THE CHARLIE CHRONICLES VOLUME
6
Correspondence between Charles Dillingham and Ken Cashion.
(Cashion's comments in italics.)
Date: 30 Oct 2008
>From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: Are You Okay?
You wrote: >I haven't heard from you lately.
Am I OK?
>"I received your letter yesterday
About the time the doorknob broke.
You ask me how I'm doing
Is that some kind of joke?"
OK, OK, I plagiarized that. (Oh, I didn't know
until just now that "to plagarize" means, literally, "to kidnap". So,
I kidnapped it. Does that imply that I can extract money from someone for its return?)
But you ask me if I'm OK. Well, yes and no.
(shrug)
As Kurt Vonnegut said: So it goes.
Sorry about my silence. There's a lot on my mind,
all of it important and not all of it pleasant, and in such situations a person sometimes
finds himself ensconced in silence, where the power of spilling forth the gay
twitterclicks of keys fails.
>I have been busy over-working some mods on
a $60 guitar. I am sure there is an object lesson in there somewhere...sow's ear; silk
purse thing?
Any piece of pretty, hollow wood stressed with
tightly stretched wound strands of tarnishing metal which enables you to sit alone in the
late night and play and sing, "There's no stronger wind than the one that blows down
the lonsome railroad line, no prettier sight than looking back on a town you left behind
..." is worth both the silk and the sow. And the hog shit too. There are times that
the soft comfort of that old guitar may be all that stands between one and one's
unhingement.
>I got so much done today I am almost smug
about it. I can worry some stuff to death and take forever to get even a simple job done
and then at 1 p.m. this afternoon things start falling in place and I find now I am where
I thought I was going to be in a couple of days...based on the recent setbacks.
So much for scheduling. Planning is good. Scheduling is a waste of time.
Words of sagacity. I agree with the aphorism.
Think about the irony: "Scheduling"
means "scheduling time". So we have that scheduling time is a wast of time.
Isn't that funny? No matter what you do, time just happens anyway. Ineluctably. I guess
herding time is kind of similar to herding cats. Except that time is more dangerous than a
cat.
Somebody once asked some famous physicst, what is
time? The physicist replied, it's nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at
once.
But then, I would ask: Does time move, or are we
always just in now? Maybe our conception of movement is just a remnant of the
building of big steeple clocks in Mediaeval Europe and everybody watched the big moving
hands and heard the tolling bells linearizing and dividing time, thus preparing the way
for Isaac Newton to posit absolute time, which is something that passes uniformly without
regard to whatever happens in the world. But then, Kant, also a physicist but more
famously a philosopher, claimed that time is the a priori precondition of all
inward experience. He claimed that our representations of simultaneity and succession must
be mind-contributed since they are presupposed in our experience of simultaneous and
successive moments in time.
My, there are so many important things to be
figured out. Another one is ...
Q: Why did the chicken not cross the
road?
A: What road? He was at the beach.
Q: The beach road.
A: Oh, that road. Well, maybe he didn't want to
leave the beach.
Q: Why not? He's a chicken.
A: Of course he is. You already specified that.
Q: Then why are you being oblique with me?
A: To get to the other side.
Q: The other side of what?
A: Oh, kiss off.
OK, I didn't hijack that one. I made it up myself.
Joan Rivers said: "Girls! Listen to me!
Listen to me! Guys Like Them Stupid! Listen to me girls! No man ever pushed his hand
inside your shirt looking for your library card!"
>When I was growing up I was having a hard
enough time (no pun) trying to figure out who I wanted to be when I grew up and fighting
with Bettie Watson's raging hormones...which made mine seem inept.
