"I have to say this... you're way hotter in person."

Genius metacameo from Alec Baldwin in Gov. Palin's cameo.

...Guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on

If I were a terrorist, and I’m not, but if I were a terrorist—a frosty, tough-like-Chuck-Norris terrorist, say a C-title jihadist with Hezbollah or, more likely, a donkey-work operative with the Judean People’s Front—I would not do what I did in the bathroom of the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, which was to place myself in front of a sink in open view of the male American flying public and ostentatiously rip up a sheaf of counterfeit boarding passes that had been created for me by a frenetic and acerbic security expert named Bruce Schnei­er. He had made these boarding passes in his sophisticated underground forgery works, which consists of a Sony Vaio laptop and an HP LaserJet printer, in order to prove that the Transportation Security Administration, which is meant to protect American aviation from al-Qaeda, represents an egregious waste of tax dollars, dollars that could otherwise be used to catch terrorists before they arrive at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, by which time it is, generally speaking, too late.

I could have ripped up these counterfeit boarding passes in the privacy of a toilet stall, but I chose not to, partly because this was the renowned Senator Larry Craig Memorial Wide-Stance Bathroom, and since the commencement of the Global War on Terror this particular bathroom has been patrolled by security officials trying to protect it from gay sex, and partly because I wanted to see whether my fellow passengers would report me to the TSA for acting suspiciously in a public bathroom. No one did, thus thwarting, yet again, my plans to get arrested, or at least be the recipient of a thorough sweating by the FBI, for dubious behavior in a large American airport. Suspicious that the measures put in place after the attacks of September 11 to prevent further such attacks are almost entirely for show—security theater is the term of art—I have for some time now been testing, in modest ways, their effectiveness. Because the TSA’s security regimen seems to be mainly thing-based—most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on—I focused my efforts on bringing bad things through security in many different airports, primarily my home airport, Washington’s Reagan National, the one situated approximately 17 feet from the Pentagon, but also in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, and at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport (which is where I came closest to arousing at least a modest level of suspicion, receiving a symbolic pat-down—all frisks that avoid the sensitive regions are by definition symbolic—and one question about the presence of a Leatherman Multi-Tool in my pocket; said Leatherman was confiscated and is now, I hope, living with the loving family of a TSA employee).

The Things He Carried (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, November 2008)

Ezra Pound Cake

New on the blogroll: Ezra Pound Cake:

Prior to starting Ezra Pound Cake in March 2008, I was head pastry chef at a German bakery in my hometown. Before that, I spent 10 years as a professional writer. Now, I use my master’s in English strictly to come up with badass blog names.

I write Ezra Pound Cake to chronicle my life, share recipes and encourage people to cook real food.

(Via Serious Eats.)

Foodblogging Vancouver and Seattle

Restaurants we loved while visiting Vancouver and Seattle:

Coast Restaurant, Vancouver, BC - Inventive, fusiony seafood-based menu; standouts included foie gras nigiri sushi and tuna tartare served with homemade potato chips. Moderately expensive.

Phnom Penh, Vancouver, BC - Cambodian/Vietnamese in Vancouver's Chinatown neighborhood. Fantastic, aromatic soups with handmade noodles. Inexpensive.

Banana Leaf, Vancouver, BC - Great Malaysian restaurant; veggie and noodle dishes especially good. Inexpensive.

Heirloom tomato salad at Trellis

Trellis, Kirkland, WA - "Hotel restaurants" often aren't very good, but Trellis, in Kirkland, Washington's Heathman Hotel, has a chef that goes the extra mile: he grows much of the produce served in the restaurant on his three-acre sustainable garden. Breakfasts especially good; standouts at lunch/dinner include the exquisite heirloom tomato salad above. Moderate.

Fries drizzled with demiglace and fontina cheese - Quinns, Seattle WA

Quinns, Seattle, WA - Gastropub in Seattle's Capitol Hill district. Standout dishes included hand-cut fries drizzled with demiglace and fontina cheese, and a Belgian beer on draft (Duchess de Bourgogne). Moderate.

Cured meat platter (with cheese and olives) - Salumi, Seattle WA

Salumi Artisan Cured Meats, Seattle, WA - Amazing cured meats, served with olives, cheeses, bread and wine, eaten family-style with other foodies (and chefs on their lunch hours.) Inexpensive and an astounding value for money.

(All photos by Scott Smith, used with kind permission.)

White Trash on the skids

There's been bloodletting in the markets, and the White Trash Portfolio has not been immune. It's still faring better than the major indexes we track.

To refresh your memory, the components of the White Trash Portfolio were as follows:

• BFB - Brown-Forman Corp. Cl B
  
• BUD - Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc.
  
• CHB - Champion Enterprises Inc.
• F - Ford Motor Co.
• GM - General Motors Corp.
  
• IGT - International Game Technology
  
• KO - Coca-Cola Co.
  
• MCD - McDonald's Corp.
• MO - Altria Group Inc.
• WMT - Wal-Mart Stores Inc

Since inception, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tracking the major indexes performed as follows:

• DIA, which tracks the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is down 29.3%.
• SPY, which tracks the S&P 500, is down 34.7%.
• VTI, which tracks the performance of the broad US stock market as a whole, is down 35%.
• IYC, which tracks the Dow Jones Consumer Cyclical index, is down 38.6%.

And White Trash? Down 27.13%.

