The Finite Nature of Doing

The outcome, on a long enough timeline, might be temporary; the event itself is always permanent.

New Ghosts For Old Hauntings

The similarity with which crises present themselves throughout the years is astounding.  At some point between November 15th and January 15th, something will randomly fuck with my serenity; it's been that way since I was eight years old.  A winter car accident, the showdown with the old man when I was ten, somebody dies, someone leaves, something breaks...whatever.  Something is going to suck.  Those kinds of things are fucked up enough on their own without being predictable; coinciding with a season that's supposed to be festive is one of those little kicks in the sack that lets you know there is a higher force at work in the universe, and sometimes he's a dick.

Ontological arguments for God aside, I've tried to decipher over the years whether or not these things were truly random, the result of some external machination, or whether perhaps I've somehow brought some of them to bear myself (via expecting the holidays to be fucked, and then subconsciously setting out to tank them because of that expectation).  Certainly more rational than the rather egocentric notion that the Almighty has decided that I have high billing in a retelling of the story of Job. 

In truth, some fall into each category.  This years is purely someone else's seasonal madness made manifest in my holiday, but it still sucks.  I don't blame them particularly; it's the silly season, and I've been there myself.  I'm actually far more pissed off at how it impacted other people involved than over any trouble it caused me,:

To all of humanity, RE: the whole major depression / self-destructive thing -- do your friends and family a favor and put that shit off until March next time.

Eulogy Redux

As referenced at: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ndn

NDN was the nickname of a great brown buffalo of a man from Tulsa, OK; like the eponymous Brown Buffalo of Hunter S. Thompson's works (HST's attorney, Oscar Zeta Acosta), NDN was one of God's prototypes - never intended for mass-production. With a legendary appetite for life, drink, food, and fun, NDN was an icon in several distinct national sub-communities of gamer-nerds, carnival geeks, chicks with blue hair, fire-eaters, sword-swallowers, nipple-piercers, the hirsuite, the corpulent, the French, the verbose, fans of certain touring bands named after famous firearms, and the ambiguously perverse. To this day, if you drink enough Jaggermeister to hallucinate, it is alleged that you will have a vision of The NDN...even if you've never met the man. He was a legend, and when he shuffled off this mortal coil it was as if the last of the great primeval beasts had roared once more to remind the world of his presence, and then faded into the obscurity of anecdote to sleep forever more.

Also known as Jeronimous MacFargyle to his dozens of besotted clanmates, and as Freight Train to people who may have shot at him in a mostly harmless sporting sort of way, he is remembered most fondly by people with similar jolly-pirate nicknames.

A real live Urban Legend. Yogi would be proud.

(Overheard from any number of random people without any logical connection)

"NDN? Big dude, looks like the Bodhisattva...only inebriated?"
"THAT'S HIM..."
"Hey, I think he delivered my sister's baby..."
"Dude he can spit fire! I love that guy."
"Indian?"
"No, dude N-D-N; the man is so hip he doesn't really require vowels."
"Like the tetragrammaton?"
"Yeah...kinda. 'IMDNDN' he used to say."

Over a year now, and it still sucks.

Rebel Without A Causal Link

Or, if you prefer, Cum hoc ergo WTF?

I listened passively to a debate over gun control over the weekend, amazed and appalled at the arguments presented from both sides. Central to my incredulity was the presentation of correlation as causality (a pet peeve of mine) by the proponents of gun control...essentially the "ugly gun" argument and the absurd notion that making handguns generally illegal will have any effect on the criminal use of handguns more meaningful than an accounting trick when it comes time to tally up the charges in court. That being said, I couldn't help but notice that those opposing gun control never presented what I feel is a key argument for keeping the populace armed. The usual things came up...the "sporting use", both in the sense of handgun hunting and competitive shooting, protection of life and property, etc...but nobody will approach the big one: protection from the state.

There may be a sporting use for a semi-automatic rifle for which a bolt-action rifle is simply inadequate. I can't think of one, but I'm willing to hear the argument. Maybe hunting with revolvers is a prized and cherished right founded on tradition and...whatever. Never mind the fact that nobody hunted with a wheelgun except in desperation before large caliber revolvers became suddenly in vogue. I'm willing to let that slide, but it doesn't represent me.

I have a gun so I can shoot people, period. I live in a city, I have supermarkets all around me, and hunting for meat would be more expensive than buying it from a store 99% of the time. The truth is, I simply don't enjoy hunting enough to justify the expense, so I rarely go. I go to the range to keep frosty, but I don't feel the need to compete. I have firearms so that I can shoot bad people. This includes, but is not limited to, people attempting to harm myself or my family, steal my shit, or violate any of my civil liberties. This group potentially includes a hostile government, frankly; 200 years is a long time for a society founded by dissidents to go without a revolution - we're overdue.

Safety, Control, & Related Delusions

I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the utter uselessness of the following concepts:

1) Firearms Safety

2) Gun Control

To the first point, the essential function of a firearm is unsafe, so I will propose that it is impossible to achieve anything that can be called "safety" in an unqualified sense without compromising utility. A "safe" gun is one that is innert, incapable of firing, and kept sealed in a container that is immovable and inviolate (so that you couldn't, for instance, bludgeon someone with it) and for good measure is located at least 100 yards from any living thing. That's "safe" in the unqualified sense: useless.  A gun is intended to cause harm, preferably mortal harm. It isn't a tool, it isn't a deterrent, and it isn't a toy -- it's a weapon, and there is nothing wrong with that...but call it what it is. You can make it "safer" to some in a relative sense, but to say that you can make one "safe" is absurd.

