Trent's Daily Manifesto 2.08

Moves Like Trent Rock (ft. Trent Rockuleira)

2011-09-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

Moves Like Trent Rock (I'm S0rry 4 Th1s Mashup) ft. Trent Rockuleira by TrentRock

Converse® presents The Trent Rock Limited Edition Tactical Chucks™

2011-08-16T02:25:00.000-07:00

The Shit Hits The Fan Fund 2.011 (The Quest for Low Beta)

2011-08-04T19:33:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting for this mini crash to start a new fund...:)
My goal, as always, is to outperform the S & P 500

Inflation Falls: Is the Economy Saved or Doomed?

2011-07-18T23:04:00.000-07:00

Inflation in June fell for the first time in a more than a year. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is the government's most widely watched gauge of what the things average Americans buy cost, fell 0.2% last month. The drop was mostly driven by a fall in gas prices, which were down nearly 7% alone in June. The question is whether this is a good sign for the recovery, or another sign that we are headed for a double dip. Are we at the end of the soft patch, or the beginning of a worse patch?

Inflation Falls: Is the Economy Saved or Doomed?

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) decreased
 0.2 percent in June on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U.S. Bureau
 of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all
 items index increased 3.6 percent before seasonal adjustment.

In contrast, the index for all items less food and
energy increased 0.3 percent for the second consecutive month.

Consumer Price Index - June 2011

The Grind (I'm Tellin' U What) ft. Mike Snody

2011-07-10T05:42:00.000-07:00

The Grind (I'm Tellin' U What) ft. Mike Snody by TrentRock

Peppered Dr. Pepper Beef Jerky Recipe (Economists Can't Cook, Series 2, Vol IV)

2011-06-30T10:46:00.000-07:00

I like to use TOP ROUND roast. I "temper" (partially freeze) the roast and slice it by hand. With the grain, against the grain, thick, thin, whatever you prefer.......

For every one lb. of beef:
1 tsp. black pepper
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. onion powder
1 tsp. chili powder
1 tsp. cayenne pepper powder (optional)
1-2 tsp. salt
1 capful liquid smoke
1/2 cup Dr. Pepper
Crushed red pepper (optional)

Put sliced beef and mixture in a large bowl. Add enough water to cover the beef. I usually marinate my jerky meat overnight. I think the Dr. Pepper is kind of acidic and will cook the meat if left too long. So I only marinate the Dr. Pepper jerky about 4-5 hrs. (I am going to marinate my next batch overnight and see what happens. Hopefully it is not some beef mush!!!)

When you have the beef strips on the rack you can sprinkle crushed red pepper on one side (or both) if you want that extra umph!!

Food and Cooking @ Economist.com

The Perfect High

2011-04-28T19:55:00.000-07:00

The Perfect High

By Shel Silverstein

There once was a boy named Gimme-Some-Roy... He was nothin' like me or you,
'cause laying back and getting high was all he cared to do.

As a kid, he sat in the cellar...sniffing airplane glue. And then he smoked banana peels, when that was the thing to do. He tried aspirin in Coca-Cola, he breathed helium on the sly, and his life became an endless search to find the perfect high.

But grass just made him wanna lay back and eat chocolate-chip pizza all night,
and the great things he wrote when he was stoned looked like shit in the morning light.
Speed made him wanna rap all day, reds laid him too far back, Cocaine-Rose was sweet to his nose, but the price nearly broke his back.

He tried PCP, he tried THC, but they never quite did the trick. Poppers nearly blew his heart, mushrooms made him sick. Acid made him see the light, but he couldn't remember it long. Hash was a little too weak, and smack was a lot too strong. Quaaludes made him stumble, booze just made him cry, Then he heard of a cat named Baba Fats who knew of the perfect high.

Now, Baba Fats was a hermit cat...lived high up in Nepal, High on a craggy mountain top, up a sheer and icy wall. "Well, hell!" says Roy, "I'm a healthy boy, and I'll crawl or climb or fly,
Till I find that guru who'll give me the clue as to what's the perfect high."

So out and off goes Gimme-Some-Roy, to the land that knows no time, Up a trail no man could conquer, to a cliff no man could climb. For fourteen years he climbed that cliff...back down again he'd slide . . .
He'd sit and cry, then climb some more, pursuing the perfect high.

Grinding his teeth, coughing blood, aching and shaking and weak, Starving and sore, bleeding and tore, he reaches the mountain peak. And his eyes blink red like a snow-blind wolf, and he snarls the snarl of a rat,
As there in repose, and wearing no clothes, sits the god-like Baba Fats.

"What's happenin', Fats?" says Roy with joy, "I've come to state my biz . . .
I hear you're hip to the perfect trip... Please tell me what it is. "For you can see," says Roy to he, "I'm about to die, So for my last ride, tell me, how can I achieve the perfect high?"

"Well, dog my cats!" says Baba Fats. "Another burned out soul, Who's lookin' for an alchemist to turn his trip to gold. It isn't in a dealer's stash, or on a druggist's shelf... Son, if you would find the perfect high, find it in yourself."

"Why, you jive mother-fucker!" says Roy, "I climbed through rain and sleet,
I froze three fingers off my hands, and four toes off my feet! I braved the lair of the polar bear, I've tasted the maggot's kiss. Now, you tell me the high is in myself? What kinda shit is this?

My ears, before they froze off," says Roy, "had heard all kindsa crap; But I didn't climb for fourteen years to hear your sophomore rap. And I didn't climb up here to hear that the high is on the natch, So you tell me where the real stuff is, or I'll kill your guru ass!"

"Okay...okay," says Baba Fats, "You're forcin' it outta me... There is a land beyond the sun that's known as Zabolee. A wretched land of stone and sand, where snakes and buzzards scream, And in this devil's garden blooms the mystic Tzutzu tree.

Now, once every ten years it blooms one flower, as white as the Key West sky,
And he who eats of the Tzutzu flower shall know the perfect high. For the rush comes on like a tidal wave...hits like the blazin' sun. And the high? It lasts forever, and the down don't never come.

But, Zabolee Land is ruled by a giant, who stands twelve cubits high, And with eyes of red in his hundred heads, he awaits the passer-by. And you must slay the red-eyed giant, and swim the river of slime, Where the mucous beasts await to feast on those who journey by. And if you slay the giant and beasts, and swim the slimy sea, There's a blood-drinking witch who sharpens her teeth as she guards the Tzutzu tree."

"Well, to hell with your witches and giants," says Roy, "To hell with the beasts of the sea--
Why, as long as the Tzutzu flower still blooms, hope still blooms for me."
And with tears of joy in his sun-blind eyes, he slips the guru a five, And crawls back down the mountainside, pursuing the perfect high.

"Well, that is that," says Baba Fats, sitting back down on his stone, Facing another thousand years of talking to God, alone. "Yes, Lord, it's always the same...old men or bright-eyed youth... It's always easier to sell 'em some shit than it is to tell them the truth."

Stop The Presses!! (The Myth Of The Exploding US Money Supply)

2011-03-15T00:38:00.000-07:00

So yes, the US government is running a massive $1.5T deficit, however, by any metric of money supply we can see that this is barely offsetting the continued de-leveraging that is occurring across the US economy. We are certain to see higher rates of inflation in 2011 (especially if oil prices surge higher), however, it is not an accurate portrayal of reality to conclude that the USA is “printing money” uncontrollably and flooding the world with dollars that will lead to hyperinflation. That is simply not the case and the data speaks for itself. At best, we are barely printing enough to offset the destruction of de-leveraging….

The Myth Of The Exploding US Money Supply

When U Frequent The Spot (That Trent Is Known To R0ck)

2011-03-08T23:08:00.000-08:00

When U Frequent The Spot (That Trent Is Kn0wn To R0ck) by TrentRock

Gold Lords (He Who Has The Gun Gives The Orders)

2011-03-05T19:39:00.000-08:00

Convert all the drug organizations to gold mining firms. Sounds good to me :)

Guerrillas and their paramilitary adversaries have long been involved in mining, often using it and related businesses like cattle ranching to launder money and to extract extortion payments. But military intelligence officials and residents here say that new factors, like the success of American-financed coca eradication projects and the price of gold, have pushed rivals in Colombia’s long drug war to focus elsewhere.

In Colombia, New Gold Rush Fuels Old Conflict

Gold Lords

Dart-throwing Chimpanzees (On Economic Forecasting)

2011-02-23T02:11:00.000-08:00

There was one significant factor in greater prediction success, however, and that was cognitive style: “foxes” who know a little about many things do better than “hedgehogs” who know a lot about one area of expertise. Low scorers, Tetlock wrote, were “thinkers who ‘know one big thing,’ aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who ‘do not get it,’ and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters.” High scorers in the study were “thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible ‘ad hocery’ that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.”

Financial Flimflam: Why Economic Experts' Predictions Fail

“If the professional economists can’t predict economies and professional forecasters can’t predict markets, then what chance does the amateur investor have? You know the answer already, which brings me to my own ‘cocktail party’ theory of market forecasting, developed over the years of standing in the middle of living rooms, near punch bowls, listing to what the nearest ten people said about stocks.

In the first stage of an upward market – one that has been down awhile and that nobody expects to rise again – people aren’t talking about stocks. In fact, if they lumber up to ask me what I do for a living, and I answer, ‘I manage an equity mutual fund,’ they nod politely and wander away. If they don’t wander away, then they quickly change the subject to the Celtics game, the upcoming elections, or the weather. Soon they are talking to a nearby dentist about plaque. When ten people would rather talk to a dentist about plaque than to the manager of an equity mutual fund about stocks, it’s likely the market is about to turn up.

In stage two, after I’ve confessed what I do for a living, the new acquaintances linger a bit longer – perhaps long enough to tell me how risky the stock market is – before they move over to talk to the dentist. The cocktail party talk is still more about plaque than about stocks. The market is up 15 percent from stage one, but few are paying attention.

In stage three, with the market up 30 percent from stage one, a crowd of interested parties ignores the dentist and circles around me all evening. A succession of enthusiastic individuals takes me aside to ask what stocks they should buy. Even the dentist is asking me what stocks he should buy. Everybody at the party has put money into one issue or another, and they’re all discussing what’s happened.

In stage four, once again they’re crowded around me – but this time it’s to tell me what stocks I should buy. Even the dentist has three or four tips, and in the next few days I look up his recommendations in the newspaper and they’ve all gone up. When the neighbors tell me what to buy, and then I wish I had taken their advice, it’s a sure sign that the market has reached a top and is due for a tumble.”

Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street

Even if they did, they would shy away from forecasting. The main advantage that academic economists’ have over professional forecasters may be their greater awareness of established relationships between factors. What is hardest to forecast, though, are turning points – when the old relationships break down. While there may be some factors that signal turning points – a run-up in short-term leverage and asset prices, for example, often presages a bust – they are not infallible predictors of trouble to come.

Why Did Economists Not Spot the Crisis?

The actual year-end 10-year yield was 31% higher than the average of the economists' estimates made less than three months earlier.

An Economic Forecasting Fiasco: What Pro Economists Predicted For QE2 And Treasury Yields

The truth is that our knowledge of the complex system called the economy is woefully inadequate and may always remain that way. We ask too much of economics. Even our best attempts to measure the job impact of the stimulus spending make this clear. In November of 2010, the CBO estimated that the stimulus had created between 1.4 and 3.6 million jobs. Not a very precise estimate.

Congressional Testimony on the Stimulus

The discussion largely centers around the weak version which says that, while market prices may not always be a great guide to real economic forces, their movements are not systematically predictable. At every moment, prices reflect all the forecasts of all the market participants who, between them, have access to all potential information and ways of utilizing it. A price moves only when new information arises. But to be truly new, this information has to be unpredictable—otherwise it is simply an inference from information that already exists. Because the information is unpredictable, so is its effect on prices. The randomness of price movements in turn implies that no one can outperform the market in betting on where they will go.

I have no problem with this. The fallacy arises when this argument is invoked to deny the possibility that economists can identify bubbles in real time. If you’re so smart you can spot a bubble, why aren’t you rich? If people could spot bubbles with any predictability, then the EMH would be wrong—but we know it’s right.

Why the Efficient Market Hypothesis (Weak Version) Says Nothing about the Ability to Identify Bubbles

One way to interpret this is that the economics profession was not fully accounting for the economy’s human element, an element that can’t be reduced to mathematical analysis.

The relatively few professional economists who warned of the current crisis were people, it seems, who not only read the scholarly economics literature, but also brought into play more personal judgment: intuitive comparisons with past historical episodes; conclusions about speculative trading, price bubbles, and the stability of confidence; evaluations of the moral purposes of economic actors; and impressions that complacency had set in, lulling watchdogs to sleep.

A People’s Economics

The This American Life program reported that massive and sophisticated computer modelling of economic forecasts results in not particularly high levels of accuracy. There is too much chaos in the world – chaotic randomness, including national and global political events – for modelling to be that effective in increasing forecasting accuracy.