Amazingly, Anheuser-Busch, McDonald's and Wal-Mart are all still in the positive column since portfolio inception; BUD is the winner at 23.2% in gains.

Big Loser: GM, losing 80% of its value since purchase, followed closely by Altria, with a 77.3% loss.

Thought for the day

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit. - Aristotle

Update: Carrie has some interesting thoughts here.

Court and spark

[Stanley Miller] wanted to test the current ideas for the origin of life, by striking electric sparks in a mixture of gases thought to resemble the atmosphere of the young Earth.

When his analysis of the products in the experiments revealed traces of the building blocks of life, amino acids (which combine to make proteins), Stanley Miller became an instant celebrity - though the 1950s newspapers were overstating the case when they claimed he had actually recreated life in the lab.

When Stanley Miller died in May last year, his former student, Jeffrey Bada, inherited his materials; including, it turns out, several boxes containing vials of dried samples from those 1950s experiments, and the accompanying notebooks.

BBC News Science: New Spark In Classic Experiments

Bada and colleagues are now re-creating Miller's classic experiment with objectively better tools and methods, and what they hope is an improved understanding of what conditions at the time were likely to be. Fascinating article.

Hat tip: Carrie

The TED Spread

Initially, the TED spread was the difference between the interest rates for three-month U.S. Treasuries contracts and the three-month Eurodollars contract as represented by the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). However, since the Chicago Mercantile Exchange dropped T-bill futures, the TED spread is now calculated as the difference between the three-month T-bill interest rate and three-month LIBOR.

[...]

During 2007, the subprime mortgage crisis ballooned the TED spread to a region of 150-200 bps. On September 17, 2008, the record set after the Black Monday crash of 1987 was broken as the TED spread exceeded 300 bps.^[3] Some higher readings for the spread were due to inability to obtain accurate LIBOR rates in the absence of a liquid unsecured lending market.^[4] On October 10, 2008, the TED spread reached another new high of 465 basis points. The longterm average of the TED has been 30 basis points.

The TED Spread (Wikipedia)

Related:

• Understanding the TED Spread (Econbrowser)
• Current TED Spread (Bloomberg)

Remembering absent friends at unexpected times

I doubt this post will make any sense at all, but I'm going to write it and see.

Friday nights at our place, we often get takeout, or cook something simple at best; tonight was spaghetti night, a favorite Friday convention because you boil some water, open a box of pasta, and warm up some homemade sauce stashed in the freezer when you had more time. If you're feeling adventurous and wild, you make a salad. And it's pretty decent, quick, actual home cooking (you prepaid timewise when you made the sauce.)

Carrie and I had both had long weeks, but takeout (even with some of the great places we have in the neighborhood) didn't appeal, so I threw together something quick.

So, Spaghetti Night. I'm getting over a bit of stomach upset, so I went light on the sauce.

I don't know if you know this about dogs, but if you don't: they eat anything.

They especially love the sort of food that human beings eat off of plates, and if you don't want your dogs to develop bad habits, you don't ever feed them table scraps.

We compromised. Dogs are not fed from plates in our house, but when the meal is over, if they've waited semi-politely, we might share a bit of whatever we were eating that's dog-safe.

Pasta, lightly tossed with butter (but no sauce), is a traditional canine favorite in our place.

Tonight when I went to put two small handfuls of noodles into the dog bowls, there was only one dog and one food bowl.

Chow Bella was really happy to get the spaghetti.

I'm sure she must have wondered why I was acting so strange.

The Economist: Capitalism at bay

...[E]economic liberty is under attack and capitalism, the system which embodies it, is at bay. This week Britain, the birthplace of modern privatisation, nationalised much of its banking industry; meanwhile, amid talk of the end of the Thatcher-Reagan era, the American government has promised to put $250 billion into its banks. Other governments are re-regulating their financial systems. Asians point out that the West appears to be moving towards their more dirigiste model: “The teachers have some problems,” a Chinese leader recently said. Interventionists are in full cry: “Self-regulation is finished,” claims France’s Nicolas Sarkozy. “Laissez-faire is finished.” Not all criticisms are that unsubtle (the more pointed ones focus on increasing the state’s role only in finance), but all the signs are pointing in the same direction: a larger role for the state, and a smaller and more constrained private sector.

"Capitalism at bay" (cover story), The Economist, 16 October 2008

Detail from cover of The Economist, 16 October 2008: "Capitalism at bay"

While we were out...

...we celebrated the ten-year anniversary of having done this on October 4, 1998.

Time for the State Fair

I've been a resident of New York state since 1996, but I've never been to the New York State Fair.

When I lived in North Carolina, though, I used to go to the NC State Fair every chance I got.

NC State Fairgrounds

Acculturated to it at an early age; we only lived a few miles from the Fairgrounds.


It's time for the North Carolina State Fair again.

Related: NC State Fair 2008

Christopher Buckley resigns from National Review

Christopher Buckley... the author and son of the conservative mainstay William F. Buckley Jr., said on Tuesday that he has resigned from National Review, the political journal his father founded in 1955. Mr. Buckley said in a telephone interview that he had “been effectively fatwaed by the conservative movement” after endorsing Senator Barack Obama in a blog posting on TheDailyBeast.com. Since then, he said, he has been blanketed with hate e-mail at the blog and at National Review, where he had written a column.

