will invent one, the way twins develop their own language if raised together, which sadly they drop when they pick up the languages of their parents. People who aren’t exposed to a language by about four, like in that movie Nell, even when later taught a language can never speak it well.

Spoken language is basically something humans make up and these guys who come afterwards and try to make rules, like the plural of goose is geese, are only recording what is already being done and formulating it as a rule.

Of course you can’t really judge spoken language because it is written on the air, but the written is written on paper so it lasts quite a bit longer. As long as there were only a few educated people writing the language they could police themselves, but once every Tom, Dick, and Harry could write (or sort of write), it was Katy bar the door. Notice how I said ‘Tom, Dick, and Harry,’ and not ‘Tom, Dick and Harry.’ The former has two commas, and is called the Oxford comma, the latter has one and is called, well I don’t know, the anti-Oxford comma.

This is a controversy. The Oxford group thinks it just makes sense if all things are equal, like if you say for sandwiches we have ham, turkey, and peanut butter. The anti people say, well everybody knows that a comma is just shorthand for ‘and,’ so if we stick that second comma in it has like a double comma so it should be ‘ham, turkey and peanut butter.’

But then say the Oxfordites, of whom I am one, that makes it sound like there are only two kinds of sandwiches, ham, and turkey and peanut butter. Oh for Chrissake say the Oxfordites anybody can tell there is no such thing as a turkey and peanut butter sandwich. What if it’s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich answers my side? If you say ‘ham, turkey, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches’ under the Oxford rules you know right away there are three kinds of sandwiches, whereas if you say ‘ham, turkey, peanut butter, and jelly, it is obvious that there are four. This difference cannot be expressed in the anti Oxford manner, therefore that manner should be dismissed out of hand. I’ll dismiss you out of hand, say the antis, and anyway look, our method saves a comma, saves ink, saves paper, saves the forests. Oh pshaw say the Oxfordites, a little bitty comma doesn’t mean shit in this cockamamie world, and speaking of sandwiches how would you like a knuckle sandwich, and I mean a thumb, fingers, and knuckle sandwich?

And so the debate goes amongst the genteel cap and gowners in their high ivy towers while in the streets the rabble and the raffish sometimes they use the Oxford, sometimes the anti Oxford, and it’s nothing they think about very much.

Do you remember the controversy about the use of the word ‘hopefully,’ as in hopefully Beagles will solve global warming? There is no such word claimed the antis, you can’t just convert an adjective to an adverb just like that. Of course we do that all the time, but that doesn’t make it right, and anyway the word just didn’t sound right to the delicate shell-like ears of the educated antis who were manning the walls of proper English against the barbarian hordes of well barbarians and ad men, and sloppy writers, and probably commies, because they are always into any fight to destroy civilization.

But basically the pro side said fuck a bunch of you stodges and kept on saying it and anymore I think you see the word all the time and the stodges may turn up their noses, but it doesn’t do any good anymore to say anything so they don’t.

I think that valley girl was a real thing, but it was maybe just an LA thing until Frank Zappa wrote that song and teen age girls across the nation thought it was so cool that they adopted it, and I think it still exists today. Well I hear it, but I don’t know if they are mocking it or just doing it. That’s the trouble in these modern times, you can’t tell when something is being mocked or if it is being done seriously.

Just another sign of the world going to hell in a handbasket, a streak of lightning car, and a moon unit, nothing to be done about it though, unless hopefully Beagles invents something to stop it.

Ain't English a Funny Language?

I think what you said about English is basically correct. If you look back as little as century or two, you will find that the rules of spelling and grammar haven't always been the same as they are now. If you look back much farther than that, it's almost like it's a different language altogether. Then there's all those dialects and accents, but I think the other languages have those too. When radio and television were still pretty new, the experts predicted that they would cause dialects and accents to disappear. That has happened to some extent, but radio and TV have spawned a few accents of their own. Remember that "valley girl" thing that was going around a few decades ago? That had to come from TV, I find it hard to believe that anybody ever talked like that in the real world, or even in California. The internet has spawned a dialect of its own too, but it's mostly used by the younger people. I mean, like, you and I are both veterans of the internet, and we don't talk like that. (LOL)

The reason I'm tossing all these pies into the sky is that, having accepted, for the purposes of discussion only, that global warming is real, I am trying to come up with a way to fix it without raising taxes or increasing the price of energy. It wouldn't hurt for you to participate in this effort but, since you have already advocated raising taxes and/or prices, I suppose it would be counter productive to your purposes.