Also, the program reported that the forecasters find it very difficult to admit that their forecasts are wrong – their egos get in the way when they need to revise their forecasts.

Witches, ghouls and economic forecasting

Economic forecasting delusions

Forecasters collectively have tended to make the largest
errors during periods that included either turning points
in the business cycle or significant shifts in the trend rate
of growth of labor productivity. Large changes in oil
prices—apart from their role in precipitating business
cycles—also cause errors in forecasts of inflation.

CBO’s Economic Forecasting Record: 2010 Update

The result? More often than not, the dart board beats the traditional, technical analysis methods of trading stocks! One group of dart-board investors beat the S&P 500 without fail for 12 consecutive years, and realized an impressive 23.4 return on their dart board stock selections

Astrology and the Stock Market: “Astro Investing”

Into The Heart of Trentness (ft. DJ RyP)

2011-02-17T01:04:00.000-08:00

Into The Heart of Trentness (ft. DJ RyP) by TrentRock

Procrastination Flowchart 2.011

2011-02-11T01:47:00.000-08:00

Procrastination Flowchart 2.011 by Trent Rock's Visual Vices, on Flickr

And sailors will soon again be able to afford a stripper in every port! (U.S. Inflation Goals 1933 Style)

2011-02-01T11:48:00.000-08:00

1942 OWI Poster

The purpose should also be to keep wages at a point stabilized with today's cost of living. Both must be regulated at the same time; and neither one of them can or should be regulated without the other.

At the same time that farm prices are stabilized, I will stabilize wages.

That is plain justice -- and plain common sense.

Fireside Chat 22: On Inflation and Food Prices (September 7, 1942)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Contrast with:

A 10-minute short film produced by the MGM studio to be played in movie theaters across the country. Pete Smith explains (with graphs!) how FDR’s inflationary policies are going to help the economy.

“And sailors will soon again be able to afford a stripper in every port! . . . What inflation has done before it will do again! . . . What a man! And what a leader! Yowzer! Happy days are here again!”

Misunderstanding Inflation through the Years

Inflation in 1933 (explained by MGM Studio)

George Orwell "Politics and the English Language" 1946

2011-01-25T00:29:00.000-08:00

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

George Orwell

Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.
DYING METAPHORS. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

OPERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

PRETENTIOUS DICTION. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i. e., e. g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers(1). The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

MEANINGLESS WORDS. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning(2). Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip — alien for akin — making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence(3), to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.
1946
_____
1) An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-awayfrom the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific. [back]
2) Example: ‘Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative ginting at a cruel, an inexorably selene timelessness... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation’. (Poetry Quarterly.) [back]
3) One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field. [back]
THE END

Ezra Pound On Economics

2011-01-24T01:24:00.000-08:00

"In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries."
— Ezra Pound

The Cult of Personality (Marcellus Wallace and Alan Greenspan)

2011-01-16T23:50:00.000-08:00

2 years ago I took the Myers Briggs personailty test. I decided to take it again. I went from a ESTP to a INTJ??? I went from The Promoter to The Mastermind.

All Rationals are good at planning operations, but Masterminds are head and shoulders above all the rest in contingency planning. Complex operations involve many steps or stages, one following another in a necessary progression, and Masterminds are naturally able to grasp how each one leads to the next, and to prepare alternatives for difficulties that are likely to arise any step of the way. Trying to anticipate every contingency, Masterminds never set off on their current project without a Plan A firmly in mind, but they are always prepared to switch to Plan B or C or D if need be.

Masterminds are rare, comprising no more than one to two percent of the population, and they are rarely encountered outside their office, factory, school, or laboratory. Although they are highly capable leaders, Masterminds are not at all eager to take command, preferring to stay in the background until others demonstrate their inability to lead. Once they take charge, however, they are thoroughgoing pragmatists. Masterminds are certain that efficiency is indispensable in a well-run organization, and if they encounter inefficiency -- any waste of human and material resources -- they are quick to realign operations and reassign personnel. Masterminds do not feel bound by established rules and procedures, and traditional authority does not impress them, nor do slogans or catchwords. Only ideas that make sense to them are adopted; those that don't, aren't, no matter who thought of them. Remember, their aim is always maximum efficiency.

In their careers, Masterminds usually rise to positions of responsibility, for they work long and hard and are dedicated in their pursuit of goals, sparing neither their own time and effort nor that of their colleagues and employees. Problem-solving is highly stimulating to Masterminds, who love responding to tangled systems that require careful sorting out. Ordinarily, they verbalize the positive and avoid comments of a negative nature; they are more interested in moving an organization forward than dwelling on mistakes of the past.

Masterminds tend to be much more definite and self-confident than other Rationals, having usually developed a very strong will. Decisions come easily to them; in fact, they can hardly rest until they have things settled and decided. But before they decide anything, they must do the research. Masterminds are highly theoretical, but they insist on looking at all available data before they embrace an idea, and they are suspicious of any statement that is based on shoddy research, or that is not checked against reality.

Rational Portrait Of The Mastermind

Jung Typology Test™

Famous INTJ's:
* Angela Lansbury - actress (Murder, She Wrote)
* Arnold Schwarzenegger - actor, Governor of California
* Arthur Ashe - tennis champion
* Augustus Caesar - Roman Emperor
* C. Everett Koop - former U.S. Surgeon General
* C. S. Lewis - apologist, author (The Chronicles of Narnia)
* Calvin Coolidge - American President
* Charles Rangel - politician, decorated war veteran
* Chester A. Arthur - lawyer, American President
* Chevy Chase - actor, comedian
* Dan Akroyd - actor, comedian, musician
* Donald Rumsfeld - former U.S. Secretary of Defense
* Dwight D. Eisenhower - American President
* Edwin Moses - Olympic gold medalist
* General Colin Powell - former U.S. Secretary of State
* Greg Gumbel - TV sportscaster
* Hannibal Barca - Military Commander
* Ivan Lendl - tennis champion
* James K. Polk - American President
* Jane Austen - author (Pride and Prejudice)
* Joan Lunden - Journalist
* Josephine Tey - English author
* Katie Couric - journalist
* Lance Armstrong - cyclist (seven Tour De France wins)
* Maria Shriver - journalist, wife to Arnold Schwarzenegger
* Martina Navratilova - tennis champion
* Michael Dukakis - former Governor of Massachusetts
* Orel Hershiser - baseball player (pitcher)
* Pernell Roberts - actor, activist
* Peter Jennings - journalist
* Raymond Burr - actor (Perry Mason), vintner
* Rudy Giuliani - former New York City mayor
* Sir Isaac Newton - Astronomer
* Susan B. Anthony - civil rights leader
* Thomas Jefferson - American President
* Veronica Hamel - actress
* William F. Buckley, Jr. - journalist
* William J. Bennett - politician
* Woodrow Wilson - American President
* General Ulysses S. Grant – Union general, American President
* Friederich Nietzsche – philosopher
* Niels Bohr – physicist
* Peter the Great – Russian tsar
* Stephen Hawking – astrophysicist
* John Maynard Keynes –
* Lise Meitner – chemist
* Ayn Rand – philosopher, author
* John F. Nash Jr. – mathematician, game theorist
* Norbert Wiener – mathematician, founder of cybernetics
* Nikola Tesla – physicist, engineer, inventor
* Glenn Gould – Canadian pianist and composer
* Stanley Kubrick – film director (2001: A Space Odyssey)
* Jean-Paul Sartre – philosopher
* Erik Satie – composer, pianist
* Helmuth von Moltke – German military general
* Isaac Asimov – biochemist, science-fiction author (I Robot)
* Theodore Kaczynski – infamous “Unabomber”
* Lewis Carroll – author, logician, mathematician
* Franz Kafka – author

* Calvin – Calvin and Hobbes
* Cassius – The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
* Clarice Starling - Silence of the Lambs
* Batman – Batman Begins
* Dexter – Dexter’s Laboratory
* Dr. Jonathan Crane - Batman Begins
* Dr. Otto Octavius (Doc Ock) - Spiderman 2
* Ellen Ripley - Alien
* Ensign Ro Laren - Star Trek: The Next Generation
* Ernst Stavro Blofeld - James Bond
* Gandalf - Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit
* George Smiley - John Le Carr character
* Hannibal Lecter - Silence of the Lambs
* Jigsaw – Saw films
* Marsellus Wallace - Pulp Fiction
* Michael Corleone - Godfather
* Mr. Burns - The Simpsons
* Mr. Darcy - Pride and Prejudice
* O-Ren Ishii - Kill Bill Vol. 1
* Phileas Fogg – Around the World in Eight Days (novel and film adaptations)
* Professor Moriarty - Sherlock Holmes antagonist
* Sherlock Holmes
* Reed Richards – the Fantastic Four
* Stewie Griffin - Family Guy
* Tom Hagen – Godfather
* V - V for Vendetta
* Vicious - Cowboy Bebop
* Victor von Frankenstein
* Vito Corleone – Godfather
* Willy Wonka – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

The Ultimate List of Famous INTJs
*******************************************************************************

I also took the Enneagram of Personality test. I scored as a FIVE. The Investigator.

Fives are alert, insightful, and curious. They are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills. Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. They become detached, yet high-strung and intense. They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation. At their Best: visionary pioneers, often ahead of their time, and able to see the world in an entirely new way.

We have named personality type Five The Investigator because, more than any other type, Fives want to find out why things are the way they are. They want to understand how the world works, whether it is the cosmos, the microscopic world, the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms—or the inner world of their imaginations. They are always searching, asking questions, and delving into things in depth. They do not accept received opinions and doctrines, feeling a strong need to test the truth of most assumptions for themselves.

John, a graphic artist, describes this approach to life.

“Being a Five means always needing to learn, to take in information about the world. A day without learning is like a day without ‘sunshine.’ As a Five, I want to have an understanding of life. I like having a theoretical explanation about why things happen as they do. This understanding makes me feel in charge and in control. I most often learn from a distance as an observer and not a participant. Sometimes, it seems that understanding life is as good as living it. It is a difficult journey to learn that life must be lived and not just studied.”

Behind Fives’ relentless pursuit of knowledge are deep insecurities about their ability to function successfully in the world. Fives feel that they do not have an ability to do things as well as others. But rather than engage directly with activities that might bolster their confidence, Fives “take a step back” into their minds where they feel more capable. Their belief is that from the safety of their minds they will eventually figure out how to do things—and one day rejoin the world.

Fives spend a lot of time observing and contemplating—listening to the sounds of wind or of a synthesizer, or taking notes on the activities in an anthill in their back yard. As they immerse themselves in their observations, they begin to internalize their knowledge and gain a feeling of self-confidence. They can then go out and play a piece on the synthesizer or tell people what they know about ants. They may also stumble across exciting new information or make new creative combinations (playing a piece of music based on recordings of wind and water). When they get verification of their observations and hypotheses, or see that others understand their work, it is a confirmation of their competency, and this fulfills their Basic Desire. (“You know what you are talking about.”)

Knowledge, understanding, and insight are thus highly valued by Fives, because their identity is built around “having ideas” and being someone who has something unusual and insightful to say. For this reason, Fives are not interested in exploring what is already familiar and well-established; rather, their attention is drawn to the unusual, the overlooked, the secret, the occult, the bizarre, the fantastic, the “unthinkable.” Investigating "unknown territory"—knowing something that others do not know, or creating something that no one has ever experienced—allows Fives to have a niche for themselves that no one else occupies. They believe that developing this niche is the best way that they can attain independence and confidence.

Thus, for their own security and self-esteem, Fives need to have at least one area in which they have a degree of expertise that will allow them to feel capable and connected with the world. Fives think, “I am going to find something that I can do really well, and then I will be able to meet the challenges of life. But I can’t have other things distracting me or getting in the way.” They therefore develop an intense focus on whatever they can master and feel secure about. It may be the world of mathematics, or the world of rock and roll, or classical music, or car mechanics, or horror and science fiction, or a world entirely created in their imagination. Not all Fives are scholars or Ph.Ds. But, depending on their intelligence and the resources available to them, they focus intensely on mastering something that has captured their interest.

For better or worse, the areas that Fives explore do not depend on social validation; indeed, if others agree with their ideas too readily, Fives tend to fear that their ideas might be too conventional. History is full of famous Fives who overturned accepted ways of understanding or doing things (Darwin, Einstein, Nietzshce). Many more Fives, however, have become lost in the Byzantine complexities of their own thought processes, becoming merely eccentric and socially isolated.

The intense focus of Fives can thus lead to remarkable discoveries and innovations, but when the personality is more fixated, it can also create self-defeating problems. This is because their focus of attention unwittingly serves to distract them from their most pressing practical problems. Whatever the sources of their anxieties may be—relationships, lack of physical strength, inability to gain employment, and so forth—average Fives tend not to deal with these issues. Rather, they find something else to do that will make them feel more competent. The irony is that no matter what degree of mastery they develop in their area of expertise, this cannot solve their more basic insecurities about functioning in the world. For example, as a marine biologist, a Five could learn everything there is to know about a type of shellfish, but if her fear is that she is never going to be able to run her own household adequately, she will not have solved her underlying anxiety.