Buckley Steps Down From National Review (New York Times, 15 October 2008)

(Earlier on enrevanche.)

Falling in love with Bob Schieffer all over again

Last night's debate was the best of the three (a very low bar) - due in no small part to the efforts of veteran CBS telejourno Bob Schieffer as moderator.

The delighted reactions from the liveblogging of the debate over at PoliticalFilter (a group blog for politics junkies, a twelve-step program I definitely need to look into) captured the flavor:

Well, here's our last chance for fireworks or a train wreck. Is this why people feel like when they go to NASCAR races?

Posted by Hannah at 8:55 PM on Oct 15th

ECONOMY DOWN THE DRAIN?

CALL JOE THE PLUMBER.

Posted by Capt. Renault at 9:08 PM on Oct 15th

Hey, is that a real, live moderator in there???

Posted by SurfThug at 9:18 PM on Oct 15th

"Are you willing to say it to each others face?" Bob, I love you.

Posted by anastasiav at 9:25 PM on Oct 15th

Liveblogging the last debate @ PoliticalFilter

Hat tip: Carrie (who has an interesting take on the last debate here)

Thought for the day

Responsibility is a unique concept: it can only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it. Even if you do not recognize it or admit its presence, you cannot escape it. If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance, or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the person who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible. - Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

Hat tip: Chap.

Makes rather a nice bookend with this quote, I think.

Frank Rich gives a shoutout to my homefolks

To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.

"The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama" (Frank Rich, New York Times, 12 October 2008)

Startups and the economic downturn

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn. (Web-view of PowerPoint deck.)

(via Metafilter; hat tip, Carrie)

Lipstick on Pig (Latin)

(snicker) This is pretty funny:

Manes Julii Caesaris paucis diebus aderant — “O, most bloody sight!” — cum Ioannes McCainus, mavericus et veteranus captivusque Belli Francoindosinini, et Sara Palina, barracuda borealis, qui sneerare amant Baracum Obamam causa oratorii, pillorant ut demagogi veri, Africanum-Americanum senatorem Terrae Lincolni, ad Republicanas rallias.

"Are we Rome? Tu Betchas!" - Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 12 October 2008

They grow 'em big

The trees around Snoqualmie Falls, WA are pretty healthy (and old.)
Here's hoping the same can be said one day for all of us!
(Photo credit: Carrie)

It was a blast seeing our friend Scott for a few days in Seattle.

He's got a post up at his place detailing some of our culinary adventures--including a fantastic picture of the cured meat platter at Salumi in downtown Seattle--and he apparently took mercy on me, because the only photographs he's included in this one, everybody has their clothes on. (Link is SFW except for, um, the ads..., okay, it's NSFW. The rest of the site is very very NSFW.)

If you're interested in vacation pictures, there's a rough-cut set here:

www.flickr.com

A game theory experiment that no one understands or can exit

There currently is no banking system, if by that you mean a network of organizations lending to one another and to quality companies in a predictable way...Instead, there are a bunch of paralyzed deposit-hoarding institutions stuck in a game theory experiment that no-one understands or can exit.

The Banking System, Nationalization, and Slack, quoted in "Greedy Bankers" @ Virtual Economics blog.

Both articles are well worth a read, and they're brief.

Hat tip: Greg

Another step in the Republican change of personality

Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

[...]

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

David Brooks - The Class War Before Palin (New York Times, 9 October 2008)

Heading home

It's been a wonderful trip. We fly back to New York City in the morning - blogging will resume on Monday once we're back home.

Barry and Carrie at Snoqualmie Falls, Washington (with the Salish Lodge
in the background... if this setting looks at all familiar to you, were you a
Twin Peaks fan in the 1980s early 1990s?)

The potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader

...[Obama] is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Sorry, Dad, I'm voting for Obama (Christopher Buckley, The Daily Beast, 10 October 2008)

Yeah, that about sums it up.

November 4th will not mark the first occasion that I've voted for a Democrat--I've done so many times in my adult life, for candidates at the local and state level--but it'll be the first time I've ever voted for the Democratic Party's candidate for President.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

So, as it turns out, the ten days or so that we've just taken as a long-planned vacation to Vancouver and Seattle (we're visiting friends in Seattle now, flying back to NYC on Saturday morning) have been... eventful... in world financial markets.

Carrie and I have had a wonderful time on our travels, and we've certainly eaten well. :-) It has been wonderful to catch up with old friends, too (WARNING: while the text in the linked article is benign enough, the accompanying picture--and indeed pretty much the rest of the site--is absolutely, comprehensively Not Safe For Work unless you happen to work for gay pornographers. You Have Been Warned -- or incentivized, depending on your preferences.)

When we have a chance to catch our breath, expect more travelogue posts, pictures, and Google-able information about Vancouver and Seattle restaurants (this afternoon, we had an epic lunch at Salumi, the Italian-cured-meat temple and retirement project of Armandino Batali... yes, Mario's poppa.)

But there's really been only one story worth following this week: the continuing global meltdown in the financial markets, with no end in sight and only the barest beginnings of the visible consequences to come.

We've watched in growing disbelief, on Blackberries, iPhones, and hotel room televisions, as the events of the last week unfolded.

On Tuesday evening, Carrie and I watched the depressing, uninspiring, poorly formatted and ineptly moderated "debate" from our Vancouver hotel room, and we tried to get drunk enough not to mind the outpouring of platitudes from Obama and McCain as both candidates flailed about, spewing buzzwords to their respective bases and trying to produce a convincing simulacrum of actual leadership in the face of what's likely to be the biggest crisis the Western world has faced in a generation, at least.