Women, I have come to realize, are just like that
beautiful, mythical fairy-tale creature that always shows up looking like a mesmerising
Valkyrian nymph, and she drapes her charms and velvet hair across your heart and mind and
flesh, and then suddenly transmogrifies into a horrifying banshee. To quote the same poet
I just quoted above:
My lover comes to me with a rose on her bosom
The moon's dancin' purple
All through her black hair
And a ladies-in-waiting she stands 'neath my window
And the sun will rise soon on the false and the fair
She tells me she comes from my mother the mountain
Her skin fits her tightly
And her lips do not lie
She silently slips from her throat a medallion
Slowly she twirls it in front of my eyes
I watch her, I love her, I long for to touch her
The satin she's wearin'
Is shimmering blue
Outside my window her ladies are sleeping
My dogs have gone hunting
The howling is through
So I reach for her hand and her eyes turn to poison
And her hair turns to splinters,
And her flesh turns to brine
She leaps cross the room, she stands in the window
And screams that my first-born
Will surely be blind
She throws herself out to the black of the nightfall
She's parted her lips
But she makes not a sound
I fly down the stairway, and I run to the garden
No trace of my true love
Is there to be found
So walk these hills lightly, and watch who you're lovin'
By mother the mountain
I swear that it's true
Love not a woman with hair black as midnight
And her dress made of satin
All shimmering blue
- Townes
I must say what I have believed all
along. First, George W. is certainly NOT a dimwit. He may be a lot of things, but he is
not a dimwit. I think he's pretty smart. Second, Oliver Stone can go retire to a golf
course as far as I'm concerned. I've never seen anything I liked by him except
"Platoon". Most of his movies are shallow, predictable, cliche, cloying,
overbearing ... the only major director who is, in my modest and limited opinion, perhaps
even harder to bear is the quintessential American sob-sop himself, Steven Spielberg. (I
prefer movies where even the strangest characters are real and beleivable -- not
caricatures. Unless of course the movie doesn't claim to be representing real people
anyway. (But then again, even people like Daffy Duck and Buggs Bunny and Groucho Marx and
that ditzy, sad girl aparently possessed of some sort of low-level autism who pirouetted
across English hillsides with her hands circling about her head and who was bemusedly
befriended by Kate Beckinsale in CCF all seem pretty real to me. (But I'm babbling
again.)))
A headhunter e-mailed me saying that he had seen my
resume online, and asked if I would be interested in this job. It is a little ways outside
Washington D.C., sitting right smack dab on the commuter train line to the heart of the
city (including Dupont Circle, which probably is where I would live). The employer is the
National Institutes of Health, one of the finest of its kind there is, and it's a
government job. Their benifites include everything you ever heard of, including relocation
expenses. (!!) I am qualifed for the job in a number of specific areas they list, in some
cases exceeding what they require. They are willing to hire someone with experience
ranging anywhere from something like "just out of college but with a reasonably
appropriate background and able to learn" to extra-experienced in every facet of what
they want done. (I would think I fall very nicely somewhere not too far below the middle
of that range. And two of my former employers, a husband and wife, who have agreed to give
me references, and who will (I think) give me good ones, are now jointly the co-directors
of Inherited Disease Research Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute at --
yep, you guessed it: at the National Institutes of Health. They are heavyweights. Those
recommendations, plus my rather appropriate background, might get their attention. Who
knows? And the salary range they are offering is $50,000 to $130,000, depending upon
experience. Hope springs eternal in the breast of desperate jaded optomists.
I also received a notification of a job a couple of
days ago which is also close to downtown D.C. on the commuter train line, at the
Department of Commerce. Sounds boring, you say? Ahhh. The agency is the Patent and
Trademark Office: "Incumbent is responsible for reviewing patent applications,
determining the scope of the protection claimed by the inventor, researching relevant
technologies and communicating findings to patent practitioners/inventors." It's
another gov job, it pays between 40,184.00 and 75,537.00 USD per year. And the
qualifications are: "Have at least of bachelor's degree in physics or related degree
that included at least 24 semester hours in physics." My goodness, the gov makes it
easy. Benefits even include "business casual dress policy" and "transit
subsidy". And everything else in the world except for relocation expenses. Well,
hell, maybe the job IS boring, but if they'l hire me I'll do it for the money, whore that
I am. I think it might be kinda fun. Have you actually browsed the U.S. Patent Office web
site? It's a lot of fun, if you're bored and sipping a rum and coke.