Dealing directly with physical matters can feel extremely daunting for Fives. Henry is a life scientist working in a major medical research lab:
“Since I was a child, I have shied away from sports and strenuous physical activity whenever possible. I was never able to climb the ropes in gym class, stopped participating in sports as soon as it was feasible, and the smell of a gymnasium still makes me uncomfortable. At the same time, I have always had a very active mental life. I learned to read at the age of three, and in school I was always one of the smartest kids in academic subjects.”

Thus, much of their time gets spent "collecting" and developing ideas and skills they believe will make them feel confident and prepared. They want to retain everything that they have learned and “carry it around in their heads.” The problem is that while they are engrossed in this process, they are not interacting with others or even increasing many other practical and social skills. They devote more and more time to collecting and attending to their collections, less to anything related to their real needs.

Thus, the challenge to Fives is to understand that they can pursue whatever questions or problems spark their imaginations and maintain relationships, take proper care of themselves, and do all of the things that are the hallmarks of a healthy life.

Enneagram Personality Test

Famous Enneagram Fives:
Performance artist Laurie Anderson, St. Thomas Aquinas, Issac Asimov,
Mohammed Atta, Gregory Bateson, Playwright Samuel Beckett, Osama bin
Laden, Dirk Bogarde, Author Paul Bowles, The Buddha, William S. Burroughs, Tim Burton, David Byrne, Albert Camus, Richard Chamberlain, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie, Van Cliburn, Montgomery Clift, Former CIA
Director William Colby, Michael Crichton, David Cronenberg, Marie Curie,
Daniel Day-Lewis, Charles Darwin, John Dean, Edgar Dega, Robert DeNiro,
Jacques Derrida, René Descartes, Joan Didion, Joe DiMaggio, Esther Dyson,
Aviatrix Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Author Loren Eiseley, T. S. Eliot, the
cultural aura of England,
Ralph Fiennes, Chess player Bobby Fischer, E. M. Forster, John Fowles,
Greta Garbo, Bill Gates, Paul Gauguin, J. Paul Getty, Cybertech novelist William Gibson, Jean-Luc Godard, Kurt Godel, Jane Goodall, Glenn Gould,
Author Graham Greene, Alan Greenspan, H. R. Haldeman, Novelist Thomas
Harris, Stephen Hawking, Hermann Hesse, Hildegarde of Bingen, Alfred
Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins, Howard Hughes, Charles Ives, Unabomber
Ted Kaczynski, Franz Kafka, Dean Kamen, Director Philip Kaufman, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Dean R. Koontz, Arthur (The Amazing) Kreskin,
Stanley Kubrick, C-SPAN's Brian Lamb, Mary Leakey, John le Carré, Author
Ursula K. LeGuin, Photographer Annie Leibowitz, Charles Lindbergh,
"American Taliban" John Walker Lindh,
George Lucas, David Lynch, Cormac McCarthy, Norman MacLean, Robert
MacNeil, Terence Malick, Movie critic Leonard Maltin, Author Peter Matthiessen, Novelist Ian McEwan, Larry McMurtry, Timothy McVeigh, Singer Natalie Merchant, Thelonious Monk, Vladimir Nabokov, Mathematician John
Nash, Actor Sam Neill, Sir Isaac Newton, Joyce Carol Oates, Author Patrick
O'Brien, Georgia O'Keefe, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Al Pacino, Italian sculptor
Paladino, Andre Previn, Thomas Pynchon, Keanu Reeves, Philanthropist
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Phillip Roth, Oliver Sacks, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ebenezer Scrooge, Sister Wendy, Phil Spector, Albert Speer, Huston Smith, Poet
Gary Snyder, George Stephanopoulos, Actress Madeleine Stowe, Nikola
Tesla, Jules Verne, Max Von Sydow, Lars Von Trier, Colin Wilson, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, William Butler Yeats, Neil Young.

Enneagram Styles of Famous People
Compiled by Thomas Condo

Low Gap Road Waterfall

2011-01-12T03:21:00.001-08:00

Happy Holiday Season!!!!

2010-12-21T16:48:00.000-08:00

It's been a fun year being an internet addict!!!
Keep hope alive.................

$8133.64 Per Sq. Foot (Carpinteria Love)

2010-11-20T15:41:00.000-08:00

3485 Padaro Ln
CARPINTERIA, CA 93013
MLS #
10-3344
Price
$5,295,000
Status
Active
Square Footage
651
Lot Size
20,909
Bedrooms
3
Bathrooms
1
Half Bathrooms
1
Year Built
1935
Property Type
Home/Estate
Style
Cal. Cottage
Contruction
Single Story
Exterior
Wood Siding
Interior
Wood
Roof
Composition
Foundation
Raised

Do you think they will throw in a Weber BBQ for that price??

Adorable 100 year old Padaro Lane beach cottage sits above the sand in Santa Barbara's premiere ocean front enclave. On nearly one half acre with almost 100 feet of beachfront one can enjoy it as it is or take advantage of plans designed by Neumann, Mendro, Andrulaitis Architects for a stunning two story beach home with expansive views all the way down to Serena Cove.

3485 Padaro Ln, Carpinteria

Village Properties

This Is A Sampling Sport................

2010-10-29T00:26:00.000-07:00

Caught, now in court 'cause I stole a beat
This is a sampling sport
But I'm giving it a new name
What you hear is mine
P.e. you know the time
Now, what in the heaven does a jury know about hell
If I took it, but but they just look at me
Like, hey I'm on a mission
I'm talkin' 'bout conditions
Ain't right sittin' like dynamite
Gonna blow you up and it just might
Blow up the bench and
Judge, the courtroom plus I gotta mention
This court is dismissed when I grab the mike
Yo flave...what is this?

Get hyped, c'mon we gotta
Gather around - gotcha
Mail from the courts and jail
Claims I stole the beats that I rail
Look at how I'm livin' like
And they're gonna check the mike, right? - sike
Look at how I'm livin' now, lower than low
What a sucker know
I found this mineral that I call a beat
I paid zero
I packed my load 'cause it's better than gold
People don't ask the price, but it's sold
They say that I sample, but they should
Sample this my bit bull
We ain't goin' for this
They say that I stole this
Can I get a witness?

Understand where we're goin
Then listen to this, plus my roland
Comin' from way down below
Rebound c'mon boost up the stereo
Snakes in the morning
Wake up, scared afraid of my warning
They claim that I'm violent
Now I choose to be silent
Can I get a witness?

C'mon get wit' it
Something ain't right, I got to admit it
Made me mad when I was on tour
That I declared war on black radio
They say that I planned this
On the radio most of you will demand this
Won't be on a playlist
Bust the way that I say this: no sell out

You singers are spineless
As you sing your senseless songs to the mindless
Your general subject love is minimal
Its sex for profit
Scream that I sample
For example, tom you ran to the federal
Court in u.s. it don't mean you
Yeah, 'cause they fronted on you
The posses ready, terminator x yes he's ready
The s1ws, griff are you ready?

They say that I stole this
I rebel with a raised fist, can we get a witness?

5l33p 83 4 d@ w33|< f00! (How to Read and Write in 1337)

2010-08-29T01:17:00.000-07:00

LEET (1337) is a written language or cipher used in online gaming, e-mails, text messaging, and other electronic communication. The root of the term "leet" is the word "elite"--translated as 31337--and 1337 was initially developed as an exclusionary language: a way to encode text so that messages could only be read by the initiated. The defining characteristic of 1337 is substitution of symbols and numbers for letters (for example, in the term "1337," 1=L, 3=E and 7=T), but the language has also developed to include intentional misspellings, phonetic spelling, and new words. If you want to familiarize yourself with 1337, or if you're just curious about it, this article will explain the basics of how to read and write in this everchanging language.

Keep an open mind. Like all languages, 1337 isn't static. Reading 1337 can be difficult and the language may not always appear to make sense, especially since new words, random capitalizations and alternate spellings proliferate. You can learn basic guidelines for 1337, but there are no rules, and individuals alter the language to suit their own needs. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the same can be said for any language. All languages are living and changing; 1337 is simply very alive and changing quickly.
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2
Think of the symbols as shapes and not as their meanings. For example, a 5 looks a bit like an S, as does a $, so either of these symbols (among others) could be substituted for an S. When writing in 1337, you can follow guidelines such as those below, you can use the same substitutions of symbols for letters that you see other people using, or you can make up your own substitutions.
3
Combine two or more symbols and numbers to make single letters, such as |= for F or |3 for B. Again, you will find some frequently-used combination substitutions, but don't be afraid to be creative when you're writing, and don't be discouraged if you come across something unfamiliar when you're reading.
4
Pay attention to context. If you can't figure out the meaning of a symbol, try to guess its meaning based on the letters (symbols) around it. This is a bit like playing hangman or Wheel of Fortune: you try to figure out the missing letter or letters by looking at the surrounding letters. The same can be said of whole words. If a word doesn't make sense, you might not be translating it right, or it might be unfamiliar slang. Try to guess its meaning by looking at adjacent words or the sentence which contains the word.
5
Familiarize yourself with common phonetic replacements. In addition to symbol-for-letter replacement, 1337 can include letters which substitute for other letters, sounds or words. For instance, f = ph, cks = xx, s = z or r = are. This practice is certainly not unique to 1337--you don't have to be a 1337$p34|<3r (leetspeaker) to figure out the phrase "i luv u."
6
Brace yourself for flagrant misspellings. Some, such as "kewl" (for "cool") are phonetic replacements, while others such as "teh" (for "the), or "ownt" and "pwned" (for "owned") have just grown into the language as an inside joke. Other variations, such as omission of vowels, are also common. "Creative" spelling is just part of 1337.
7
Learn new grammatical structures. 1337 users often deviate from standard English grammatical structures, and they have invented some grammatical devices of their own. For example, the suffix "0rz" can be added to a word to make it plural or to add emphasis, as in "r0xx0rz" for "rocks," where "r0xx" would substitute for "rocks". Another common suffix is "3d," used to indicate the past tense such that "rocked" becomes "r0xx0r3d," as is "7h47 r0xx0r3d" ("that rocked"). It has also become something of a convention to change verbs to nouns by preceding the verb with "the" or, especially, "teh."
8
Embrace acronyms. Though technically just chat-speak, the use of acronyms and abbreviations is common in 1337. There are a tremendous number of acronyms used in electronic communication, among them BTW ("by the way"), TTYL ("talk to you later"), and the ubiquitous LOL (generally meaning "laugh out loud"). Even the meaning of unfamiliar acronyms will probably become obvious if the letters are examined in context, for example ROFLBBQCOPTER ("ROFLBBQCOPTER") or ROFLB52BOMBER ("ROFLB52BOMBER"), and you can always make your own.
9
Expand your vocabulary. Though most of the "new" words in 1337 are simply misspellings of English words ("taht", for example, or "pwn"), some are actually new coinages, such as "nooblet"--this could be written, for example, as "n008137"--which denotes a "noobie," or the 'newguy' |\|3\/\/|3 (newb) someone new to 1337 or something else. The best way to learn the vocabulary is to read a lot of 1337.
10
Adapt to inconsistency. Sometimes, you'll see people with 1337 "skillz," sometimes you'll see "5k1||5," and sometimes "$c1llz0r3d." Sometimes all three will be the same person writing in the same passage. There is a lot of inconsistency in 1337--get used to it.
11
cApItalizE at random. Random capitalization is arguably an integral part of 1337. Some writers employ a consistent method, such as capitalizing all letters except vowels or only ending letters, but many simply capitalize letters (where they are not replaced by symbols), whenever they want..
12
Practice reading 1337 and study the chart below. The only way to really learn 1337 is to absorb it by reading and writing a lot of it. If you read through 1337 $|o3/-\|< |=/-\57 3|\|0U9|-| u
1337 r0ck5
Note:
The commas are added to separate symbols
The symbol | (Example: B = |3 ) is a "down-slash", or "pipe", and not a lower-case "L" or capital "i"
The symbol ` (Example: T = 7` ) is not a standard apostrophe, but is a "Grave Accent" and is found on the tilde (~) key
Also keep in mind that the use of /-/ for H for example, aren't used nearly as often as the normal letter in a quick conversation. To write an entire sentence this way would take three times as long, thus the quicker single symbol or letter substitutions are more often used.
A = 4, /-\, @, ^, /\ , //-\\
B = 8, ]3, ]8, |3, |8, ]]3, 13
C = (, { , [[, <, €
D = ), [}, |), |}, |>, [>, ]]), Ð
E = 3, ii, €
F = |=,(=, ]]=, ph
G = 6, 9, (_>, [[6, &
H = #, |-|, (-), )-(, }{, }-{, {-}, /-/, \-\, |~|, []-[], ]]-[[,╫
I = 1, !, |, ][, []
J = _|, u|, ;_[], ;_[[
K = |<, |{, ][<, ]]<, []<
L = |,1, |_, []_, ][_, £
M = /\/\, |\/|, [\/], (\/), /V\, []V[], \\\, (T), ^^, .\\, //., ][\\//][,JVL
N = /\/, |\|, (\), /|/, [\], {\}, ][\][, []\[], ~
O = 0, (), [], <>, *, [[]]
P = |D, |*, |>, []D, ][D
Q = commas are necessary: (,) or 0, or O, or O\ or []\
R = |2, |?, |-, ]]2 []2 ][2
S = 5,$,š
T = 7, +, ']', 7`, ~|~, -|-, '][', "|", †
U = (_), |_|, \_\, /_/, \_/, []_[], ]_[, µ
V = \/ , \\//,√
W = \/\/, |/\|, [/\], (/\), VV, ///, \^/, \\/\//, 1/\/, \/1/, 1/1/
X = ><, }{, )(, }[
Y = '/, %, `/, \j , ``//, ¥, j, \|/, -/
Z = 2, z, 7_,`/_

http://www.wikihow.com/Read-and-Write-in-1337

Life < 100 Items??