(It didn't work, by the way -- there's not enough wine in the world for that.)

I don't think any of us can be sure about just how much trouble we're in for... but one thing we can be sure of: the world has been rudely awakened to some important, structural changes in the last week, and it will very likely not be the same again.

I've excerpted heavily, below, the thoughts of Financial Times columnist Philip Stevens.

Do go and read the whole thing; he has grasped and put into words something I've been struggling to articulate to friends and colleagues for some time now.

"America drowned itself in Asian liquidity"

...[T]wo things mark out this crisis as unique. First, is its sheer ferocity. I am not sure how useful it is to make comparisons with the 1930s. History never travels in a straight line. What is evident is that governments and central banks have had no previous experience of coping with shocks and stresses of the intensity and ubiquity we have seen during the past year.

The second difference is one of geography. For the first time, the epicentre has been in the west. Viewed from Washington, London or Paris, financial crises used to be things that happened to someone else – to Latin America, to Asia, to Russia.

The shock waves would sometimes lap at western shores, usually in the form of demands that the rich nations rescue their own imprudent banks. But these crises drew a line between north and south, between the industrialised and developing world. Emerging nations got into a mess; the west told them sternly what they must do to get out of it.

The instructions came in the form of the aptly-named Washington consensus: the painful prescriptions, including market liberalisation and fiscal consolidation, imposed as the price of financial support from the International Monetary Fund.

This time the crisis started on Wall Street, triggered by the steep decline in US house prices. The emerging nations have been the victims rather than the culprit. And the reason for this reversal of roles? They had supped enough of the west’s medicine.

A decade ago, after the crisis of 1997-98 wrought devastation on some of its most vibrant economies, Asia said never again. There would be no more going cap in hand when the going got rough. To avoid the IMF’s ruinous rules, governments would build their own defences against adversity by accumulating reserves of foreign currency.

Those reserves – more than $4,000bn-worth at the present count – financed credit in the US and Europe. There were other sources of liquidity, of course, notably the Fed and the reserves accumulated by energy producers. It also took financial chicanery to turn reckless mortgage lending in to triple A rated securities. But as a Chinese official told my FT colleague David Pilling the other day: “America drowned itself in Asian liquidity.”

[...]

...[T]he rich nations have yet to face up properly to the implications. They can imagine sharing power, but they assume the bargain will be struck on their terms: that the emerging nations will be absorbed – at a pace, mind you, of the west’s choosing – into familiar international forums and institutions.

When American and European diplomats talk about the rising powers becoming responsible stakeholders in the global system, what they really mean is that China, India and the rest must not be allowed to challenge existing standards and norms.

This is the frame of mind that sees the Benelux countries still holding a bigger share than China of the votes at the IMF; and the Group of Seven leading industrialised nations presuming this weekend that it remains the right forum to redesign the global financial system.

I have no inhibitions about promoting the values of the west – of preaching the virtues of the rule of law, pluralist politics and fundamental human rights. Nor of asserting that, for all the financial storms, a liberal market system is the worst option except for all the others. The case for global rules – that open markets need multilateral governance – could not have been made more forcefully than by the present crisis.

Yet the big lesson is that the west can no longer assume the global order will be remade in its own image. For more than two centuries, the US and Europe have exercised an effortless economic, political and cultural hegemony. That era is ending.

Crisis marks out a new geopolitical order (Phillip Stevens, writing in Financial Times, 9 October 2008)

The Devil takes a nap

Joe Bageant wrote something very wise about Sarah Palin a few days back, which I'm just now getting around to reading due to vacation travel.

Joe (who I've exchanged e-mails with from time to time) is by his own description an "old socialist," not just a leftist; he's very wise about redneck culture, however, and as longtime enrevanche readers know, while I disagree pretty comprehensively with him on certain political and economic issues, I think much of his social analysis is spot-on.

Anyway. If you're an Obama supporter who's been publicly shrieking in horror about Governor Palin, please, please read what Uncle Joe has to say and consider how you're playing perfectly into the strategic goals of those you oppose:

Sarah Palin's real coup is that she brings out the snobbery of the left in their dismissal of her as an ignorant hick typical of small town red state America. They vastly underestimate her. Just like they have underestimated George Bush for the past eight years. While they laughed, George Bush managed to get everything he wanted and assist the looting of America in his spare time. No matter that he is vastly unpopular now even among Republicans. He has fulfilled his purpose to the powerful corporations and financial institutions that animate American politics. You do not have to be smart to be president, just malleable to the greater forces at work.

Yet Palin is not stupid. She may be religious and a right winger, but that doesn't mean she is stupid and incompetent (neither of which ever prevented an astute American politician from success, by the way.) She may be the last person any thinking leftist would want to see as vice president, but so far Sarah Palin has been a very successful politician. She has a high domestic approval rating and has soared to the top in record time. And each time Democrats and liberals take a shot at her religious beliefs and moral choices, which just happen to be those of tens of millions of heartland voting Americans, she gains political ground, or at a minimum, holds some for herself and McCain.

[...]

