Make Yr Own Band

DAVOS: Pronouncements From the Sanatorium

Part of the big uncertainty is where the bodies are buried – R.G. Rajan, former chief economist of the IMF.

In Davos, the world’s elite are meeting in banquet rooms to discuss our fate. With celebrity appearances and all the usual scribes in attendance, they are making pronouncements from the sanatorium. And the reports so far are downright bizarre.

Talk on high of “Corporate Responsibility” and “Socially Conscious Capitalism”; Talk of “crisis sessions from the hotel suites”. Really? What is this, ANXIETY in the AGE OF GREAT MODERATION?

Bill Gates is slated to issue a call to arms: A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century. “People are asking themselves” said Klaus Schwab, host of the event “What are the boundaries of the capitalist system? They think that the market may not always be the best mechanism for providing solutions.” Has George Soros comandeered the control room with a pack of penitent philanthropists?

Man, this latest Market Crash has got people more than a little worked up? Could it be that the profit reports are finally reflecting what any Joe has been experiencing for years, if not generations? Sweet Jesus, will the lion really lie down with the lamb?

How To Help Hal (Part 1)

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Hal is a marketing executive from Silicon Valley. Hal is age 51. Pictured here in a modest blue collar dress shirt, in front of a suburban looking backyard fence, Hal is the exemplar of a recent New York Times front-page story chronicling the woes of a new class of American society: the middle class rich.

Hal works 12 hours a day, arriving at work at 7am most mornings. He works an average of 10 hours on the weekend. He has a $1.2 million home that is paid off and he and his spouse are worth an estimated $3.5 million. Good job, Hal.

Hal says “a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to.” For fun, let’s see what Hal might be able to do if he liquidated a mere 1/2 of his assets. $3.5 mill / 2 = $1.75 mill. Say the feds were to take almost half. Hal would be left with about $1 million to play around with while the other $1.75 mill would continue to mature in the diversified investments of his choice.

With roughly $1 million – free and clear – Hal and his family may choose to: Purchase a seaside villa on the South Coast of Jamaica. 8 bed, 8 bath w/ “beautiful ocean and mountain views”… more details

At a mere $675,000 (he could probably do better with a little leg-work) minus $25,000 to grease some local wheels, Hal & Co could settle down w/ roughly $350,000. According to the World Bank, an average Jamaican family subsists on under $4000 a year. If they could squeeze by on merely 3Xs the local average – $12,000/year – Hal & Co should be able to make it until Old Hal turns 80. That’s 3 years past the average life expectancy for an American and 5 years past that of a Jamaican. Not bad, Hal.

Do you have any other thoughts of how to help Hal?

THIS JUST IN:

A FANTASTIC EMAIL CAME IN THIS MORNING:

these rainless regions all is necessarily silence, desolation, and a
precipitation of moisture from the air, would probably transform the to
inundate the districts where they fall. Immense torrents stream down
Mediterranean, nor are there any rains over any portion of the valley
on the other hand, air moves from cold mountains toward warm and sunny
named Ptolemy. Ptolemy made it his kingdom, and left it, at his death,
from north to south, and lying side by side. The most easterly of these
and ranges of mountains in Abyssinia, called the Mountains of the Moon.
arrival and departure of ships of war to land or to take away bodies of
sway in the palaces of the Ptolemies, and among the nobles of their
means of which, through our powers of mental conception, we may take a
such a class as a whole, the inevitable result; for the innocent until
the time of her birth, continued much the same. In fact, the We can not
soften the picture which is exhibited to our view in the from Lathyrus
at the instance of his mother–espoused the other brother.

AND I REPLIED:
THANKS,
GIVE MOTHER MY LOVE,
LEE BOB

Why is Slate so Smug?

Regarding Obama Messiah Watch at Slate.com “which will periodically highlight gratuitously adoring biographical details that appear in newspaper, television, and magazine profiles of this otherworldly presence in our midst.”

Well isn’t that rather smug? Heaven forbid–or should I say cognescenti forbid–people of all stripes and ideological bent should get a little more than tepidly excited about a public figure and potential president.

At any rate, the inaugural outing by Timothy Noah faltered pretty quickly, first citing some limp praise Obama received while a student at Harvard. A former classmate: “Where I had five pages, Barry had probably a paragraph of the pithiest, tightest prose you’d ever see. … It was very short, very sweet. Obviously somebody almost Clintonesque in being able to sum a whole lot of concepts and place them into a succinct written style.” Yes, by God, Slate is right! This clearly messianic, blindly elegaic praise has got to stop!