2010-08-14T18:33:00.000-07:00

Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.

But Will It Make You Happy?

The 2010 Social Networking Map

2010-08-14T18:25:00.000-07:00

2010 Social Networking Map

Capulin, Colorado Crib 2.10

2010-08-14T18:15:00.000-07:00

I Have A Dream (Economics: A Good Choice of Major for Future CEOs)

2010-07-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

Economics: A Good Choice of Major for Future CEOs

Patricia M. Flynn
Bentley University - Department of Economics

Michael A. Quinn
Bentley University - Department of Economics

November 28, 2006

Abstract:
It is often suggested that Economics is a good major for individuals interested in becoming business leaders. Despite this widespread assertion, little research has been conducted on this topic. Using the Standard and Poor (S&P) 500 companies, this paper examines the validity of such a claim. We find evidence that Economics is a good choice of major for those aspiring to become a CEO. Economics ranked third with 9% of the CEOs of the S&P 500 companies in 2004 being undergraduate Economics majors, behind Business Administration and Engineering majors, each of which accounted for 20% of the CEOs. When adjusting for size of the pool of graduates, those with undergraduate degrees in Economics are shown to have had a greater likelihood of becoming an S&P 500 CEO than any other major. That is, the share of graduates who were Economics majors who were CEOs in 2004 was greater than that for any other major, including Business Administration and Engineering. The findings also show that a higher percentage of CEOs who were Economics majors subsequently completed a graduate degree - often an MBA - than did their counterparts with Business Administration and Engineering degrees. The paper demonstrates that while women now comprise over half of all bachelors and masters degrees awarded, they remain a minority in terms of undergraduate degrees awarded in Economics and in MBA degrees conferred. Economics programs may try to appeal to more women students as a stepping stone to becoming a CEO, especially as women continue to account for less than 2 percent of the S&P 500 CEOs.
Keywords: undergraduate major, CEO, economics degrees, gender mix of students
JEL Classifications: A2
Working Paper Series

Economics: A Good Choice of Major for Future CEOs

How Google Works

2010-07-07T05:21:00.000-07:00

Infographic by PPC Blog

McChronic (The Branding of Buddah)

2010-06-01T01:27:00.000-07:00

Will Stateline California have a bunch of weed shops at the border. Kids make the run from NEV to CA to get their herb?
How about Cheech's Crunch Chronic Brownies (98% trans fatty oil free)?
Motel 420? They could have a bong in each room. You can have it cleaned every other day by the maid. Or you can request daily cleanings.
High Times Resorts presents Cannabis Hills Country Club. Scheduled opening date of April 20, 2011. Beautiful 18 hole golf course nestled in rolling, cannabis groves with stunning coastal views.
They can call the sports bar, The 420th Hole. And have bong cleaners at each hole.

In a not-too-distant future, I can even imagine frequenting, for example, a HIGH TIMES Café or a NORML Healing Center. Given the right partners and conducive legal circumstances, it hardly seems a stretch of one’s imagination to see this happening relatively soon in California, where citizens will vote this November on a marijuana-legalization ballot initiative.

Branded Buds

These 420 resorts will include cannabis gardens with hundreds of different strains, accommodations, restaurants, tours of the local areas, including legal cultivation models and 420 educational programs, with other traditional tourist attractions and events.

The ‘King of Pot' plans ganja tourism in N. California

With this in mind, Print contacted four firms: Lust, a graphic design practice in Amsterdam established by Thomas Castro, Jeroen Barendse, and Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen; the New York office of Base, which worked with its branches in Europe; the Oslo firm Strømme Throndsen, winner of the 2009 Award for Design Excellence for its flour packaging; and The Heads of State, a two-man operation run by Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers in Philadelphia.

The brief was simple: What would a legal pack of marijuana cigarettes look like?

Building a Better Baggie

YAK edibles is launching a broad line of eight products, including; YAK Brownie, YAK Fudge, YAK Mini Cookies, YAK Greenie, YAK Sensi Star (cookie in star shape), YAK Haute Chocolate (instant hot chocolate drink), YAK Mocha Juana (instant coffee drink) and their best selling YAK Cannabis Extract Capsules.

YAK Greenie
Available in Sativa or Indica
Price: $15.00
Package contains 1 cookie
with 800mg. of cannabis flowers

This is the strongest of the Yak edible line. It is made primarily for patients with severe pain and spasticity, conditions requiring substantial amounts of cannabis medicine. Each Greenie contains the equivalent of eight of the Yak single-dose capsules.

Ingredients:
Active Ingredients: 750 mg. each of medicinal cannabis flowers
Sativa: Active ingredients: Prime flowers of Blue Dream, Super Silver Haze and Pineapple Thai
Indica: Prime flowers of Grandaddy Purple and Purple Kush.

Other ingredients: Cannabis flowers, organic sugar, organic butter, organic flour, organic eggs, chocolate chips, organic raisins, organic vanilla, baking soda, Himalayan pink salt.

YAK Edibles

The Hershey Co. has sued Affolter, 40, for giving his forbidden marijuana munchies names like Stoney Rancher, Rasta Reese’s and Keef Kat. Each came in packaging similar to Hershey’s Jolly Rancher, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Kit Kat candies.
Hershey’s suit, filed earlier this month in U.S. District Court in San Jose, accuses Affolter of trademark infringement, trademark dilution and unfair competition. The company is seeking $100,000 in damages.

Hershey Vs. Pot Dealer in Trademark Suit

The more I think of it. If the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010 passes, it's gonna create a lot of of new jobs,spur entrepreneurship, and infuse capital into California...............

What Is The Underground Economy?

2010-05-28T02:54:00.000-07:00

The Underground Economy in One Page

The government's "war on drugs" has been both a tremendous triumph and an abysmal failure. Drug warriors have been very successful. We have all seen media images of police stings involving massive amounts of money, drugs, and firearms. However, this has had no impact in local markets. Illegal drugs are available just about everywhere and at prices that have fallen in real terms over time. The amount of pot that could be bought for $10 at a local high school in 1980, for example, is likely the same quantity that could be obtained for $10 today.

Underground Economy @ Wikipedia

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences) by Philippe Bourgois

Policing for Profit (The Economics of Civil Asset Forfeiture Laws)

2010-05-24T01:16:00.000-07:00

In most states and under federal law, law enforcement can keep some or all of the proceeds from civil forfeitures. This incentive has led to concern that civil forfeiture encourages policing for profit, as agencies pursue forfeitures to boost their budgets at the expense of other policing priorities.

Policing for Profit @ Cato

Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture

Forfeiture Endangers American Rights

The Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section provides centralized management for the Department's asset forfeiture program to ensure its integrity and maximize its law enforcement potential, while also providing managerial direction to the Department's components in prosecuting money laundering. The Section initiates, coordinates, and reviews legislative and policy proposals impacting on the asset forfeiture program and money laundering enforcement agencies.

The Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section

Same Quadrant..Different Test

2010-05-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

My Political Views
I am a right social libertarian
Right: 7.13, Libertarian: 6.35

Political Spectrum Quiz

Political Spectrum Quiz

Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Milton Friedman and Trent (Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal?)

2010-05-17T15:32:00.000-07:00

For the record..I am Fiscally Conservative AND Socially Liberal.

'

The world is complicated, and an electorate so diverse in geography, race, class and beliefs can’t be shoehorned into two fixed templates. There is no particular reason why all advocates of fiscal restraint should also oppose abortion rights, or why supporters of a progressive tax code should necessarily favor restrictions on gun ownership.

Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal?

Party purges

And In This Corner!! Weighing In At 270 lbs....(Weight Classes for Prisons Revisited)

2010-05-16T13:40:00.000-07:00

As discussed earlier in this section, a victim of prison rape is often much smaller and weaker than the perpetrator of the violence. Therefore, while prior violence should certainly be taken into account, the classification system should incorporate the strength and size of the inmate as well. This Note encourages prison officials to continue to use degree of violence as a factor but within that violence classification, to check each inmate for height and weight, and classify each according to a sliding scale, the details of which will be discussed later in this section.

Weight Classes for Prisons Revisited
Bryan Caplan

Beyond the Border: A Comparative
Look at Prison Rape in the United
States and Canada
PHILIP ELLENBOGEN

Bourbon, Loose Women and Cigarettes (The Relentless Subjectivity of Value)

2010-05-11T23:16:00.000-07:00

Consider Waits and Weil. Waits is a musician who has lived much of his 61 years on bourbon, loose women and cigarettes. Weil, a 67-year-old holistic physician, thrives on organic food and yoga. Each, from his own perspective, leads more or less the kind of life he wants to. Both can be fulfilled. Without actually being them, how can we tell? Waits sings bitter-sweetly of his 'misspent' life. Weil writes, in self-help books, about healthy living. We could observe their behavior or ask them to take an MRI. Otherwise, we have to trust each man's report to determine whether or not they are well or fulfilled. When the government embraces some idea about how people ought to live (value), the instinct might be to tax Waits and subsidize Weil. But why?

The Relentless Subjectivity of Value

The Earworm Chronicles 2.10

2010-05-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

Created a new blog to catalog my earworms. Mostly movie and tv clips/samples...

The Earworm Chronicles 2.10

The Opener (Ode to the Knuckleballer)

2010-05-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

This is kind of an interesting concept...........

If you have a hot reliever who is not your closer and can pitch two innings consistently (as in Mariano Rivera in 1995), why not start the game with that pitcher? If you could get two solid innings out of a reliever at the start of the game, your actual starter would only need to pitch seven innings to finish the game. Or, that actual starter could pitch just six innings and hand it over to the closer for the ninth.

I would suggest calling the new relief position “The Opener.”

A New Kind of Starting Pitcher?

Tipping 101 : Cup Sizes

2010-04-28T23:46:00.000-07:00

Professor Lynn found a positive correlation between the breast size of waitresses (n = 432) and the size of their tips (both were self-reported measures). He did not split the tipping data by sex of the patrons. One might expect that the "breast effect" might enhance tips for male patrons whereas female patrons might "punish" shapely waitresses (intra-sexual rivalry). The existing data did not allow for a more refined set of analyses to test such possibilities. Also, Lynn notes that he might have expected a quadratic relationship between breast size and size of tips, namely, breasts that are too small or too big would result in lower tips than medium sized breasts. However, his data suggests that bigger is always better...at least when it comes to tipping behavior!

Big Breasts = Larger Waitress Tips.
The Hooters effect: Big breasts equal big tips.

Abstract: Waitresses completed an on-line survey about their physical characteristics, self-perceived attractiveness and sexiness, and average tips. The waitresses’ self-rated physical attractiveness increased with their breast sizes and decreased with their ages, waist-to-hip ratios, and body sizes. Similar effects were observed on self-rated sexiness, with the exception of age, which varied with self-rated sexiness in a negative, quadratic relationship rather than a linear one. Moreover, the waitresses’ tips varied with age in a negative, quadratic relationship, increased with breast size, increased with having blond hair, and decreased with body size. These findings, which are discussed from an evolutionary perspective, make several contributions to the literature on female physical attractiveness. First, they replicate some previous findings regarding the determinants of female physical attractiveness using a larger, more diverse, and more ecologically valid set of stimuli than has been studied before. Second, they provide needed evidence that some of those determinants of female beauty affect interpersonal behaviors as well as attractiveness ratings. Finally, they indicate that some determinants of female physical attractiveness do not have the same effects on overt interpersonal behavior (such as tipping) that they have on attractiveness ratings. This latter contribution highlights the need for more ecologically valid tests of evolutionary theories about the determinants and consequences of female beauty.

Determinants and Consequences of Female Attractiveness and Sexiness: Realistic Tests with Restaurant Waitresses

UCSB - Playboy #8 Party School (With A Bullet)

2010-04-20T00:55:00.000-07:00

1. University of Texas at Austin
2. West Virginia University
3. University of Wisconsin-Madison
4. University of Miami
5. East Carolina University
6. Arizona State University
7. Rollins College
8. University of California-Santa Barbara
9. Plymouth State University
10. University of Iowa

Released last Friday, Playboy’s 2010 Top 10 Party Schools list dubbed UCSB the eighth wildest campus in the country. With plenty of beach access, a socially active student body and the healthy party scene in Isla Vista, UCSB made it back onto the list after several years of being excluded. UCSB was last ranked in the top 10 in 2006, when Playboy put the university at number two.