...[O]ne thing I know for sure. Liberals and leftists, theoretically at least, have more common national interests with red state heartland white working class Americans than any other current political group. And the way to communicate that is NOT sneering at the only candidate who resembles ordinary Americans, their beliefs and lifestyle. When we do that, the Republicans grin like Cheshire cats, our global financial oppressors turn the screws down a bit harder, and the Devil takes a nap, because his work is done for him by fools using the most efficient tools available -- arrogance and hubris.

Joe Bageant: Sarah Palin, Through The Toast Crumbs Dimly (30 September 2008)

Old dogs, teaching us new tricks

Puppies are incomparably cute and incomparably entertaining, and, best of all, they smell exactly like puppies. At middle age, a dog has settled into the knuckleheaded matrix of behavior we find so appealing -- his unquestioning loyalty, his irrepressible willingness to please, his infectious happiness. His unequivocal love. But it is not until a dog gets old that his most important virtues ripen and coalesce. Old dogs can be cloudy-eyed and grouchy, gray of muzzle, graceless of gait, odd of habit, hard of hearing, pimply, wheezy, lazy and lumpy. But to anyone who has ever known an old dog, these flaws are of little consequence. Old dogs are vulnerable. They show exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust. They are without artifice. They are funny in new and unexpected ways. But, above all, they seem at peace.

Something About Harry: Gene Weingarten On Why Old Dogs Are The Best Dogs (Washington Post, 5 October 2008)

This brings to mind something that Ben Franklin said, in the guise of Poor Richard: "There are three faithful friends: an old wife, an old dog, and ready money."

At the Aquarium

We spent the morning in Stanley Park, a thousand acres of loveliness on the western tip of the peninsula that also houses downtown Vancouver.

Plantings along a path in Stanley Park

While there's never a bad reason to walk through a city park (especially one as magnificent as this) on a rainy morning, we were actually there to visit the Vancouver Aquarium, where one can view (and to some extent interact with) many different species of marine mammals. Like most recently built aquariums, there's action both on the surface of the water and at the underwater viewing areas. :-)

Feeding time in the otter habitat


Steller sea lion, surfacing


Infant beluga whale (age: 4 months, still unnamed, not yet eating solid food) swimming with Mama.

Related: Vancouver Aquarium BelugaCam

Thought for the day

"I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves." - Jerry Garcia

One good tern?

Our new roommate
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

My ornithology chops have never been strong, and are more attuned to the appreciation of Charlie Parker solos than the identification of actual birds.

But this fine feathered friend was waiting for us on the balcony of our hotel room this morning, not a bit afraid of us (or people in general, clearly.) He seemed a little too squat and stubby to be a seagull, but we've tentatively identified him as belonging to some species of tern (a close cousin)...check out the gigantic webbed feet on this specimen of waterfowl!

He happily accepted an offering of a small handful of breadcrumbs (we had the dregs of a bag of bagel chips from the plane still in the room with us), and hung out with us a while longer while we dressed for the day.

What happens in Vegas, may require you to stay in Vegas

OJ Simpson, guilty on all 12 counts in the sports memorabilia robbery case.

You know, this is kind of like when Martin Scorsese won the Oscar for "The Departed," which was an okay movie but nothing like his best work ("Raging Bull"? Come on.) The Academy was really recognizing him, um, cumulatively...

The bailout explained comprehensively, in 136 words

If you owe the bank $10, it’s your problem. If you owe the bank $10m, it’s the bank’s problem.

If you and a million others owe the bank $10 each, it’s still your problem – but it’s also the bank’s problem.

If the bank then sells to an investor the $10 you owe, it ought to be the investor’s problem.

But if you have a problem repaying the $10 – and so do a million others – it’s both the investor’s problem and the bank’s problem.

Your problems and the investor’s problems mean the bank now owes another bank $10bn. That is both banks’ problem. But if neither bank will pay the $10bn it owes the other, it can quickly turn into a $700bn systemic problem.

And if the government then owes the banking system $700bn, it’s your problem.

Lombard: The US bailout explained (FT Alphaville blog - Financial Times) - 29 September 2008

A study in contrasts

The staff at the Vancouver (BC) Hyatt are the dog's bollocks (that's good, kids.)

This morning, while arranging our transfer to this hotel, I had a frank chat with the reservations agent about the lousy experience we were having so far at the Other Hotel, and I do believe she took it to heart.

She arranged early check-in for us, and when we made our way down the street and around the corner to the Hyatt, we were greeted by hyper-competent, professional staff who barely let us draw a breath by ourselves from the moment we walked in the door.

Five minutes after we presented ourselves, we were all checked in.

Ten minutes after we showed up, we and our luggage were in our room, our car was safely stashed in the underground garage, both laptops were hooked up to the hotel's high-test wireless broadband Internet, and we were being soothed by the traffic noises of downtown Vancouver from the open sliding glass door to our small balcony...and the noises produced by "party shuffle" on Carrie's iPod nano, which slotted into a stereo set up specifically to receive it.

Here's the clincher: the hotel rooms? Cost the same.

We had a lovely morning walking around downtown (a few pix are below), and after a short nap (a key feature of any Campbell vacation is the regularly scheduled mid-afternoon disco nap), we're heading out again.

Dinner tonight is going to be Malaysian. There's this place nearby that's famous for (among other things) their mango and okra salad... and the seven-course tasting menu for two is $25 each.