Don't forget that Einstein's realization of the
fundamental concept behind General Relativity struck him like a bolt of lightening while
he was sitting idle in the Swiss Patent Office. Maybe I'll be like him. Who knows?
I'm gonna go an apply for jobs now.
Best regards, until next time ...
- Charlie, Optomist
Date: 5 Nov 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: Choo-Choo Twain
--- On Sat, 11/1/08, Ken Cashion wrote:
>We got home and being Hallo'ween, and I did have some
candy, it was late and we had missed the usual bunch of little kids in our neighborhood,
and would be getting the older kids coming from other neighborhoods...so we just left the
lights off except for the back room and did nothing much.
We turned off all lights in the house except the back bedroom where we were hiding,
barricaded the living room and the kitchen and the hallway to keep the dogs away from the
front door, spread sharp thumb tacks all over the front porch, and smeared thick paste of
iodine crystals dissolved in ammonium hydroxide across the front porch and all over the
door knob and door bell (beautiful smoke explosions when the paste dries and is touched!),
and I loaded my .45 semi-automatic with hollow-point armor-piercing bullets purchased from
WallMart with our $100 gift card from an old hippie friend who is now a college professor
at a college in Georgia teaching future teachers how to teach retarded people. We had no
trick-or-treaters, and no one died needlessly.
>I started reading Pinker's human nature book. It is not
a fast read and even slower for me because I am reading it once and I am careful for
quickie, cute phrases in the midst of technical talk. This is done to cloud the issue in
one paragraph so the following one can take a different direction and one not warranted by
his sequence of explanations.
That sounds so familiar.
>So I read that stuff for more slowly and deliberately
than most people read such "life altering" dispositions.
>Besides the unpopular, identical twins separated at
birth studies...which can provide real evidence of how much of our brain is hardwired by
genes of the parents and how much is nurture...
Yes. "Nature" (meaning hard-wiring) has a lot more to
do with it than is politically correct to acknowledge in public.
>And another two studies are needed very badly...that is
the adopted children in a home with parents' own children, and the child raised in a
single home without both male and female. These would be as unpopular as "The Bell
Curve."
But Ken, you forgot the study that needs to be done to determine the heinous fate of the
hapless monster-children who are raised by godless, same-sex homuseckshul parents.
>And in the end the family would praise Mao for being so
generous as to let you keep one of the ten cows when he didn't have to.
Nancy Pelosi is not near as bad as Chairman Mao.
>I will finish (really) the little guitar with an hour
of work.
Yea, right. But you'll still wake up from nightmares about it
in a cold sweat. You should go back to building model sailboats. ( :
Hey! I have an idea! Build a model sailboat with strings. When the wind blows through the
strings, you get a weird, eerie, mediaeval, wailing windstring sound. It would sound maybe
like a Philip Glass composition. He's rich and famous.
>I don't know if I ever told you but I had been wanting
a rosewood guitar for a while and then you played you Guild and I thought 'That's it! I am
getting a rosewood.'
God dammit, Ken. Are you just being mean to me, you big brute?
You see, my beautiful $2000 Rosewood Guild is one of the
guitars that the [expletive deleted] hocked for $10 (no, really: it was $10) to the Korean
pawnshop owner who has now disappeared with all of his merchandise and the law has not
been able to find him. I no longer have a rosewood Guild. She hocked my $1500 Larivee,
too, for $10. I no longer have a Lerrivee constructed from hand-picked pieces of wood from
the Great Northern Forest in Canada.
>I checked and found the one that was one model down
from yours...less trim and things.
Oh, yea. Now that you mention it, I remember all that. Gee,
wasn't it pretty?
>I bought the rosewood J-45 Gibson.
Yea, that's what the [expletive deleted] helped me buy. I
bought a beautiful-sounding (and -looking) Gibson, used, for $1500, and the [expletive
deleted] contributed $700 toward its purchase out of her collected SSI disability checks
she had accumulated during her six months in the Coweta County jail, without hearing or
bail, for felony assault of a police officer. That's OK ... that [expletive deleted] got
free room and board, and free clothing and laundry service, in the jailhouse for six
months, plus the gov stuffed her piggy bank (in violation of federal law) while she was
wining and dining on dry bologna sandwiches and boiled eggs and dirty water. I'll take the
$700.