According to Playboy’s junior publicist Steve Mazeika, a thriving social presence, location, atmosphere, nightlife and even academics were taken into account for the formulation of their rankings.

“We consider a lot of different things,” Mazeika said. “Basically, we’re looking for a place that someone who wants to live the Playboy lifestyle would want to go to school. It has to be the full package.”

Additionally, Mazeika said in order to represent an accurate general opinion, Playboy’s editors base their rankings on a variety of sources, including responses from online voters, student readers and campus representatives.

This year, the University of Texas at Austin took the title as the top party school in the country.

Though many are glad to see UCSB back in action on the list, not everyone is thrilled about the “Playboy lifestyle” UCSB supposedly caters to.

Vice Chancellor Michael Young said many negative connotations come with being ranked one of the nation’s top party schools, and this ranking may drive away qualified students who feel they would be better suited at a more disciplined university.

“Despite records to the contrary, people want to continue to say we’re a party school, even with the presence of five Nobel Prize winners and outstanding academics,” Young said. “But our statistics will speak for themselves, and students need to remember that this list distracts people from what is important.”

Clayton Carlson, Associated Students external vice president of local affairs, said now is not the time for UCSB to be getting more risqué publicity.

“This list ties back to events like Floatopia — the publicity around Floatopia was not good,” Carlson said. “And it seems like bad stereotypes of our school just keep getting perpetuated. Playboy has the power to affect so many people and I think that this list may push possible candidates for the school away. ”

Jake Wiskel, a second-year business-economics major, said it’s all about finding a balance between the crazy I.V. parties and the prestigious academics that make the school what it is.

“People party pretty fucking hard at UCSB so it’s not surprising that we’re on the list,” Wiskel said. “But the partying isn’t what defines UCSB, it’s what enriches the environment.”

In addition, UCSB has consistently been featured on the Princeton Review’s Top 20 Party Schools list. While the two lists have no connection and apparently operate based on different criteria — Princeton Review ranked Penn State as top party school of 2010 — both publications agree on UCSB’s party factor.

Young said in the end, it comes down to the UCSB community to uphold the campus’s academic status.

“It’s about individual responsibility and personal choice,” Young said. “If we all operate in the way we want it to be, it will be that way.”

Similarly, Carlson added that maintaining a balance between work and play is necessary for the university’s integrity.

“I think it comes back to being a good member of the community and proving to people that we as students at UCSB can go out and party but still get our stuff done,” Carlson said.

SB Rises in Playboy Party Ranking
******************************************************

UCSB was the only California college or university on this list, but the Playboy top 10 did also mention Chico saying that “Chico State may get a touch higher, but UCSB grads go on to do great things after their six years in college.” Most do not know that UCSB has 5 Nobel Prize winners on the faculty, which might be why Playboy called the college the “Harvard of Santa Barbara.”

UCSB and the town of Isla Vista is also well known for their massive Halloween party every year that fills up the entire town. It is no wonder that so many people apply each year for UCSB, and other California colleges in the region near the beach. There are not many schools like UCSB in California which have such strong academics, and a great atmosphere for partying

Best Fish-In-A-Barrel College: Sarah Lawrence, where 73 percent of the student body is female

Best College Drinking Innovation: The Flabongo, a beer bong made out of a lawn flamingo

Best College Sandwich: Fat Philly from the Rutgers grease trucks: two chicken fingers, cheesesteak, gyro meat, two mozzarella sticks, white and red sauces, lettuce and tomato
UCSB Earns Spot 8 on Playboys Top Ten Party School List

More Gauchos Is Better

2010-04-19T03:38:00.000-07:00

Two programs within the Department of Economics at UC Santa Barbara have been ranked among the top 10 in the nation by Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), a volunteer-driven initiative to create a public-access database that promotes scholarly communication in economics and related disciplines.

Only M.I.T. and Harvard University ranked higher than UCSB in environmental economics, and the department's experimental economics program placed sixth behind the University of Chicago, UC San Diego, Chapman University, Harvard University, and New York University. In addition, the cognitive and behavioral economics program ranked 12th. Other UC campuses among the top 12 include UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, at numbers three and four, respectively.

The ranking is a joint product of RePEc and the University of Connecticut, where the database is maintained. The results are based on 31 different criteria, including the number of citations and the publications in which they appeared, the total number of works authored by a particular scholar, journal page counts, the number of times document abstracts have been viewed on the RePEc Web site, and the frequency with which they have been downloaded.

"These rankings are a testament to the commitment UCSB has made to these fields over the past two decades, though of course it is the faculty in environmental, experimental, and behavioral economics who deserve the most credit," said Charles Kolstad, chair and professor of economics and professor at UCSB's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. "The stature of departments is built one field at a time. The Department of Economics hopes to strengthen all of its core fields over the next five years so that each is top five nationally."

Said Melvin Oliver, the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences at UCSB: "We are gratified that our Department of Economics faculty who specialize in environment, experimental, and cognitive and behavioral economics are recognized in national rankings for their outstanding quality. Such recognition speaks to the scholarly research they continue to produce while educating and mentoring nearly 2,500 undergraduate and 85 graduate students. These rankings reflect a faculty that embraces the teaching and research mission of the University of California."

UCSB Economics Receives High Rank

Top 25% Economics Departments(World), as of March 2010
#41 Department of Economics, University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB), Santa Barbara, California (USA)

Top 25% US Economics Departments, as of March 2010
#27 Department of Economics, University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB), Santa Barbara, California (USA)

Top 10% Institutions and Economists in the Field of Business Economics, as of March 2010
#84 Department of Economics, University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB), Santa Barbara
IDEAS rankings

Professor Crouch would be proud of Trent ;)
I still see him in town at all the dive bars!!!

The Encyclopedia of Business Cliches

2010-04-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

Click through to see the plexo

The Encyclopedia of Business Cliches

Santa Barbara Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Map [ REAL TIME!!!] ;)

2010-04-13T03:14:00.000-07:00

View Santa Barbara Medical Marijuana Dispensaries in a larger map

The United Countries of Baseball

2010-04-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

Leet Speak Alphabet

2010-04-06T11:53:00.000-07:00

A: 4 or l\ or ^ or @ or /\ or /-\
B. l3 or 8 or ß or ]3 or l:
C: ( or < or © or ¢ D: l) or l> or ])
E:3 or £
F: l= or # or ƒ
G:6 or 9
H: # or l-l or (-) or !-! or }-{ or }{ or l+l or )+( or !+! or }+{
L: 1 or ! or ]
J: _l or _/
K: l< or l( or l{ or l<= L: l_ or ! or 1 M: l\/l or /\/\ or l\l\ or ^^ N: l/l or /\/ O: 0 or () or <> or * or ø or Ó or °
P: l* or l> or |D or l^ or l+
Q:& or (\) or ¶
R: l2 or ®
S: 5 or $ or §
T:+ or 7
U: l_l or /_/
V: \/
W:|/\| or \/\/ or |/\/ or \/\|
X: >< or }{ or :-:
Y: ¥
Z: 2

1337 Generator

BBCode for Flickr (Greasemonkey Tool)

2010-04-03T17:21:00.000-07:00

This is a great Greasemonkey tool for posting pics on forums that use BB Code:

If you're like me who likes to upload photos to Flickr, and then post them onto forum boards, this is for you.

This Firefox plugin will generate the BBCode for your Flickr photo. Most forum uses BBCode.

1. You'll need to have Firefox web browser. The download link for that is on the right most column at the bottom.

2. After you've installed Firefox, visit Greasemonkey plugin to install Greasemonkey.Greasemonkey is needed for you to install the BBCode generator.

3. Next visit userscripts.org to look for a "Install this script" button. Click on it.

4. Greasemonkey will install the script necessary to generate the BBCode.

5. Then from your Firefox menu bar, go to Tools->Greasemonkey->Manage User Scripts...

Under your included pages, add http://*flickr.com/photos/*/*/sizes/*/

6. You're done. Next time you visit the Flickr photo page where all your photos are shown in different sizes, you'll get a form box with the BBCode ready for you to copy.

Parka Blogs: BBCode Generator for Flickr

Why Behavioral Economists Love Online Games - Daniel Lyons - Newsweek.com

2010-04-02T19:51:00.000-07:00

I've always been fascinated by the economics of virtual money.why would anyone pay money for a jpg of flowers? And why does the jpg of flowers cost less than the jpg of a diamond ring??

The idea of studying behavior in virtual marketplaces is starting to catch on among academics. The focal point of the effort is the Virtual Economy Research Network, which serves as a kind of clearinghouse for scholars who are interested in studying virtual goods and virtual currencies

Why Behavioral Economists Love Online Games - Daniel Lyons - Newsweek.com

Scatter Brain: The Recession and Recovery in Perspective

2010-03-26T03:09:00.000-07:00

Talk about a crap shoot.....would be intersting to see the line of best fit (linear regression) on this graph!!

Economist's View: One of These Things is Not Like the Others

the recession and recovery in perspective

Stimulus: How Fast We're Spending Nearly $800 Billion | ProPublica

2010-03-24T20:48:00.000-07:00

34% and counting.............

Stimulus: How Fast We're Spending Nearly $800 Billion | ProPublica

SB Scrilla-Does Local Currency Make Dollars and Sense for Santa Barbara? - Noozhawk.com

2010-03-24T20:45:00.000-07:00

But, ask around town now about Santa Barbara’s local currency experiment and the answer is nearly always, “Never heard of it.” Then, after a healthy pause, “What’s a local currency?”

No, Trent HAD NOT heard of SB Scrilla...........

Does Local Currency Make Dollars and Sense for Santa Barbara?

Valley Of The Cruisers, Isla Vista, CA UCSB

2010-03-20T16:32:00.000-07:00

by Trent Rock's Visual Vices

Cruiser bicycles, also known as beach cruisers, combine balloon-tires, upright seating posture, single-speed mechanicals, and straightforward steel construction with expressive styling. The bikes, noted for their durability and heavy weight, were the most popular bicycle in the United States from the early 1930s through the 1950s — and enjoyed renewed popularity since the late 1990s.

Cruiser and Lowrider (Pool)@ Flickr

Cruiser bicycle

All Linked Up , Holmes...(Rolling Down The Information Superhighway)

2010-03-20T04:15:00.000-07:00

Trent Rock CEO T Rock Productions Goleta, CA, 93117 USA	http://trentrock.blogspot.com/

Visit MyBlogLog and get a signature like this!

I Told You!! There IS No Recession! Punk Ass Bitch!!

2010-03-19T03:22:00.000-07:00

The December incident wasn't the first time Madoff found himself engaged in a prison brawl. He allegedly emerged the victor after an argument with another inmate over the "state of the market" ended in fisticuffs last October

Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff reportedly assaulted in prison

Grandmaster B (It's A Lonely Life)

2010-03-17T22:48:00.000-07:00

He came from the streets where everyone's meet
Guns in the night, but you wonder why she can't love no-one
'cause he's on the run
Sleeps in the alley, wakes by the sun
Listen to the sirens, thinkin' they're for me
It's a lonely life for Grandmaster B
Yes, a lonely life for Grandmaster B

"When the hat is on..."
Grandmaster B name substitutes

Won't they ever get it right?

Ghostbuster B (Kelly, 0603)
Mixmaster B (Jill, 0603)
Grandma B (Kelly, 0603)
Grand Marshall B (Peg, 0603)
Bedwetter B (Kelly, 0603)
Court Jester B (Peg, 0603)
Bushwhacker (Kelly, 0603)
Burgermeister (Peg, 0603)
Buckminster (Al, 0603)
Grand Flasher (Jill, 0603)
Dustbuster (Jill, 0603)
Grasshopper (Al, 0604)
Gaspasser (Al, 0604)
Bass Satcher (Al, 0604)
Grandfather B (Al, 0604)
Crossdresser B (Kelly, 0607)
Grandpappy B (Kelly, 0607)
Bellringer B (kelly, 0607)
Grand Bastard (Kelly, 0614)
Thumbsucker B (Kelly, 0614)
Buttwagger B (Kelly, 0616)
Grandmaster Virgin (Kelly, 0616)
Thighmaster (Kelly, 0619)
Grinchmaster B (Host, 0619)
Abdomenizer B (Bud, 0723)

Greed Is (Not) Good (For Your Heart)

2010-03-17T01:42:00.000-07:00

...we found that when stock market values decreased, heart attacks seemed to increase, and then decreased when stock trends improved,”

Duke study links stock market to cardiac events

I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me...