Canadian. :-)

Carrie at Burrard Inlet; North Vancouver, BC in background

Barry at Burrard Inlet

Vancouver Waterfront

North Vancouver, BC (across Burrard Inlet)

Vancouver notes

Uneventful flight to Seattle and drive to Vancouver last night; though we ran into some traffic getting through Seattle (the airport is south of town and Interstate 5 basically takes you smack through the city), we made it to the hotel after 12+ consecutive hours of travel from NYC in reasonably good shape... wanting nothing more than a hot shower, a room service supper, and a good night's sleep.

Unfortunately, that's when things got interesting.

When Carrie and I travel for pleasure, we try to stay in quirky little independent hotels, as we generally enjoy that experience more than the HiltonHyattMarriott in whatever city we're staying in. When we're headed someplace new, or someplace we haven't been to in a while, we rely on multiple information sources to zero in on hotels and restaurants, and usually we do fine.

Every now and then, though, that strategy doesn't work, and we find a place where the definition of "quirky" includes "unacceptable levels of service."

This was one of those times.

The centrally located, "luxury boutique hotel" we selected for our Vancouver stay last night presented us with a festival of incompetence on check-in.

They couldn't even manage to organize a tray of sandwiches and a couple of beers for two tired travelers at 8pm last night, despite repeated phone calls and even an in-person visit to the front desk.

Our first meal in Canada last night? The execrable but ubiquitous Tim Horton's.

We're relocating to a competently managed hotel--one of the sterile corporate international chains, as it happens--this morning. And then out into this lovely city in the Pacific Northwest.

I don't think the management at the hotel we're checking out of will forget me soon.

enrevanche...

...is headed to an undisclosed location for a few days.

Okay, we're going to Vancouver on vacation (and stopping in Seattle for a few days on the way home.)

Blog posting will be even more erratic than usual, and will likely feature more pictures too.

Thought for the day

I loathe populism. But if there ever has been a moment when reasonable men's hands itch for the pitchfork, this must surely be it. No one is blameless. No one is pure. Two decades of crapulence by the political class has been prologue to the era of coprophagy that is now upon us. It is crap sandwiches for as far as the eye can see.

Jonah Goldberg, writing in the Los Angeles Times

Backstory on the Somali pirates

Piracy in Somalia is a highly-organized, lucrative, ransom-driven business. Just this year, pirates have hijacked more than 25 ships, and in many cases, they were paid million dollar ransoms to release them. The juicy payoffs have attracted gunmen from across Somalia and the pirates are thought to now number in the thousands.

The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world.

Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax.

“From there, they got greedy” explained Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “They starting attacking everyone.”

By the early 2000s, many of the fishermen had traded in their nets for machine guns and were hijacking any vessel — sailboat, oil tanker, United Nations-chartered food ship — that they could catch.

“It’s true that the pirates started to defend the fishing business,” Mr. Mohamed said. “And illegal fishing is a real problem for us. But this does not justify these boys to now act like guardians. They are criminals. The world must help us crack down on them.”

Somali pirates tell all: They're in it for the money (New York Times)

Wad some pow'r the giftie gi' us

The most interesting news coverage about the failed bailout bill is, unsurprisingly, in the foreign press.

Quick survey:

House Republicans voted roughly two-to-one against the bail-out, while the Democrats split three-to-two in favour. Congressional leaders took procedural steps that could enable a revote, but analysts said Democrats would be unlikely to try again without the promise of more Republican support.

Financial Times: House rejects US bailout bill

The financial system lurched closer to a catastrophic breakdown last night after the US Congress dramatically rejected a bailout plan designed to restore confidence to paralysed banks.

Wall Street suffered one of its worst days in history. In 24 hours five banks across the West, including Britain’s Bradford & Bingley, had to be rescued to avoid insolvency.

With plans for the biggest rescue of Wall Street since the Great Depression in tatters, the Dow Jones industrial average of shares dived almost 800 points, losing 7 per cent of its value. It was the worst one-day points fall and the worst percentage fall since Black Monday in 1987.

Times of London: Markets carnage after bailout rejected

Australia has joined a global coalition to pressure US legislators to pass a controversial $US700 billion Wall Street bailout package.

Kevin Rudd today confirmed the rare intervention into domestic US politics, revealing he spoke to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown this morning after the US House of Representatives rejected the financial package overnight, sending the Dow Jones into freefall.

The Australian stock market has fallen sharply on opening, down more than four per cent in the first 15 minutes of trading.

The Australian: Global coalition urges US to act

Aux Etats-Unis, la restructuration à marche forcée du secteur s'est poursuivie avec la reprise de la majeure partie des activités de la grande banque régionale Wachovia par Citigroup.
(Barry's menu-French translation: In the United States, restructuring-as-forced-march continued as Citigroup resumed most of the activities of the large regional bank Wachovia.)

Le Monde: Lundi noir pour les Bourses mondiales ("Black Monday for worldwide stock markets") - Google translate

The Appalachian Problem

The southwestern region, rising from the Roanoke Valley up to the Appalachian Plateau, is a place of small farms, coal mines, and chronic economic hard times. It was settled in the eighteenth century by Scots-Irish Calvinists who fled Anglican-dominated Ulster and, eventually, came to that portion of Virginia which the planter aristocracy didn’t want. Their descendants live in small hill towns that are nearer, in mileage and in spirit, to the old factory town of Ironton, Ohio, than to the glass office towers of northern Virginia. Three weeks after the Virginia primary, the mostly white, working-class voters of southern Ohio, a significant portion of them of Scots-Irish descent, helped deliver that state to Hillary Clinton. In the next weeks, their kin did the same in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky. It became clear that if Obama hoped to win in November he would probably have to overcome his Appalachia problem.