Oh, sorry ... were we talking about guitars? I think I
bifurcated ...
>The Gibson was so bad that I didn't like it later and I
spent right at $200 on it to get it set up right. The guy who did it for me had done some
other guitars and I trust him.
Now, it is wonderful and everybody drools over it. I'm glad
you're happy. I'll put on a bib before I look at it.
>But the deal is remembered...and I even bought it right
then and paid TX/Houston taxes on it.
You betrayed the principles of the Libertarian Party in your
pursuit of immediate gratification.
>Let me do a few things here now.
It's OK, you don't need my permission. But I appreciate the
deferential gesture, nonetheless.
>And then I will start putting some CDs of the TX group
together for you. Figuring out which ones to send will be harder than actually making them
and sending them.
Oh goodie!
>More anon, Mastodon.
Call yourself or me or anybody else anything you want. Just
don't tell me my grea-grea-gramma was no monkey! Don't tell me 'bout no godless monkey! I
don't cotton to that kinda anti-Jesus shenanigans!
Anon, forsooth, Saber Tooth. (The Saber Tooth falls withing Biblical correctness: Noah had
a couple of them on the Ark.)
Date: 5 Nov 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: Gentle Screw Up
--- On Sun, 11/2/08, Ken Cashion
<kcashion@charter.net> wrote:
>I was trying to save time earlier by finishing the ends
of the frets after putting the finish on the neck. This can be done and I have done it but
this time I had to change some of the fret ends without damaging the finish of the neck
and that took lots of taping (over and over) and I should have done it differently. Just
took me a few hours longer.
Ha ha ha ha haaa! Haaaaa haa -- oops!
Sorry. I'm sorry. It's just that you said in your last e-mail
something like "I'm gonna put in just one more hour, really." And I wrote
something like, "Yea, right."
But that guitar is going to be a masterpiece. I can sense it.
>And now I just had my irreversible screw up by
reversing a pattern when I wall milling a void in some 1/4" ply so that the top was
the bottom. If it had been any shape but a free form one to conform to another free form
shape, I could have just flipped it.
>I had a fall back position that I had considered
earlier so I lost no work but maybe 30 minutes...and no material loss.
>Still, I don't like to feel stupid.
Charlie feels Ken ... No, Ken, you don't feel stupid. I don't
think you feel stupid.
>I will tell you sometime about me screwing-up a very
large piece of aluminum that was 10' square and 12" thick. A fortune had been spent
milling that surface. I was flattered that they thought I could ink and layout the holes
to be drilled and tapped in the top but their confidence was for naught. I left that group
for a better job before the error had been discovered. I think now that the piece was
saved, but the holes had to be tapped and aluminum plugs screwed in and that section hand
milled and then they would be back where they were when they told me to do it.
>So some screw-ups cost more than others but these
things are vector functions...in this case the magnitude was many times different...but
the direction was still the same and that was a screw-up.
But the happy lesson from the aluminum story is that everything
could all be much worse than the non-chiral reversal of the guitar back or front. At least
you don't have to worry about firing yourself or suing yourself, unless of course things
get REALLY worse.
>Tuesday, we vote -- to no avail.
Yea. I'm afraid that's correct. I watched, sitting right there
in NYC international financial centers, watching what those amoral Moloch magicians were
doing with ignorant people's money, and lying about it. This was 20 years ago! And in the
last 20 years it's gotten far, far worse. No one, republican or democrat, or among all the
king's horses and buffoons, know how to reel back in 20 years of profligate, drunken,
irresponsible, unaccountable, unregulated gambling with people's borrowed money -- those
people's retirement. And the bond money that was to be used to build schools and bridges.
And so on. And we're still bailing out the fat cats, even to this very day. They're
sequestering the gov money, and they're not using it to make credit more liquid to save
small businesses. They're hoarding the money to fend off their own impending losses and to
acquire other companies. Very little has gone to actual business loans or mortgages.