2010-03-17T00:22:00.000-07:00

The Justice Department released a presentation entitled "Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites." The slides, which were prepared by two lawyers from the agency's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, detail several social media companies' data retention practices and responses to law enforcement requests. The presentation notes that Facebook was “often cooperative with emergency requests” while complaining about Twitter’s short data retention policies and refusal to preserve data without legal process. The presentation also touches on use of social media for undercover operations

United States Justice Dept: "Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites"

EFF Posts Documents Detailing Law Enforcement Collection of Data From Social Media Sites Electronic Frontier Foundation

(Trent) Rock Ain't Noise Pollution

2010-03-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

The 50th Law: 10 Lessons in Fearlessness

2010-03-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

The 50th Law: 10 Lessons in Fearlessness

View more presentations from Robert Greene.

From Argentine Cowboys to Tossed Tortillas, the True Story of UCSB's Mascot

2010-03-14T04:00:00.000-07:00

One of the quirkiest parts of the gaucho legacy lives in our corner of California, where students, alumni, and sports teams from the University of California at Santa Barbara call themselves The Gauchos. But even though UCSB took Gauchos as its nickname more than 70 years ago - and thousands of alumni are expected to return this weekend to celebrate the 3rd annual All Gaucho Reunion - few in Santa Barbara know just what a gaucho is, or why they should be proud to wear that name. And fewer still know how the gaucho name came to be immortalized here.

It's time to set the record straight. This is the true story of the gaucho, from Argentine cowboy to UCSB mascot

The Men Behind the Myths:
From Argentine Cowboys to Tossed Tortillas, the True Story of UCSB's Mascot

Economics is in crisis: it is time for a profound revamp?

2010-03-13T04:01:00.000-08:00

Most people are not sure which camp is right. They hesitate. One day, when green shoots are popping up here and there, they believe the story warning about inflation; the next day, when the shoots turn brownish, they believe the other story. Disagreements among economists take away the intellectual anchors around which market participants interpret events and forecast the future. Ultimately, all our forecasts use a particular economic model to interpret data and to forecast their future course.

Economics is in crisis: it is time for a profound revamp?

Divided By Trent (demo II)

2010-03-06T12:39:00.000-08:00

I got a message for you.....
Divided By Trent (demo II).MP3

Trent Rock Simpson (Self Portrait VII)

2010-03-03T04:43:00.001-08:00

Palace Hotel, Antonito, Colorado

2010-03-03T04:00:00.000-08:00

Interventionism: An Economic Analysis by Ludwig von Mises

2010-03-03T03:55:00.000-08:00

It is irrelevant to the entrepreneur, as the servant of the consumers, whether the wishes and wants of the consumers are wise or unwise, moral or immoral. He produces what the consumers want. In this sense he is amoral. He manufactures whiskey and guns just as he produces food and clothing. It is not his task to teach reason to the sovereign consumers. Should one entrepreneur, for ethical reasons of his own, refuse to manufacture whiskey, other entrepreneurs would do so as long as whiskey is wanted and bought. It is not because we have distilleries that people drink whiskey; it is because people like to drink whiskey that we have distilleries. One may deplore this. But it is not up to the entrepreneurs to improve mankind morally. And they are not to be blamed if those whose duty this is have failed to do so.
--Ludwig Von Mises

Interventionism: An Economic Analysis by Ludwig von Mises:

Columbia Skies

2010-02-04T00:40:00.000-08:00

Columbia State Historic Park

San Felipe de Neri Church (Symmetry Style) -Schmap Winner!!!!

2009-10-11T02:14:00.000-07:00

San Felipe de Neri Church (Symmetry Style)

Hi Trent Rock's Visual Vices,

I am delighted to let you know that your submitted photo has been selected for inclusion in the newly released ninth edition of our Schmap Albuquerque Guide:

San Felipe de Neri Church
San Felipe de Neri Church

Bert's Burger Bowl Santa Fe, NM

2009-08-02T04:07:00.000-07:00

www.roadfood.com/Restaurant/Reviews/1379/berts-burger-bowl

www.foodnetwork.com/diners-drive-ins-and-dives/all-kinds-...

Guy Fieri tracks down fast food done right: In NM, a 54 year old drive-in that s legendary for Green Chile Cheeseburgers

Trent likes green chile!!!

The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits

2009-07-30T06:10:00.000-07:00

The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits
by Milton Friedman

The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the "social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system," I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are–or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously–preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.

The discussions of the "social responsibilities of business" are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor. What does it mean to say that "business" has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities. A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but "business" as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense. The first step toward clarity in examining the doctrine of the social responsibility of business is to ask precisely what it implies for whom.

Presumably, the individuals who are to be responsible are businessmen, which means individual proprietors or corporate executives. Most of the discussion of social responsibility is directed at corporations, so in what follows I shall mostly neglect the individual proprietors and speak of corporate executives.

In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different objective. A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose–for example, a hospital or a school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objective but the rendering of certain services.

In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.

Needless to say, this does not mean that it is easy to judge how well he is performing his task. But at least the criterion of performance is straightforward, and the persons among whom a voluntary contractual arrangement exists are clearly defined.

Of course, the corporate executive is also a person in his own right. As a person, he may have many other responsibilities that he recognizes or assumes voluntarily–to his family, his conscience, his feelings of charity, his church, his clubs, his city, his country. He ma}. feel impelled by these responsibilities to devote part of his income to causes he regards as worthy, to refuse to work for particular corporations, even to leave his job, for example, to join his country's armed forces. Ifwe wish, we may refer to some of these responsibilities as "social responsibilities." But in these respects he is acting as a principal, not an agent; he is spending his own money or time or energy, not the money of his employers or the time or energy he has contracted to devote to their purposes. If these are "social responsibilities," they are the social responsibilities of individuals, not of business.

What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a "social responsibility" in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers. For example, that he is to refrain from increasing the price of the product in order to contribute to the social objective of preventing inflation, even though a price in crease would be in the best interests of the corporation. Or that he is to make expenditures on reducing pollution beyond the amount that is in the best interests of the corporation or that is required by law in order to contribute to the social objective of improving the environment. Or that, at the expense of corporate profits, he is to hire "hardcore" unemployed instead of better qualified available workmen to contribute to the social objective of reducing poverty.

In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his "social responsibility" reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.

The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct "social responsibility," rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it.

But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other.

This process raises political questions on two levels: principle and consequences. On the level of political principle, the imposition of taxes and the expenditure of tax proceeds are governmental functions. We have established elaborate constitutional, parliamentary and judicial provisions to control these functions, to assure that taxes are imposed so far as possible in accordance with the preferences and desires of the public–after all, "taxation without representation" was one of the battle cries of the American Revolution. We have a system of checks and balances to separate the legislative function of imposing taxes and enacting expenditures from the executive function of collecting taxes and administering expenditure programs and from the judicial function of mediating disputes and interpreting the law.

Here the businessman–self-selected or appointed directly or indirectly by stockholders–is to be simultaneously legislator, executive and, jurist. He is to decide whom to tax by how much and for what purpose, and he is to spend the proceeds–all this guided only by general exhortations from on high to restrain inflation, improve the environment, fight poverty and so on and on.

The whole justification for permitting the corporate executive to be selected by the stockholders is that the executive is an agent serving the interests of his principal. This justification disappears when the corporate executive imposes taxes and spends the proceeds for "social" purposes. He becomes in effect a public employee, a civil servant, even though he remains in name an employee of a private enterprise. On grounds of political principle, it is intolerable that such civil servants–insofar as their actions in the name of social responsibility are real and not just window-dressing–should be selected as they are now. If they are to be civil servants, then they must be elected through a political process. If they are to impose taxes and make expenditures to foster "social" objectives, then political machinery must be set up to make the assessment of taxes and to determine through a political process the objectives to be served.

This is the basic reason why the doctrine of "social responsibility" involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses.

On the grounds of consequences, can the corporate executive in fact discharge his alleged "social responsibilities?" On the other hand, suppose he could get away with spending the stockholders' or customers' or employees' money. How is he to know how to spend it? He is told that he must contribute to fighting inflation. How is he to know what action of his will contribute to that end? He is presumably an expert in running his company–in producing a product or selling it or financing it. But nothing about his selection makes him an expert on inflation. Will his hold ing down the price of his product reduce inflationary pressure? Or, by leaving more spending power in the hands of his customers, simply divert it elsewhere? Or, by forcing him to produce less because of the lower price, will it simply contribute to shortages? Even if he could answer these questions, how much cost is he justified in imposing on his stockholders, customers and employees for this social purpose? What is his appropriate share and what is the appropriate share of others?

And, whether he wants to or not, can he get away with spending his stockholders', customers' or employees' money? Will not the stockholders fire him? (Either the present ones or those who take over when his actions in the name of social responsibility have reduced the corporation's profits and the price of its stock.) His customers and his employees can desert him for other producers and employers less scrupulous in exercising their social responsibilities.

This facet of "social responsibility" doc trine is brought into sharp relief when the doctrine is used to justify wage restraint by trade unions. The conflict of interest is naked and clear when union officials are asked to subordinate the interest of their members to some more general purpose. If the union officials try to enforce wage restraint, the consequence is likely to be wildcat strikes, rank-and-file revolts and the emergence of strong competitors for their jobs. We thus have the ironic phenomenon that union leaders–at least in the U.S.–have objected to Government interference with the market far more consistently and courageously than have business leaders.

The difficulty of exercising "social responsibility" illustrates, of course, the great virtue of private competitive enterprise–it forces people to be responsible for their own actions and makes it difficult for them to "exploit" other people for either selfish or unselfish purposes. They can do good–but only at their own expense.

Many a reader who has followed the argument this far may be tempted to remonstrate that it is all well and good to speak of Government's having the responsibility to impose taxes and determine expenditures for such "social" purposes as controlling pollution or training the hard-core unemployed, but that the problems are too urgent to wait on the slow course of political processes, that the exercise of social responsibility by businessmen is a quicker and surer way to solve pressing current problems.

Aside from the question of fact–I share Adam Smith's skepticism about the benefits that can be expected from "those who affected to trade for the public good"–this argument must be rejected on grounds of principle. What it amounts to is an assertion that those who favor the taxes and expenditures in question have failed to persuade a majority of their fellow citizens to be of like mind and that they are seeking to attain by undemocratic procedures what they cannot attain by democratic procedures. In a free society, it is hard for "evil" people to do "evil," especially since one man's good is another's evil.

I have, for simplicity, concentrated on the special case of the corporate executive, except only for the brief digression on trade unions. But precisely the same argument applies to the newer phenomenon of calling upon stockholders to require corporations to exercise social responsibility (the recent G.M crusade for example). In most of these cases, what is in effect involved is some stockholders trying to get other stockholders (or customers or employees) to contribute against their will to "social" causes favored by the activists. Insofar as they succeed, they are again imposing taxes and spending the proceeds.

The situation of the individual proprietor is somewhat different. If he acts to reduce the returns of his enterprise in order to exercise his "social responsibility," he is spending his own money, not someone else's. If he wishes to spend his money on such purposes, that is his right, and I cannot see that there is any objection to his doing so. In the process, he, too, may impose costs on employees and customers. However, because he is far less likely than a large corporation or union to have monopolistic power, any such side effects will tend to be minor.

Of course, in practice the doctrine of social responsibility is frequently a cloak for actions that are justified on other grounds rather than a reason for those actions.

To illustrate, it may well be in the long run interest of a corporation that is a major employer in a small community to devote resources to providing amenities to that community or to improving its government. That may make it easier to attract desirable employees, it may reduce the wage bill or lessen losses from pilferage and sabotage or have other worthwhile effects. Or it may be that, given the laws about the deductibility of corporate charitable contributions, the stockholders can contribute more to charities they favor by having the corporation make the gift than by doing it themselves, since they can in that way contribute an amount that would otherwise have been paid as corporate taxes.

In each of these–and many similar–cases, there is a strong temptation to rationalize these actions as an exercise of "social responsibility." In the present climate of opinion, with its wide spread aversion to "capitalism," "profits," the "soulless corporation" and so on, this is one way for a corporation to generate goodwill as a by-product of expenditures that are entirely justified in its own self-interest.

It would be inconsistent of me to call on corporate executives to refrain from this hypocritical window-dressing because it harms the foundations of a free society. That would be to call on them to exercise a "social responsibility"! If our institutions, and the attitudes of the public make it in their self-interest to cloak their actions in this way, I cannot summon much indignation to denounce them. At the same time, I can express admiration for those individual proprietors or owners of closely held corporations or stockholders of more broadly held corporations who disdain such tactics as approaching fraud.

Whether blameworthy or not, the use of the cloak of social responsibility, and the nonsense spoken in its name by influential and prestigious businessmen, does clearly harm the foundations of a free society. I have been impressed time and again by the schizophrenic character of many businessmen. They are capable of being extremely farsighted and clearheaded in matters that are internal to their businesses. They are incredibly shortsighted and muddleheaded in matters that are outside their businesses but affect the possible survival of business in general. This shortsightedness is strikingly exemplified in the calls from many businessmen for wage and price guidelines or controls or income policies. There is nothing that could do more in a brief period to destroy a market system and replace it by a centrally controlled system than effective governmental control of prices and wages.