The Appalachian Problem: Obama goes to rural Virginia (Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, October 6 2008 issue)

Once more, with feeling

Congress on Sunday made public a proposed bill that would enact a far-reaching government rescue of the financial system.

[...]

Among the provisions:

• The $700 billion would be disbursed in stages, with $250 billion made available immediately for the Treasury's use.
• Curbs will be placed on the compensation of executives at companies that sell mortgage assets to Treasury. Among them, the bill would limit golden parachutes to executives at companies that participate; they will not be able to deduct the salary they pay to executives above $500,000.
• An oversight board will be created. The board will include the Federal Reserve chairman, the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, the Federal Home Finance Agency director and the Housing and Urban Development secretary.
• Allow for the Treasury to receive the option to take ownership stakes in participating companies under certain circumstances.
• Treasury may establish an insurance program - with risk-based premiums paid by the industry - to guarantee companies' troubled assets, including mortgage-backed securities, purchased before March 18, 2008.

Lawmakers' goal is to shore up a deal before financial markets around the world open on Sunday evening.

Congress aims to finalize rescue bill on Sunday (CNNmoney.com)

Capitalism, evolving

It has become fashionable to fret that the current crisis on Wall Street marks the end of American capitalism as we know it. "This massive bailout is not the solution," Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) warned Tuesday. "It is financial socialism, and it is un-American." It is neither. The near-collapse of the U.S. financial system and Washington's sudden and massive intervention to try to shore it up certainly mark a major turning point, but a bailout would represent a thoroughly American next step for our economic system -- and one that will probably lead to better times.

Americans may assume that the basics of capitalism have been firmly established here since time immemorial, but historical cataclysms such as the Great Depression strongly suggest otherwise. Simply put, capitalism evolves. And we need to understand its trajectory if we are to bring our economic system into greater accord with the other great source of American strength: the best principles of our democracy.

Everybody Calm Down. A Government Hand In the Economy Is as Old as the Republic (Washington Post, 28 September 2008)

A constantly lo-jacked, walking bomb detector for the Man

Obviously, there are some major civil rights issues here, especially if you're legally required to be a constantly lo-jacked, walking bomb detector for the Man.

Everyone will be a walking nuclear weapon detector (Gizmodo)

...referencing "My Blackberry as a bomb-sniffer?" (Newsweek, 27 September 2008)

The Teenage Put (via Marginal Revolution)

Parents are abandoning teenagers at Nebraska hospitals, in a case of a well intentioned law inspiring unintended results.

Over the last two weeks, moms or dads have dropped off seven teens at hospitals in the Cornhusker state, indicating they didn’t want to care for them any more.

Father Leaves Nine Children at Nebraska Hospital (Chicago Tribune's Triage blog), quoted in Not from The Onion: The Teenage Put via Marginal Revolution by Alex Tabarrok on 9/28/08.

Alex comments: "From now on I will will tell my kids, "Behave! or we're moving to Nebraska!"

Oriented, rather than distracted, by shiny objects

You Can Always Tell the Conductors Who Used to Teach Public School

Train conductor on "drunk train" from Penn Station: To your right, you will see a big shiny train. If you are changing to the train to Port Jeff, get off of this train, and get on that shiny train. If you are changing to the train to Montauk, walk through the big shiny train, until you see an even *bigger* shiny train. The train to Montauk will have not one, but two big shiny levels. That is the train to Montauk. So remember: Port Jeff?
Conductor and herd of drunken fools: Shiny train!
Conductor: Montauk?
Drunken fools: Bigger shiny train! Woooo!

--LIRR, Jamaica Station

Overheard by: Sarah

via Overheard in New York, Sep 28, 2008

(The "drunk train" is the last commuter train leaving Manhattan for whatever your destination might be - Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester.)

"I'd like to use one of my lifelines..."

The debate: impressions

Watched it twice now: live, but while exhausted, and replayed from DVR, while rested.

Finally ready to opine. I know you've been breathless with anticipation.

Neither man committed a major error; neither man achieved the kind of breakthrough moment that significantly sways independents and swing voters.

McCain was a little better than I thought he'd be, and Obama a little worse, but there was a basic competent sameness to their responses and approaches. Messages were carefully tuned to shore up the base and reach out to independents.

Watching the debate on CNN HD, viewers were treated to a focus group's responses in realtime at the bottom of the screen, as well as "judge's scorecards"--as if this were a boxing match--on the right and left-hand sides of the screens, as the panel of commentators awarded merits and demerits (also in realtime).

My take: lose the judges' scorecards, keep and expand the real-time focus group responses. As each candidate hit the hot buttons for his particular constituencies, the lines on the graph moved.

It looked like a web page.

Heh.

Rest in peace

Thanks for everything, Mr. Newman.

The salad dressing is pretty good too.

Paul Newman dies at 83 (CNN.com)

Back in New York

There's one dog too few in the apartment.

But it was wonderful to come home, and is wonderful to sit with wife, chow, and cat in the living room, the extended postdebate spin-o-rama on the cable news channels playing in the background.

