Good Morning
I just got notice that I don’t have any work today, which if it weren’t for the financial strain this puts on us I would be rejoicing, because we finally got some damn snow. The good the bad and the ugly, obviously not in that order, but I do like to cite a movie every now and then, especially when my day becomes FUBAR. On top of that I can’t seem to pick a font color. What’s this all about then, huh? Maybe, since I don’t have any clear plan I should wing it as best I can. I mean snow is good, we’ll take it and be happy. It’s just that yesterday was kind of a clusterfuck as well. I drove Nell to the dentist in Las Vegas where she was to have major work done, only their phones are screwed up and we couldn’t verify the appointment time and wound up getting there an hour and a half early.

 

 

Nell and I had a lovely morning in town killing time. We don’t get to hang out together in town and that part of the day was very nice. We found out there is a new fabric store next to our local bookstore, Tomb on the Range where Nell picked up a couple of Ann Rule books to read during her upcoming week off. Yeah, we think the Hospital is hurting and they are firing and laying off people left and right. One of their new rules is no office personnel when no doctor is in. The doctor is on vacation next week which means Nell is too, unfortunately without pay though. I read the preface for a book called "The Accidental guerrilla, Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One" It looked pretty good, from what I could gather without glasses. I mentioned to Nell at the checkout by way of defense for not reading more, that perhaps my astigmatism was causing only three or four per line to be readable, putting a sizable dent in my speed reading capabilities.

I got a good little giggle our my honey for that crack.  The fabric store is called "Thread Bear." They had beautiful fabrics. I saw all sorts of possibilities. My favorites were the batiks, Oh so pretty. I mentioned that I would love to have a shirt made out of any one of those. smiles. Then it was off to a manly store where we  were just as happy. We went across town to Hays Plumbing and Heating. Actually it wasn’t the first hardware store we went to yesterday morning.  We walked across the street from the dentist to BTU building materials looking for an adapter. Adapters are the bane of the home repair do it yourselfer. In this particular case I was after an adapter to convert pipe threads to atsm threads.  Good grief.

I’m not even sure I can tell this twisted little story in a proper fashion to give this adventure any gaiety in honorable mention.  While I was at dad’s the other day asking if he had a saber saw, which he did, and we found right away in their barn, we spent some time looking for the blades. During the search pop said, "Weren’t you looking for a 3/4 inch pipe thread tap?"  "Why yes I am." He showed me an oldtimey  wooden box with taps and dies in it. This part of the story is another reason I called this BMN "The Good the Bad and the Ugly" There it was, the blessed 3/4 inch tap. Just to prove it was for pipe threads, it was screwed into a 3/4 inch pipe coupling for safe keeping. 

Now at this point the story isn’t complete so I shouldn’t hex it by suggesting that an absolute solution is in place at this point.  Nevertheless, I naively took my prize home and used it to tap the 3/4 inch threads into the top of the wind turbine where the cable  comes out of the tower and goes to the alternator.
You may be able to see the hole in the top of the turbine housing in this picture.  The threaded hole is shiny silver.

 

 

zoom
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James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

March 9, 2009
Forget about "Recovery"