Amazing. This economy is in deep trouble.
>I was looking at my schedule and wondering about you
coming the second week of Dec. I thought that one was booked but I see that it only
involves Bettie all day Sat. and Sun. the month of Dec.
>Is that a possibility? Come maybe the Mon. 8th, and
stay until Fri. the 12th. That will give us time to watch, listen, drink to near
drunkeness but not beyond, and get sick of each other. That week looks the best to me. If
not that week, then it will be after Feb. 1, 2009.
I would like to do Dec. 8-12. As petty as it may sound (money
is my biggest problem at this time), my coming then will depend almost entirely upon
whether I can get the TIAA_CERF people and the Louisiana Retirement people to roll over
all of, and liquidate part of, my retirement pension before December. I think it will
happen before then, according to what they say. But you never know. These people move like
glaciers (the speed at which glaciers used to move a few decades ago, before they started
sprinting). And it's slow even when they don't fuck something up, which is seldom the
case.
The best I can do right now is to wait a couple of weeks and
call them on a daily basis to try to see that the process is still going along. If my
temporary uncertainty about the potential plan for Dec. 8-12 screws up other plans that
might come up for you, don't worry about it -- if something else comes up like, maybe,
Sarah Palin wants to visit you to make brownies while Bettie is visiting her relatives in
West Texas, or something like that.. In any case, I'll let you know as soon as I find out
about the money.
I will check the Amtrak thing you were talking about -- about
the choo choo stopping in Picayune. If December falls through, we'll shoot for another
window when things are more stable. (???)
I must go now.
Yours truly ... I AM That I AM. Sam I Am.
Date: 6 Nov 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: story
I got your CDs. I will start listening a little later today after I run an errand. I am
curious to hear what all these folks sound like. I'm hoping they will sound really awful
-- that would boost my confidence in my own angel voice and virtuosic guitar playing.
(Nah, there's no hope. I expect they're gonna sound pretty good.)
I thought of a story from my personal experience that might interest you. You may have
implied, I think, in a recent e-mail, a certain degree of skepticism regarding the
financial turpitude of many Wall Street practitioners. My story is about my boss who
worked with mortgage-backed securities as an analyst. He told me one day about the
Fannie Mae project he was currently working on. The Fannie Mae securities are, as you
know, collateralized by a pool of mortgages backed by the FNMA. Two of the main reasons
for "pooling" mortgages and then publicly trading securities on them is that,
first, this increases the liquidity of the mortgage market and infuses capital, etc.. A
second reason is that it decreases the risk to mortgage holders (or mortgage security
holders) because by pooling the mortgages, the good ones and the bad ones were all mixed
together. So if you look at the bell curve, you expect that that is what you are getting
when dealing in Fannie Maes. Some very good risk, some not very good, and most around the
middle area. Well, this guy and his cohorts said, heck with that. They started doing risk
analyses on the individual mortgages that were to be grouped together in a pool to create
a Fannie May trade instrument. (How they did this risk analysis I don't know, but no doubt
it was something sophisticated). They determined which of the mortgages had a higher
probability of non-payment, and which ones were more likely safe. They would then group
the safer ones into one pool, and the riskier ones into another, separate, pool. They have
now created two Fannie Mae instruments, which are presented for sale on the open
international trading markets. Then, they would invest a bunch of their company's money in
a long position in the safer instrument they just created, and they would invest a bunch
of money in a short position in the riskier instrument they just created. This created an
arbitrage, which, if their probability analysis of the riskiness of the mortgages is even
close to correct, will guarantee them a locked-in profit with time. They just skim the
money off the top. Of course, the rest of the naive buyers in the world don't know that
one instrument is riskier than the other; they think that they are just investing in the
U.S. mortgage market. But in fact, one naive investor is going to buy a bad deal, and
another naive investor is going to buy a better deal. So somebody gets hit with a
pre-calculated loss, and the loss incurred by that investor goes into the pocket of the
company. When the guy told me about this, I said to him, "Man, isn't that sort of,
like ... unethical?" He thought for about five seconds, and said, "Well,
actually, yes. It is. But you know, they're paying me six-figure bonuses for doing this.