Last night, right in the middle of my rambling on the subject, it occurred to me that natural green plants might be our salvation. They already do what I wanted my proposed carbon sucking machine to do, and they do it for free. I saw something on TV awhile back that said somebody had already thought of this and conducted an actual experiment about it. They raised a bunch of plants in a controlled environment with an increased level of carbon in the atmosphere. The plants did grow faster in this experiment, but not nearly fast enough to suck up all the excess carbon in the test environment. It occurred to me at the time that they didn't say anything about increasing the ambient temperature at the same time that they increased the carbon, which is what is allegedly happening in the real world. It dawned on me last night that, with the ice caps melting and the sea levels rising, the oceans will soon be encroaching on the land, which will give them more surface area which, along with the increasing temperature, should induce more evaporation. More evaporation has got to lead to more precipitation, what goes up must come down. Increased temperature, precipitation, and atmospheric carbon has got to produce more and bigger plants, which will suck up more carbon, which will reduce the greenhouse effect, which will bring everything around full circle, sooner or later. Additionally, since much of our population and heavy industry is located near the sea coasts, rising sea levels will wipe out a lot of both, which will reduce carbon emissions even further. You and I are pretty safe because Lake Michigan is about 600 feet above sea level, and I don't think anyone is predicting the ocean levels will rise that much. Okay, it's only a theory, but so is most of what passes for science nowadays.

President Theodore Roosevelt was called a progressive, you know, and he was a Republican. Many of the programs he implemented would be called liberal today, which might be why he couldn't get nominated for a second term and had to start his own party. I liked him in spite of all that because he was an avid sportsman. Too bad we don't have somebody like that around today. All we would need to do is get him to turn gay and smoke pot and he might be the great unifying force that this country needs.

Looking up the GM stock deal will be this weekend's project. Then, if I have enough time, I'll try to find out if anybody else has come up with my "plants are going to save the world" theory. I find it hard to believe that I am the only one smart enough to think that up, but I have been surprised before.

Have a good one.

why beagles kan't spel

Your spelling looked a bit odd to me, but I thought what the hell, surely Beagles must know, so I used your version and sure enough that little red underline told me that I couldn’t do that, and as I recall even spellcheck wouldn’t help me out because it was too far off base. What I do in these situations is just google the word, and google has that thing where if you start out the word it will complete it for you.

But how much nicer it would be if we spoke some reasonable language instead of English? I remember maybe the first day in Spanish class when Senor Chadwick said everything in Spanish is spelled just the way it is written, and I was floored, what a concept? Do the other languages know about this?

And of course they do, and I believe most, if not all of them are, let’s call it phonetically spelled. So what’s the deal with English?

Well of course it is a mishmash of Latin and Germanic, but it seems to me that it goes beyond that. There are things like eight and ate, there are all these different sets of rules on how to make sounds applied willy nilly.

Then there is this thing where words are borrowed from other languages. But if you notice when other languages borrow words from English they respell them to make them phonetic in their language. We should be calling it lazay fair, maybe lahzay fare. Ah hell we need to rethink our rules on how to make sounds. Why should there be two different rules for making the same sounds, both rules I might add which are sometimes enforced and sometimes not for no particular reason.

Back when I was subbing and a kid asked why is two plus two four, I could pull four pennies from my pocket and divide them into two groups of two, and say, ‘See.” But if he asked how come eating was ate and the number was eight, I had to shrug my shoulders.

Well instead of blaming the internet and tv, I am going to blame education. Back in the days before the printing press, everybody knew how to speak the language, but only an elect few knew how to write it and since they were all educated they had learned the rules and they spelled well. And if they ever weren’t sure they could look at what some other guy had written and do it his way, and since the other guy was educated they could be pretty sure that he was right.

I’m kind of pulling this out of my ass, but I think England became literate sooner than the rest of Europe, because they were more industrialized and democratic, more people learned to write then in Europe at the time. But the problem with this is, that they weren’t all that educated so they didn’t really know the rules, so they just kind of made them up, spelled the word the way they figured it ought to be spelled, and other people saw how they spelled it and they followed them.

In the rest of Europe literacy came slower and more from the top down so the rules of spelling were more often obeyed.

That’s my theory as to why English is less phonetic than other languages. A lot of holes in it I noticed as I was writing it out, but that’s why you should write out the things that you believe, to see if they make any sense. I’m sure you agree.

Maybe we can get onto this instead of why don’t we invent this and why don’t we invent that, because inventing is not like building a road where all you need is some paving stones and some strong backs. Why don’t we just invent a machine that will keep the world clean and make it so that we never get sick and we never grow old?

I think generally people use climate change to mean global warming, it’s just a gentler, slightly deceptive, phrase, like the way a pol will call himself a progressive rather than a liberal, a word which the right has thoroughly trashed, even though they both pretty much mean the same thing.

I think the gov has sold off it’s GM stock, but I am going to leave it to you to figure it out, because why do I have to be the guy that always goes to wiki?