      At the risk of confirming my critics’ dumbest charge — that I am a "doomer" — the mandate of clarity requires me to ask: to what state of affairs do we expect to recover? If the answer is a return to an economy based on building ever more suburban sprawl, on credit card over-spending, on routine securitized debt shenanigans in banking, and on consistently lying to ourselves about what reality demands of us, then we are a mortally deluded nation. We’re done with that, we’re beyond that now, we’ve crossed the frontier and left that all behind, and we’d better get our heads straight about it.
      I maintain that there are countless constructive tasks waiting to occupy us on a long national "to do" list for rebuilding a national economy, but they are way different than the ones currently preoccupying government and the mainstream media. The Obama White House, Congress, and The New York Times are hung up on exercises in futility — "rescuing" banks and insurance companies that cannot be rescued (because they are hopelessly trapped in "black hole" credit default swaps contracts), and re-starting a "consumer" binge that was completely crazy in the first place, based, as it was, on a something-for-nothing standard-of-living.
     Meanwhile, if the buzz on the blogosphere is a measure of anything — and I think it is — then a new consensus is forming out there about where to start doing things differently. Unfortunately after less than two months in office, President Obama finds himself awkwardly behind-the-curve on this. It begins with the understanding that a general bank rescue is hopeless and, going a step further, that the people who caused the train wreck of "innovative" securities have to be prosecuted. The public’s collective voice on this is muted but growing. It has been muted by the general air of blackmail that the banks have used to enthrall policy and opinion — the "too big to fail" idea — in effect holding the nation’s future for ransom.
      Last week, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo hauled Bank of America chief Ken Lewis into his office to explain who, exactly, received an aggregate several billion dollars in bonuses late in 2008 after the US Treasury forked over billions of dollars in TARP money to his bank. That was a good start. Mr. Lewis, being lawyered-up to the max, had the temerity to reply that answering the question would compromise his ability to keep talented people in his employ. For that impertinence alone, Mr. Lewis ought to be dragged over fifteen miles of broken chardonnay bottles behind a GMC Yukon — but that is not how we do things in American jurisprudence. To be more realistic, a simple indictment would be in order, and then Mr. Lewis can answer this question, and a few others, in the comfort of an air-conditioned courtroom. Ultimately, that might lead to Mr. Lewis becoming the wife of a bodybuilder in one of New York State’s houses of correction — a just outcome that would go far in rejiggering the nation’s expectations about how people in authority ought to behave. And such an outcome might lead to the conviction of many other brides-to-be from the Wall Street debutante pool.
      Now it has come to light, just last week in the wake of AIG’s latest bail-out, that previous AIG bail-out money to the tune of $50 billion was distributed to a set of banks including Goldman Sachs (former employer of then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and then New York Federal Reserve Governor Tim Geithner), plus Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Mr. Lewis’s Bank of America, and a long list of European banks with operations in the USA. Since the transactions took place in New York State, the investigation of these irregularities alone could solve the unemployment problem here if NY Attorney General Cuomo were given a free hand in hiring staff to depose everyone involved — including the hiring of caterers to bring in coffee and meals for round-the-clock proceedings.
      All of this raises another awkward question: where is United States Attorney General Eric Holder in this situation? Surely the federal statutes offer some grounds for inquiring about the misuse of Treasury funds — and many other issues arising from Wall Street’s stupendous orgy of misbehavior. What I’m hearing out in the blogosphere is a growing clamor to call people to account before we are really able to move on to the massive task-list that awaits us in rebuilding our economy.
      The bigger question for now is whether any of these authorities will act effectively before the public simply goes apeshit and starts burning down Greenwich, Connecticut. The dangerous shift in public mood is liable to occur with shocking swiftness, in the manner of "phase change," where one moment you see a bewildered bunch of flabby clown-citizens vacuously enraptured by "American Idol," and the next moment they are transformed into a vicious mob hoisting flaming brands to the window treatments of a hedge funder’s McMansion. The moment of opportunity for avoiding that outcome is looking sickeningly slim right now.
      Another thing that President Obama can set into motion anytime — and pull himself back to the head of the curve of leadership — is to either by executive order or by proposal to congress, shut down the credit default swap system for a period of time while procedures are drawn up to place all these dubious contracts in a "clearing" market, where the holders of them will have to come clean about what they’re sitting on. The lack of this procedure is allowing zombie banks to hold the United States hostage for never-ending bail-out ransoms. None of these banks are going to survive another six months anyway, so the basic blackmail motif that the whole money system will collapse if ransoms are not paid is a bluff that has to be called sooner or later in any case. So Mr. Obama might as well get on with it.
      Once these two matters are dealt with — an earnest start-up of prosecutions and disabling the credit default swap blackmail racket — then perhaps a stressed-out and impoverished public might be induced to not go apeshit and instead get on with the mighty task of rebuilding our nation along lines that have a plausible future.

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Also from Kunstler’s Blog

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More from The Daily Grunt Archive

March 4, 2009

Letter from a farmer

Dear Jim:

You stated in your blog today that you were anticipating financing problems for the 2009 crop year. That couldn’t be further from the truth. If there is one exception to the high risk borrowing, it would be agriculture. Having learned some difficult lessons in the 80’s, farmers by and large are in great financial condition in comparison to Wall Street and Main Street. The reason: Most farmers have little debt leverage. Ground that has been selling for astronomical levels over the past 5 years has mostly been purchased by farmers – FOR CASH! There will be no difficulty in obtaining financing for the 2009 crop. The banks would like for nothing more than to get their grimy hands on some prime farmland as collateral for operating loans.

I am a relatively small farmer with about 1,200 acres of row crops including corn, wheat, soybeans, milo and sunflowers in SE Illinois. My biggest fear isn’t financing for 2009 crops. My biggest fear is the continuing collapse in commodity prices. Current price levels for grains won’t come close to breakeven. My biggest fear is that once I plant my crop, prices will continue to plummet and I’ll be left stranded with huge input costs for fuel, machinery, labor, land, fertilizer seed, etc. Our input costs have not dropped in synch with commodity prices.

The other possibility I see is a systemic collapse of the banking system which would leave us with the counterparty risk of not having a viable end user to purchase what we grow. At the moment, my best strategy would be to leave my land idle and preserve my capital instead of throwing it on the crap table. It will require approximately $ 375,000.00 for me to plant my crops this year. We are about 45 days from normal planting date. It’s getting pretty scary at the moment.

I’m afraid as farmers we’ll be diving headlong into the abyss. . .

Dave Burt
Burt Farms

http://www.burtfarms.com

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Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2009 March 13

 

 

Hickson Compact Group 90
Credit: NASA, ESA, R. Sharples (Univ. Durham)

 

 

Explanation: Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups (HCGs). This sharp Hubble image shows one such galaxy group, HCG 90, in startling detail. Three galaxies are revealed to be strongly interacting: a dusty spiral galaxy stretched and distorted between a pair of large elliptical galaxies. The close encounter will trigger furious star formation. On a cosmic timescale, the gravitational tug of war will eventually result in the merger of the trio into a large single galaxy. The merger process is now understood to be a normal part of the evolution of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. HCG 90 lies about 100 million light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. This Hubble view spans about 80,000 light-years at that estimated distance. Of course, Hickson Compact Groups also make for rewarding viewing for Earth-bound astronomers with more modest sized telescopes.

 

Tomorrow’s picture: star trails