What's a guy supposed to do?" I said, "Mm hm," and ordered us another
pitcher of beer.
(This guy and I were drinking buddies. We drank at a very cool midtown bar across the
street from a recording studio, and we would occasionally see stars there. We saw Joan
Jett and Cyndi Lauper, and I met and had a conversation with the lead guitar player for
the Screaming Blue Messiahs, whom I had just seen a day before at the Ritz in the East
Village.)
Anyway, that is one of a million examples. These guys are REAL smart. They're smarter than
your local broker is, so watch out. :) :)
I'll let you know what I find out about my acquiring the money. Right now, I'm just
wondering where my damn paycheck is from Tutor.com. It is overdue.
I must errand now, before I become errant in my erranding.
Later gator ... Charlie
Date: 7 Nov 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Adendum to story
I forgot to mention something kind of funny. my old boss I told
you about, used to tell everybody -- he said it many times -- that I was the best hiree he
had ever hired in his entire career. I think he honestly meant this. (It's easy to impress
an options trading desk full of people who are doing finance, and you are doing all the
computer programming and system administration, about which they know absolutely nothing
at all and therefore are impressed with everything you do and think that you are a genius.
And I suppose it also helps to be your boss's best drinking buddy.)
But the funny part is that he also told me many times, in
private, that when he first saw my resume and saw that I had worked at an address called
"Bay Saint Louis, MS", he assumed without really thinking much about it that the
address had something to do with, "Saint Louis, MO", forgetting that MS is not
the abbreviation for Missouri. He told me that if he had known that I was from
Mississippi, he never would have contacted me for an interview. Now, whether he was really
serious about this, I never knew. He told it as an amusing story, mainly to gently pick on
me, but I think he may have been only half kidding. Actually, I guess it's not really all
that funny, because the are a lot of extremely smart and talented people from Mississippi
(duuhhh!), but it never bothered me. I though it was funny.
I would comment on your music CDs except for the fact that I
spent ALL of yesterday looking at government jobs. There are zillions of them. And Uncle
Sam now has a surprisingly painless and even downright handy web site where you can browse
and search and apply for jobs. I'm going to do that again today, but I'll put on a CD to
listen to while I do it.
OK, that's all. Now you can get back to that guitar out in the
shed. Good luck. Enjoy the rum and coke.
- Charlie, Mississippi Genius
Date: 7 Nov 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Stupefacient good fortune? Astonished bewilderment?
Or just wishful thinking in the face of shit-shoveling?
But I must say that it's been a good day, I think. I hate to
say that, given that I'm so intrinsically convinced of humanity's and my own impending
doom--I'm known by my acquaintances as the "Shining Black Beacon of Negativity",
a moniker of which I am somewhat proud. I've just racked up the following -- Boom Boom
Boom:
I just (I think) got a $225,000 debt removed from my record.
I just applied for "multiple jobs" at the Census
Bureau (they're gearing up for the 2010 census) just three miles from the Whitehouse and
one block from a Metro station. I am more than qualified for the positions, which offer a
salary in the range of $70K to $96K. (And I have applied for the Patent Office job too.)
And, most relevant to you, I have been told that everything is
in order with Teacher's retirement of LA and with my newly set-up TIAA-CREF IRA, and that
I should be able to make a withdrawal of part of the rollover money (the total rollover is
a very modest amount, the last paltry savings I have left) and have it electronically
deposited in my bank account by Friday of next week, or maybe the next Monday. So maybe I
will be able to ride the choo choo in December.
A job like this, with full benefits, would be, literally, my
salvation. There is no way that I would survive another ten years of life thet way I am
now living. And there are many, many other gov jobs. I'll just keep applying. I would like
to in the employ of the gov. It's kind of like capitalistic welfare. You know all about
that, except that you put men on the moon, and maybe I'll count people and the number of
toilets in their house trailers and stuff the data into a database. What's the difference?