The shortsightedness is also exemplified in speeches by businessmen on social responsibility. This may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the pursuit of profits is wicked and immoral and must be curbed and controlled by external forces. Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of Government bureaucrats. Here, as with price and wage controls, businessmen seem to me to reveal a suicidal impulse.

The political principle that underlies the market mechanism is unanimity. In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are no values, no "social" responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form.

The political principle that underlies the political mechanism is conformity. The individual must serve a more general social interest–whether that be determined by a church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform. It is appropriate for some to require others to contribute to a general social purpose whether they wish to or not.

Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible. There are some respects in which conformity appears unavoidable, so I do not see how one can avoid the use of the political mechanism altogether.

But the doctrine of "social responsibility" taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book Capitalism and Freedom, I have called it a "fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."

Chama Bound 2.09

2009-07-24T01:53:00.001-07:00

Chama Bound 2.09
Originally uploaded by Trent Rock's Visual Vices

It's the W00t!! woo0t!!!!

Capt. Plunderphonic

2009-07-12T04:49:00.001-07:00

Hero Machine 2.0

ESTP - Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking, Perception

2009-07-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

I took a few tests and they all said I was this

ESTP - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Promoter Artisan

The Doer

2009 Santa Barbara Summer Solstice

2009-06-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

Trent's Moral Matrix

2009-06-13T01:31:00.000-07:00

Conservative NeoLiberalism huh??

Conservative NeoLiberalism is a moderate form of Economic Conservatism.

Neoliberalism is a political philosophy and a political-economic movement beginning in the 1970s that de-emphasizes or rejects government intervention in the economy, focusing instead on achieving progress and even social justice by more free-market methods, especially an emphasis on economic growth, as measured by changes in real gross domestic product.

Moral Matrix

Trent's Political Matrix

2009-06-13T01:28:00.000-07:00

Looks about right to me.....

The Political Matrix

The Social Characteristics of Capitalism and the Psychological Causes of Its Vilification

2009-06-02T04:05:00.000-07:00

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society’s economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The “ideological superstructure” of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories.

The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality

Wiki:The_Anti-Capitalistic_Mentality

Elle Pace (aka Laurie Justus Pace) Texas Premier Contemporary Artist

2009-05-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

Just as Splintering light fractions into thousands of colors, Laurie's life has encompassed many careers, from runway model to graphic artist, from musician to singer, from teacher to artist. The greatest influence in her art is her faith and belief that her gift of creativity is from the Lord.

With a degree in art, doors opened to eight years as head artist with an advertising agency; twenty-five years of teaching art has come full circle to top honors yearly at international art shows in photography, watercolor and oils. Laurie is a member of The Daily Painters, The Five Graces, The American Watercolor Societiy, Profesisonal Published Fine Artists and is a listed artist on askart.com and artprice.com. In addition, she has exhibited with the dalls Committee of the Fine Arts in Dallas. She loves working with oils, intense colors, a palette knife and brushes, boldly capturing the energy of colors na dmotion on the canvas.

Today Laurie's work is collected internationally by both private collectors and corporations. her artwork has been published in numerous magazines, newspapers and blooks. currently she is represented by Earth Works Art Gallery of Penn Yan, New York; The Red Tree Gallery, Atascadero, California; The Rare Gallery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; The Rian Bird Gallery of Blanco, Texas; The Gillia jones Gallery, Ohio; and the SR Gallery of Hong Kong.

These are still for sale

Contact me if interested

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ORIGINAL Elle Pace Running Horses Painting COLORFUL!!!
THICK PILED ON BUTTERY OIL PAINTS ~ COLLECTED ARTIST

ORIGINAL Elle Pace Horse Head Painting Lotta Oil Globs!

Urban Warfare Playground

2009-02-25T20:11:00.000-08:00

This would make a sweet BF2 map!!!
CLUI Newsetter - Spring 2005 - Playas, New Mexico

Irony

2009-02-08T02:32:00.000-08:00

Quick Rick

2009-01-24T01:54:00.000-08:00

The Top 25 Rickey Henderson Quotes of All-Time...

1) Rickey... on referring to himself in the third person:

"Listen, people are always saying, 'Rickey says Rickey.' But it's been blown way out of proportion. People might catch me, when they know I'm ticked off, saying, 'Rickey, what the heck are you doing, Rickey?' They say, 'Darn, Rickey, what are you saying Rickey for? Why don't you just say, 'I?' But I never did. I always said, 'Rickey,' and it became something for people to joke about."

2) In the early 1980s, the Oakland A's accounting department was
freaking out. The books were off $1 million. After an investigation, it was determined Rickey was the reason why. The GM asked him about a $1 million bonus he had received and Rickey said instead of cashing it, he framed it and hung it on a wall at his house.

3) In 1996, Henderson's first season with San Diego, he boarded the team bus and was looking for a seat. Steve Finley said, "You have tenure, sit wherever you want." Henderson looked at Finley and said, "Ten years? Ricky's been playing at least 16, 17 years."

4) This one might be my second favorite. This wasn't too long ago, I think it was the year he ended up playing with the Red Sox. Anyway, he called San Diego GM Kevin Towers and left the following message: "This is Rickey calling on behalf of Rickey. Rickey wants to play baseball."

5) This one happened in Seattle. Rickey struck out and as the next
batter was walking past him, he heard Henderson say, "Don't worry,
Rickey, you're still the best."

6) Rickey once asked a teammate how long it would take him to drive to the Dominican Republic.

7) Moments after breaking Lou Brock's stolen base record, Henderson told the crowd - with Brock mere feet next to him - "Lou Brock was a great base stealer, but today, I am the greatest of all-time."

8) Henderson once fell asleep on an ice pack and got frostbite - which forced him to miss three games - in mid-August.

9) A reporter asked Henderson if Ken Caminiti's estimate that 50 percent of Major League players were taking steroids was accurate. His response was, "Well, Rickey's not one of them, so that's 49 percent right there."

10) Henderson broke Ty Cobb's career record for runs scored with a home run. After taking his usual 45 seconds or so around the bases, Rickey slid into home plate.

11) On being Nolan Ryan's 5,000th career strikeout: "It gave me no
chance. He (Ryan) just blew it by me. But it's an honor. I'll have
another paragraph in all the baseball books. I'm already in the books three or four times."

12) San Diego GM Kevin Towers was trying to contact Rickey at a nearby hotel. He knew Henderson always used fake names to avoid the press, fans, etc. He was trying to think like Rickey and after several attempts; he was able to get Henderson on the phone.
Rickey had checked in under Richard Pryor.

13) I didn't believe this one at first. However, I emailed a few
contacts within the Sox organization and they claim it actually
happened. This is priceless, it really is.

The morning after the Sox finished off the sweep against St. Louis last October, Henderson called someone in the organization looking for tickets to Game 6 at Fenway Park.

14) The Mets were staying in a hotel less than a mile from Cinergy Field in Cincinnati. While some players walked, most took the team bus. A few minutes after they arrived - again it was less than a mile - the last players off the bus noticed a stretched limo that had just pulled up.

Of course, Rickey emerged from the back seat.

15) A reporter once asked Rickey if he talked to himself, "Do I talk to myself? No, I just remind myself of what I'm trying to do. You know, I never answer myself so how can I be talking to myself?"

16) a few weeks into Henderson's stint with the
Mariners, he walked up to Olerud at the batting cage and asked him why he wore a batting helmet in the field. Olerud explained that he had an aneurysm at nine years old and he wore the helmet for protection. Legend goes that Henderson said, "Yeah, I used to play with a guy that had thesame thing."

Legend also goes that Olerud said, "That was me, Rickey."

Henderson played with Olerud on the Blue Jays and the Mets.

17) Rickey was asked if he had the Garth Brooks album with Friends in Low Places and Henderson said, "Rickey doesn't have albums. Rickey has CDs."

18) During a contract holdout with Oakland in the early 1990s, Henderson said, "If they want to pay me like Mike Gallego, I'll play like Gallego."

19) In the late 1980s, the Yankees sent Henderson a six-figure bonus check. After a few months passed, an internal audit revealed the check had not been cashed. Current Yankees GM Brian Cashman - then a low-level nobody with the organization - called Rickey and asked if there was a problem with the check. Henderson said, "I'm just waiting for the money market rates to go up."

20) In June 1999, when Henderson was playing with the Mets, he saw
reporters running around the clubhouse before a game. He asked a
teammate what was going on and he was told that Tom Robson, the team's hitting coach, had just been fired. Henderson said, "Who's he?"

21) This is my all-time favorite. Rickey was pulled over by a San Diego police officer for speeding. As the officer was approaching Rickey's car, the window went down a few inches and a folded $100 bill emerged. The officer let Rickey and his money head home without a ticket.

22) When he was on the Yankees in the mid-1980s, Henderson told
teammates that his condo had such a great view that he could see, "The Entire State Building."

23) During one of his stays with Oakland, Henderson's locker was next to Billy Beane's. After making the team out of spring training, Beane was sent to the minors after a few months. Upon his return, about six weeks later, Henderson looked at Beane and said, "Hey, man, where have you been? Haven't seen you in awhile."

24) To this day and dating back 25 years, before every game he plays, Henderson stands completely naked in front of a full length locker room mirror and says, "Ricky's the best," for several minutes.

25) In the last week of his lone season with the Red Sox, Chairman Tom Werner asked Henderson what he would like for his 'going-away' gift.
Henderson said he wasn't going anywhere, but he would like owner John
Henry's Mercedes. Werner said it would be tough to get the same make and
model in less than a week and Henderson said, "No, I want his car."
Turns out the Sox got Henderson a Red Thunderbird and when he saw it on
the field before the last game of the season, Rickey said, "Whose ugly
car is on the field?"
In honor of Rickey claiming he is going for yet another comeback this year here are Rickey's top 25 quotes that Rickey ever said.

Chop Chop!!!

2009-01-08T03:51:00.000-08:00

Chop-chop

Meaning:

Be quick; hurry up.

Origin:

This little reduplicated term has its origins in the South China Sea, as a Pidgin English version of the Chinese term k'wâi-k'wâi. The earliest known citation of chop-chop in print is from the English language newspaper that was printed in Canton in the early 19th century - The Canton Register, 13th May 1834:

We have also... 'chop-chop hurry'.

A slightly fuller account was printed two years later, in a monthly journal which was produced by and for American missionaries in Canton - The Chinese Repository. In January 1836 it contained an article headed 'Jargon Spoken in Canton', which included:

"Chop-chop - pidgin Cantonese phrase for 'Hurry up!'"

Happy Holiday Season to All My Fans!!!!

2008-12-24T14:19:00.000-08:00

Look for The Convicted Audiophile Books 1-3 in late 2009!!!!
I'm working on track 24 as I type , yo...............

International Car Show, Moscone Center

2008-12-02T14:11:00.000-08:00

JImmy Gets Mad

2008-11-24T02:37:00.001-08:00

Tennis great Jimmy Connors was arrested outside the Thunderdome Friday as the Gauchos hosted top-ranked University of North Carolina.

The eight-time Grand Slam champion was arrested near the entrance to the arena after refusing to leave the area following a confrontation. Additional details concerning the arrest have not yet been made available, but an employee at the Santa Barbara County Jail allegedly said that Connors was booked into the jail but later released.

Connors, a Santa Barbara resident, is known to frequent UCSB basketball games. Connors did not get an opportunity to watch the Gauchos square off against the Tar Heels, however, as he was arrested at the beginning of the game, reports said.

The Untold Victims of the Tea Fire (Ode to PETA)

2008-11-20T22:44:00.000-08:00

Santa Barbara Tea Fire

2008-11-14T02:21:00.000-08:00

My 6X zoom is weak!!

Here is the Albertsons on The Mesa

Fire destroys up to 80 houses in Montecito

My Hero

2008-11-07T03:16:00.001-08:00

I love the smoke in his mouth when he plays!!!

Despite prodigious consumption of cigarettes and Diet Coke, Daly has never conquered his weight problem; he refused to partake in the British Open Champions Dinner because "You can't get this fat boy into a suit." He has admitted the only reason he does not lift weights is because the health club does not let him smoke there and he would get sick after he worked out."

* "I know there's a lot of guys who would love to see me fail. Well, good. Let 'em. I'm glad."
* "There are probably some things I could do to keep my flexibility up, but I'd rather smoke, drink Diet Cokes and eat."
* "Seems I used to do everything like I was on a mission. If it was alcohol, I wanted to drink till I couldn't see straight. If it was golf, I wanted to beat everybody's brains out. If it was driving, I can get there faster'n you can... I was stubborn as hell. I had no direction."
* "Nobody can know what's in my heart. Nobody can know what I'm thinking. I know what I've got to do."[9]
* "I believe nicotine plus caffeine equals protein."
* “My life is upside-down right now. No matter what I do, it’s wrong. I’m thinking of writing a new song. I’ll call it, ‘I guess it’s my fault, even when it’s not my fault.”’
* "Some folks say I don't deserve such a beautiful wife. But hey, I earn money. Surely that is a reason!"