To the second point, the core concept of control is misapplied because there is no legitimate mechanism for "controlling" anything that can be produced by a half-competent handyman in his basement.  Hell, Girandoni made a military grade air rifle two hundred years ago, so you don't even really need a working knowledge of explosives to make an effective gun.  Regulate-shmegulate; all "gun control" does is make it slightly more difficult to obtain a good firearm by legal means, and frankly a motivated criminal only needs a shitty weapon long enough to kill someone who owns a better one.

And With Him, Something Of Me

The game is done at thine own behest,
my Invidia and my muse.
Whilst thou lived my pretentions toiled
at a carefully crafted ruse:
to feign both envy and accolade
at my meek distinctions writ bold,
and deign to measure my ambitions
as if in your success bestoled.
But no more shall Nemesis taunt me,
and no further ill shall be said;
Anonymous and heavy hearted,
The game is done if you are dead.

For years I joked that he was "my nemesis"; not only was he a scientist, a doctor, and an incredibly talented author, he was also taller than me at 6'10", which I was sure was a sign that he was sent to punish me by illuminating my shortcommings.

In truth, (quite selfishly, I admit) I will miss that motivation.

Musical Chairs

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE7DB153EF933A0575AC0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

I read this earlier today, thanks to an email from a co-worker. I particularly like the part in the NYT article above where it specifically says that while the mandatory sub-prime policy looks good while the economy is performing, a downturn could prompt "a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's". How prescient was that?

My only issue with assigning the blame here is that the sup-prime mandates from the guarantor organizations (Fannie Mae, etc), the automation of the application processes, and even consumer ignorance and predatory lending practices by brokerages really didn't cause the whole thing to fail; it would have eventually screwed a lot of individual people, and even decent swaths of the industry, but taken at face value none of those things even together could have caused this kind of catastrophic failure. What turned bad policy, individual bad choices, and denialism into a national emergency was the effect of the large firms that turned pools of purchased mortgages and loans into securities and then put them into the market, without having a fair analysis of what the loans were worth. Securitization of loans started in the 70's, and it was a bad idea then. The addition of the CRA and ARM loans later is a big contributor to the current crisis, but the mechanism at fault on a national level is the securitization process, not the loans.

Essentially, under the old system a bank held loans in a portfolio and maintained them until they were paid off. The bank's finances were tied to the centralized banking establishment, but even a large bank was never really in a position to completely hose the national economy if it failed in a vaccuum (not even if a lot of them failed at once). When loans are securitized, a company purchases pools of loans without really examining them at the same level of granularity that the bank did when the loan was signed. Now that these loans are a part of the market rather than a closed system, they are traded on speculation without giving any consideration to the risk levels the orignal lending institution would acknowledge, and the investment banks are all suddenly tied to the performance of all of their collective loans, so if one sinks they all take a hit.

The problem is that all of the involved businesses profit from the circumstances of the loan as it is initially valued, not as it ultimately performs The lender is both obligated by policy and encouraged by profit to issue these loans whenever possible, particularly since they're guaranteed anyway by the government. The broker and the lender both get paid off of the initial structure of the loan, and now with securitization of sub-prime loans they have not only a requirement by the government to pursue them, but an incentive from Wall Street to pursue them even when they are likely to become worthless, because they profit from the securitization process and do not directly suffer from the failure. The investment banks, fund managers, and other consumers of the security profit by trading on the pools, so the more there are the better the market performs, provided there is a need. That works right up until the securitization process stops because the economy dips and a significant portion of the loans fail (like all of the ARM loans that started maturing and defaulting recently), and then suddenly the securitized loans aren't worth anything because the investment banks won't trade on them without better asset liability, and now a substantial portion of the economy is invested in a bunch of worthless loan bonds. If the loans were never pooled, and never securitized, nobody but the banks who issued them and the consumers who defaulted on them would have felt the full effect; the damage would have been contained to the principle plus interest of the collective loans, rather than that plus the market price of the securities based on those loans in which the whole country was invested. Rather than twelve companies and a few hundred thousand people losing money on the deal, a few thousand companies, countless mutual funds and retirement portfolios, the Feds, the stock market as a whole, and now (with the bailout) every taxpayer is going to get bitten by this. The scary thing is that because securitization was so absurdly profitable to speculators while it was working, even as we are dropping 700+ billion on the bailout, we're still talking about extending the concept to other things, like insurance.

Even if you don't feel that the process is sort of creepy (to profit specifically off of someone else's future), it's a parasitic practice economically; essentially you are taking a set amount of money that is being borrowed and repaid, and trying to extrapolate more capital from it than it is really worth by moving it from one state of existence to another and from owner to owner. The process generates more monetary value in the market than there is actual money or asset involved (by pretty much any yardstick), and is tantamount to gambling with the national economy. Eventually, those books have to balance, and then someone gets stuck with 1000% inflation of the original, actual, tangible debt. If you think someone trading on a pool of sub-prime mortages as a bond is idiotic, wrap your head around health, automobile, renters / homeowners, and life insurance becomming a commodity soon.

The market, particularly futures trading, speculation, securities, etc, is a system of rules, so in addition to rather complicated game theory you can even reduce it down to a fair comparison with an actual game. The most telling thing about this game is that it does not conform to the normal concept of causality regarding the end of the game and the determination of winners and losers. In most games, you continue playing until someone loses, or until a certain number of players lose; winning or losing is a precondition to ending the game in completion (otherwise you just abandon the game). This functions more like musical chairs, in that there is an anomaly of causality: it is impossible to determine the outcome until the game is already over. Until the music stops, everyone appears to be winning.