Charlie: Shining Black Beacon of Negative Eternal-Springing
Hope and Light
Date: 15 Nov 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: story
>Some are really good and some sound like me and some
sound really bad. <g>
Amusingly put. But let it be noted that if you were to draw the
bell curve with the really bad region being on the left, you would fall somewhere toward
the right-hand region. (See, in capitulation to you, I chose the left to be bad and the
right to be good.)
So far, this sounds like a good idea.
Of course, the rest of the naive buyers in the world don't know
that one instrument is riskier than the other; they think that they are just investing in
the U.S. mortgage market.
>But only on the CMOs that that company is backing.
Right. This paper, in any combination, would not be available outside of of that company's
investors...is this right?
To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what the answer to that
question is. If I did, I might be making six figures myself. But I got the impression from
what I was told that they were cleverly tricking people and pocketing the money. He
didn't beat around the bush about it, he just said that they were tricking unsuspecting
investors.
I agree with your friend. For him to take the big bucks
from his company and not do his best for his company (within the rules...and it is within
the rules)...HE would be unethical.
Yep. If you're honest about your dishonesty, then what the
heck? The good guy does not necessarily win in the end. (I don't have to tell you that, of
course.) I would love to be able to afford a nice flat in London or Barcelona.
The big pay-offs to CEOs and CFOs mean nothing. Lump them
all together, make them pay them back and the market would not even recognize the
change...but the people who started this mess want to blame them as if they "did
it." <g>
You are absolutely right. The big payoffs, all lumped together,
are a relatively small part of the whole pool of money. And the existence of big payoffs
does not imply that the recipients of the big payoffs "did it". However,
notwithstanding the absence of logical causality here, the fact remains that they DID do
it. The "crises" with Fannie and Freddie exists as a direct result of the
actions of the big cats.
Now, the GM "crisis" -- you know that GM is
requesting corporate bailout money -- is perhaps a different story. GM and Ford have been
lagging way, way behind Japan for something like 30 years in the ergonomics and quality
and even appearance of their cars. They have had 30 years to rectify their errors, and
they have not done it. And now they want your and my tax money to bandage them up. I don't
like welfare at either end of the economic spectrum. (By the way, they won't give me
welfare. I'm not the right color, I'm not fat, I don't have 9 shoeless children, and I
don't have a shrink that will declare me crazy.)
"Every American deserves the right to own his own
home!" That was not a conservative talking.
Yes, it was a fool talking, or perhaps a non-fool who was
speaking foolishly. But what's even worse is: "I have a right to own my own
home!" I and you do not have any rights at all except those rights that are granted
to us by our governments. If you live in North Korea or Iran, you don't have as many
rights as you do if you live in England or New Zealand. That's the way the cookie
crumbles, I suppose.
I have some hope for Hussein Obama...I hope it is
justified...but I still think Palin is hot.
I hope too. I hope our hope is justified. As for that other
one, let's just say that I have no comment.
Charle: Philosopher of Political Economics par excellence
Date: 15 Nov 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: Stupefacient good fortune? Astonished
bewilderment?
>You need a medical plan...
What do you mean, silly? I have a medical plan: Don't get sick.
It works real good, as long as you don't get sick.
I would like to in the employ of the gov. It's kind of like
capitalistic welfare.
>Exactly. Ayn Rand referred to us as monument builders,
by taking money from the public by force to pay for the monuments they didn't want. She
was right.
I'm always reminded of my father. For 40 years he cursed and
cursed Medicare, the socialist giveaway creation of Truman and Johnson which was robbing
his paycheck. But for some reason, when his own father went into a nursing home and
Medicare picked up the expense (which my father could not have afforded), he suddenly had
nothing but praise for this wonderful government benefit. He didn't seem to see the irony.
I guess you've heard variations on that story before, no?
Ken, Master of Mythical Mooning
Charlie, Mellifluous Moderator of Malfeasance
Date: 15 Nov 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: Choo-Choo-Choo Choo-Boogie (8 beats to the bar)
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