Sexonomics Main Page

2008-11-04T02:03:00.000-08:00

Sexonomics Main Page

100 Items to Disappear First in a Panic

2008-10-31T05:02:00.000-07:00

1. Generators (Good ones cost dearly. Gas storage, risky. Noisy..target of thieves; maintenance, etc.)

2. Water Filters/Purifiers (Shipping delays increasing.)

3. Portable Toilets (Increasing in price every two months.)

4. Seasoned Firewood (About $100 per cord; wood takes 6 - 12 mos. to become dried, for home uses.)

5. Lamp Oil, Wicks, Lamps (First choice: Buy CLEAR oil. If scarce, stockpile ANY!)

6. Coleman Fuel (URGENT $2.69-$3.99/gal. Impossible to stockpile too much.)

7. Guns, Ammunition, Pepper Spray, Knives, Clubs, Bats & Slingshots

8. Hand-Can openers & hand egg beaters, whisks (Life savers!)

9. Honey/Syrups/white, brown sugars

10. Rice - Beans - Wheat (White rice is now $12.95 - 50# bag. Sam's Club, stock depleted often.)

11. Vegetable oil (for cooking) (Without it food burns/must be boiled, etc.)

12. Charcoal & Lighter fluid (Will become scarce suddenly.)

13. Water containers (Urgent Item to obtain. Any size. Small: HARD CLEAR PLASTIC ONLY)

14. Mini Heater head (Propane) (Without this item, propane won't heat a room.)

15. Grain Grinder (Non-electric)

16. Propane Cylinders (Urgent: Definite shortages will occur by September, 1999.)

17. Michael Hyatt's Y2K Survival Guide (BEST single y2k handbook for sound advice/tips.)

18. Mantles: Aladdin, Coleman, etc. (Without this item, longer-term lighting is difficult.)

19. Baby Supplies: Diapers/formula/ointments/aspirin, etc

20. Washboards, Mop Bucket w/wringer (for Laundry)

21. Cookstoves (Propane, Coleman & Kerosene)

22. Vitamins (Critical, due 10 Y2K-forced daily canned food diets.)

23. Propane Cylinder Handle-Holder (Urgent: Small canister use is dangerous without this item.)

24. Feminine Hygiene/Haircare/Skin products

25. Thermal underwear (Tops and bottoms)

26. Bow saws, axes and hatchets & Wedges (also, honing oil)

27. Aluminum foil Reg. & Hvy. Duty (Great Cooking & Barter item)

28. Gasoline containers (Plastic or Metal)

29. Garbage bags (Impossible to have too many.)

30. Toilet Paper, Kleenex, paper towels

31. Milk - Powdered & Condensed (Shake liquid every 3 to 4 months.)

32. Garden seeds (Non-hybrid) (A MUST)

33. Clothes pins/line/hangers (A MUST) 34. Coleman's Pump Repair Kit: 1(800) 835-3278

35. Tuna Fish (in oil)

36. Fire extinguishers (or.. large box of Baking soda in every room...)

37. First aid kits

38. Batteries (all sizes...buy furthest-out for Expiration Dates)

39. Garlic, spices & vinegar, baking supplies

40. BIG DOGS (and plenty of dog food)

41. Flour, yeast & salt

42. Matches (3 box/$1 .44 at WalMart: "Strike Anywhere" preferred. Boxed, wooden matches will go first.)

43. Writing paper/pads/pencils/solar calculators

44. Insulated ice chests (good for keeping items from freezing in Wintertime)

45. Workboots, belts, Levis & durable shirts

46. Flashlights/LIGIITSTICKS & torches, "No.76 Dietz" Lanterns

47. Journals, Diaries & Scrapbooks (Jot down ideas, feelings, experiences: Historic times!)

48. Garbage cans Plastic (great for storage, water, transporting - if with wheels)

49. Men's Hygiene: Shampoo, Toothbrush/paste, Mouthwash/floss, nail clippers,etc

50. Cast iron cookware (sturdy, efficient)

51. Fishing supplies/tools

52. Mosquito coils/repellent sprays/creams

53. Duct tape

54. Tarps/stakes/twine/nails/rope/spikes

55. Candles

56. Laundry detergent (Liquid)

57. Backpacks & Duffle bags

58. Garden tools & supplies

59. Scissors, fabrics & sewing supplies

60. Canned Fruits, Veggies, Soups, stews, etc. 61. Bleach (plain, NOT scented: 4 to 6% sodium hypochlorite)

62. Canning supplies (Jars/lids/wax)

63. Knives & Sharpening tools: files, stones, steel

64. Bicycles...Tires/tubes/pumps/chains, etc.

65. Sleeping bags & blankets/pillows/mats

66. Carbon Monoxide Alarm (battery powered)

67. Board Games Cards, Dice

68. d-Con Rat poison, MOUSE PRUFE II, Roach Killer

69. Mousetraps, Ant traps & cockroach magnets

70. Paper plates/cups/utensils (stock up, folks...)

71. Baby Wipes, oils, waterless & Anti-bacterial soap (saves a lot of water)

72. Rain gear, rubberized boots, etc.

73. Shaving supplies (razors & creams, talc, after shave)

74. Hand pumps & siphons (for water and for fuels)

75. Soysauce, vinegar, boullions/gravy/soup base

76. Reading glasses

77. Chocolate/Cocoa/Tang/Punch (water enhancers)

78. "Survival-in-a-Can"

79. Woolen clothing, scarves/ear-muffs/mittens

80. BSA - New 1998 - Boy Scout Handbook (also, Leader's Catalog)

81. Roll-on Window Insulation Kit (MANCO)

82. Graham crackers, saltines, pretzels, Trail mix/Jerky

83. Popcorn, Peanut Butter, Nuts

84. Socks, Underwear, T-shirts, etc. (extras)

85. Lumber (all types)

86. Wagons & carts (for transport to & from open Flea markets)

87. Cots & Inflatable mattresses (for extra guests)

88. Gloves: Work/warming/gardening, etc.

89. Lantern Hangers

90. Screen Patches, glue, nails, screws, nuts & bolts

91. Teas

92. Coffee

93. Cigarettes

94. Wine/Liquors (for bribes, medicinal, etc.)

95. Paraffin wax

96. Glue, nails, nuts, bolts, screws, etc.

97. Chewing gum/candies

98. Atomizers (for cooling/bathing)

99. Hats & cotton neckerchiefs

100. Goats/chickens

100 Items

Freestlye Rap Battle: Translated

2008-10-31T02:30:00.000-07:00

I think Boost won.....

YouTube - Freestlye Rap Battle: Translated

CA Secretary of State -Proposition 215

2008-10-29T18:07:00.000-07:00

The Situation:

I'm looking for two roommates that will have their own rooms each. I live in a quiet building located in a safe, clean, UCLA-adjacent neighborhood. 5 miles from the beach and 5 miles from Hollywood. The location is great and it’s easy to get places from here.
I've been living in a 2 bedroom apartment, but a 3 bedroom, in the same building, has become available and I'm taking it because it’s cheaper and it has a "laundry room". I am a Prop 215 card holder and the 2 new roommates that will be moving in need to be Prop 215 card holders also. Read the last sentence again. I'm planning on keeping a small medicinal garden for the three of us to share. In order to share this opportunity you’re going to have to be chill, an adult, and absolutely not a dealer.

About Me:
I’m a 32 yr old guy. I work Tuesdays thru Saturdays 10-6. I work in an exciting field and I love my job, most of the time.
If you have a dog or a cat, that’s cool, as long as they're cool and you clean up after them regularly.

The Apartment:
The place will be ready in late November/early December. The living room is huge. There is plenty of room for your furniture, if you have any. There is a large, private patio perfect for grilling and chilling. If you smoke cigarettes, you can do so on the patio. There is a “laundry room” with water hook ups, air ventilation and drainage and it’s perfect for the three of us.
You will share a bathroom. Both of the bedrooms are 12ft x 12ft with a closet that is 7 feet long.

About You:
1) You need to be chill. Party animals need not apply.
2) The landlord requires that all three of us have good credit. So if your credit score is messed up, this is not the situation for you.
3) You can’t be a slob. Your room is your business, but the kitchen and the bathroom need to stay bacteria, mold and fungus free. We clean our dishes when we’re done eating and we scrub the bathroom about once a week. Please be reasonably clean.
4) You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be the right person for this situation.

You are welcome to have your girlfriend or boyfriend stay over a couple of nights a week. You will have a parking spot. The deposit is one month’s rent. The only utilities will be cable and electricity. The water, garbage, internet and parking are free.

The building manager is in the process of repainting and re-carpeting the place. I think it’ll be ready around December 1st or a little sooner. Move in date is flexible as of now.

Send me an email if you might be the right person for this sweet situation.

I posted this ad earlier saying I had a roommate with a dog, but that is no longer the case.

Is this ad for real??

Water Fire I

2008-10-28T04:47:00.000-07:00

Joe the Lumber

2008-10-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

"I just close my eyes and swing hard in case I make contact," Game 4's unlikely home-run hero said. "That's really the only thing I can say."

Blanton rises to task - The Boston Globe

STEREO YouTube!! W00t!!

2008-10-26T05:28:00.000-07:00

I just learned that if you add "&FMT=18" to the url it will play in STEREO

Djali Zwan - The Number Of The Beast (stereo)

2008-10-26T05:24:00.000-07:00

My Motto

2008-10-26T05:17:00.000-07:00

YouTube - Billy Corgan - Long Way to the Top

Writing the "The Market for 'Lemons'": A Personal Interpretive Essay

2008-10-26T01:49:00.000-07:00

I turned my focus, instead, to the effects of asymmetric information in the automobile market. My interest in economics had always been in macroeconomics. I believed then, as I still believe today, that unemployment, with the financial hardship and the loss of identity that it entails, is a very major problem. This led me to consider the causes of the business cycle. At the time a very major factor in the business cycle was the fluctuation in sales of new cars, leading naturally to the question: why was there so much variation in new car purchases? In order to tackle this problem, I had to see why people purchased new cars, rather than rented cars, or purchased used cars. There, asymmetric information seemed to play a key role. I knew that a major reason as to why people preferred to purchase new cars rather than used cars was their suspicion of the motives of the sellers of used cars. As mentioned earlier, this insight, of course, had been central to the horse trading profession for centuries, but I did not know that at the time either.

Writing the "The Market for 'Lemons'": A Personal Interpretive Essay

The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism

The Theory of Business Enterprise by Thorstein Veblen (1904) Chapter 4 -Business Principles

2008-10-26T01:35:00.000-07:00

"At any given time and place there is an accepted ordinary rate of profits, more or less closely defined, which, it is felt, should accrue to any legitimate and ordinarily judicious business venture. However shifty the definition of this rate of profits may be, in concrete, objective terms, it is felt by the men of affairs to be of so substantial and consistent a character that they habitually capitalize the property engaged in any given business venture on the basis of this ordinary rate of profits. Due regard being had to any special advantages and drawbacks of the individual case, any given business venture or plant is capitalized at such a multiple of its earning-capacity as the current ordinary rate of profits will warrant."

The Theory of Business Enterprise by Thorstein Veblen (1904) Chapter 4 -Business Principles

The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen (1899)

2008-10-26T01:16:00.000-07:00

"In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence. And not only does the evidence of wealth serve to impress one's importance on others and to keep their sense of his importance alive and alert, but it is of scarcely less use in building up and preserving one's self-complacency. In all but the lowest stages of culture the normally constituted man is comforted and upheld in his self-respect by 'decent surroundings' and by exemption from 'menial offices'. Enforced departure from his habitual standard of decency, either in the paraphernalia of life or in the kind and amount of his everyday activity, is felt to be a slight upon his human dignity, even apart from all conscious consideration of the approval or disapproval of his fellows."

"The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle". It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command the deference of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is observable that the women still in great measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to stimulants. "

The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen

John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)

2008-10-26T00:53:00.000-07:00

There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)

Price of a Gallon of Gasoline as a % of Personal Disposable Income

2008-10-25T02:11:00.000-07:00

In These Tough Times

2008-10-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

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On Scat......

2008-10-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

I was trying to find the Lord Boothby prostitute pics ans I ran across this little discussion
3sum's - Page 2 - Chatter - Digital Spy Forums:

Originally Posted by rampagejackson
You fail to understand my point.

I'm not saying everyone can enjoy it, I'm saying that broadminded people accept and tolerate the fantasies of others whether they float their boat or not.

I'm not into feet or period play, but I'm cool with the ideas that others may like it.

No I see your point very, very clearly rj.

I just do not understand it. I can not grasp how another human being would enjoy eating, watching, touching, or smelling another persons big, fat, smelly shite for sexual pleasures!

Right boring myself on this with you, we will never agree so you poo away till your hearts content. I wont judge.

But I still think it is rank, wrong and very very un-sexual.