This is Boscoe, photographed on the path in the middle of "The Strip" of un-developed land that lies between CA HWY 1 and Obispo Rd. in El Granada, CA. I adopted Boscoe from the Marin Humane Society where he had been waiting for a new owner for several weeks. Boscoe was originally a stray that had been rescued in Santa Barbara county and when nobody wanted him down there, he was transferred up to Marin, where I was lucky to find him. Boscoe Rocks! He is a happy 2 year old. Woof! Woof!
The early morning light at Princeton Jetty is overcast and moody. We have SSW winds from the approaching low front chopping up the surface. Looks like there won't be much surf here today.
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Aug 16, 2009
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| It is one of my neighborhood cafes, so it is to bad to give them a bad review. The staff is just not friendly and almost rude. The food is very average, a little expensive for what it is and you can even taste that this is not a ... |
| What makes a 40 year old guy that still works in a cafe confident to give guests attitude? His mustache?his hat?or his tatoos? Not sure but while it may take some time to grow a mustache it is quickly twirled to look rediculous. ... |
Early Morning light over Half Moon Bay, CA is showing a little more of the rumored SSW swell today. This bodes well for later in the day. Surfline says there will be more on tap as well.
I started taking photographs because I can't paint the images the way I see them. I am starting to think that we (humans) create things because we need to compensate for the other things we have not yet been able to do. Whatever the motivation, it's a really good thing.
I took Boscoe down to the Jetty - 94018 - this morning for the surf check. Conditions are clean with little or no wind anywhere - Smaller than yesterday and the tide still fairly high at 7:15AM and dropping. I bet it will be surfable this afternoon. There are little signs of spring everywhere. Looks like it will be a great day. Off to work with Fred and Lisa on some UE changes for Grabbit.
Arianna Huffington: Why the Fight for Financial Reform Needs to Get Much More Personal
When it comes to the fight over financial reform, Democrats are making the same mistake they did with health care: failing to put the effect reform would have on the lives of real Americans front and center. This is a big-time blunder. The administration needs to make it clear: we don't need to overhaul our financial system because the Wall Street sandbox has gotten a little messy, and bank CEO bonuses have gotten too big. We need financial reform because of the enormous human suffering -- millions of battered and broken lives -- our current system has caused. Suffering that continues as the ins and outs of reform legislation are being debated. But the human element is once again getting short shrift.
There's still time to vote for the top student question for the White House. Click here for the details.
We all need to stay in regular contact with our congressmen and other elected officials to let them know that there job is to represent us, their constituents. They obviously don't know how difficult it is for the average citizen and that is why the changes aren't happening. The media is also to blame. They need to report on what's happening to average people, not regurgitate what the political spindoctors tell them.
Since I started covering the financial crisis a year and a half ago, I’ve been getting a lot of letters that say things like, “This all sucks. But what should we do about it? If you don’t have any answers, what’s the point?”
I don’t want to get into this too much since I have more on this coming out in my book, but I would like to point out some of the answers other people are providing to this question. One is this above plan from the hilariously blunt Max Keiser, whose “Goldman Sachs are scum” interview was one of the comedy highlights of 2009.
Keiser in an interview basically says that the debts countries like Greece owe to banks like Goldman, Sachs for loans and rate swaps are illegitimate since they were criminal deals, made with the intent to cook Greece’s books and defraud the citizens of Greece out of their tax money. He therefore proposes that Greece should simply stiff Goldman for those obligations and that, furthermore, American banks should be expelled from the country while the government temporarily nationalizes its banking system and establishes its independence from the financial services industry.
I’m not sure I know enough about what the consequences of a plan like that would be to say whether this is feasible or not. But I think Keiser’s idea does underline an important point about the situation, which is that as powerful as these Wall Street banks may seem, they are also exquisitely vulnerable. Right now virtually all of them are dependent upon the government keeping accounting standards lax enough for all of them to claim to be functional businesses. It is generally accepted that if the major banks on Wall Street were forced to mark all of their assets to market tomorrow, they would all be either insolvent or close to it.
Thus their “healthy” financial status is already illusory. So imagine what would happen if large numbers of those dubious loans on their balance sheets that they have marked down as “performing” were suddenly pushed ahead of time into the default column. What if Greece, and the Pennsylvania school system, and Jefferson County, Alabama, and the countless other municipalities and states that are wrapped up in these corrupt deals just decided to declare their debts illegitimate and back out?
I think it’s an interesting question and would like to hear what knowledgeable people in the field have to say about it. But the big picture, to me, is that these companies are almost totally dependent not only upon the continued good faith of aggrieved debtors, but upon the government recognizing the (sometimes fraudulent) loans made to those debtors as fully performing. I’m waiting for some canny politician to use those two facts as a hammer to make them all get in line. Thoughts?
This is an interesting take on the situation in Greece, where many believe that Goldman Sachs has defrauded the citizens of that country out of their tax dollars. At the end of the day, our government should be regulating the practices of our financial system to prevent activities of this kind both internationally and in our own country.