Waiting for 5773

Bill Clinton, explaining to Larry King why he won't be campaigning for Obama until after Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur have passed:

"Are you kind of feeling Jewish that you're waiting until after the Jewish holidays?" asked King.

"No. But I think it would be — if we're trying to win in Florida, it may be that — you know, they think that because of who I am and where my political base has traditionally been, they may want me to go sort of hustle up what Lawton Chiles used to call the 'cracker vote' there.

"But Senator Obama also has a big stake in doing well in the Jewish community in Florida, where Hillary did very well and where I did very well. And I just think respecting the holidays is a good thing to do," he said.

In memory of Chow Fun Campbell Weiner (1996-2008)

We lost an old friend this afternoon.

Chow Fun, the sweetest and gentlest Chow Chow you ever met, was euthanized today at about 1:00 PM.

For the last few days, she'd been having trouble getting her breath. I'm working from Raleigh this week, and wasn't there to help Carrie deal with this... but when Carrie took her to the vet this morning, the vet sent her straight to the critical care animal hospital... where, after taking some x-rays and performing some tests, the very kind doctors there diagnosed advanced, diffuse, metastatic cancer.

She went peacefully, and without pain.

Here are some pictures of our lovely yellow dog in happier times:


L'il Chow Fun, 1996


Chow Fun and Mister Gato, 2005


Chow Fun (foreground) and Chow Bella guarding the doorway, 2008

Chow Fun was a Good Girl, who loved her family, always took her guard duty seriously, and a true chow-hound, too (she took such pleasure in treats, and nothing would make her happier than a bite of leftover scrambled eggs from Sunday breakfast.)

She will be missed, and grieved... not just by Carrie and me, but by Chow Bella and Mister Gato.

Bella and Fun were littermates who have never, until just now, been separated... but the cat also developed a special bond with Chow Fun over the years. I often caught them snuggling quietly when they thought nobody was looking. :-)

I am not the type who goes in for that gooey, treacly Rainbow Bridge stuff (if you are, absolutely no offense is intended.)

But mister, if there aren't dogs in your Heaven, I ain't going.

The sort of groupthink that can lead an enterprise over a cliff with remarkable efficiency

[The]"old-boy" scenario raises the problem of network redundancy, when everyone in the network has longstanding bonds with everyone else in the network. While this results in a high level of trust, it also is a recipe for the sort of groupthink that can lead an enterprise over a cliff with remarkable efficiency.

Yes, you want a bunch of smart people in the room, but you don't want them to be the same smart people. The best networks--the ones that generate the most innovative thinking, that are able to keep themselves from veering too far in one direction or another--are the ones that link together multiple, overlapping clusters that collectively represent a range of perspectives and resources. The job of the person at the top is to focus the creative tension that results.

Obama seems to intuitively grasp this principle. Abner Mikva, the former Federal judge and Chicago congressman who served as an early Obama mentor recalls that from the beginning Obama would ask, "'Do you know So-and-So?'" and then Mikva would set up a lunch. But Obama went beyond merely expanding his Rolodex. He strategically reached out to people who could connect him with various groups, and then positioned himself as the link between them.

This type of positioning was key to his own meteoric rise--in social network analysis, being the bridge is where the power is: you're the guy who represents access to the other group--but it also happens to result in a framework for the kind of robust information exchange that best advances complex agendas and responds to multifaceted crises.

In the end, we don't just elect people to office. We elect their social networks--and their judgments about using (or not using) those networks to everyone's best advantage.

I was really tempted to "excerpt" the whole article. You really should go read the whole thing; Bradley Bloch is working on a system of social network analysis that has some very intriguing possibilities.

Bradley W. Bloch: All The President's Networks (Huffington Post)

Hank discovers the 419 scam

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Bailout Satire (Christopher Hayes, Capitolism @ The Nation)

Heh.

Hat tip: enrevanche regular wtf.

Related: 419 scams

"Look on the bright side"

Michael Lewis, on the bright side of economic collapse.

(via Kottke)

Thanks, Bill

In one of his periodic language columns, William Safire explains this blog's name:

Revanche is French for “revenge.” Its first appearance in English came in an 1858 letter from Queen Victoria, but as an ist blossomed as a word meaning “one seeking vengeance or reprisal” after World War II. Revanchist was used in scorn by Soviet propagandists to derogate West German democrats like Konrad Adenauer and NATO commanders who dreamed of unifying Germany and ending Russian domination of Eastern Europe.

William Safire - Revanche Is Sweet (On Language - New York Times, 13 April 2008)

Spotted by: Carrie

Private investment banking in America, dead at 75

Cross another item off Nouriel Roubini's list...

Last night, the Federal Reserve announced that the last two private investment banks left standing, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, would be converting themselves to a "traditional" bank holding company structure, subjecting them to the oversight of bank examiners and regulatory agencies.

The New York Times runs an obituary for private investment banking in the United States this morning:

The firms requested the change themselves, even as Congress and the Bush administration rushed to pass a $700 billion rescue of financial firms. It was a blunt acknowledgment that their model of finance and investing had become too risky and that they needed the cushion of bank deposits that had kept big commercial banks like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase relatively safe amid the recent turmoil.

It also is a turning point for the high-rolling culture of Wall Street, with its seven-figure bonuses and lavish perks for even midlevel executives. It effectively returns Wall Street to the way it was structured before Congress passed a law during the Great Depression separating investment banking from commercial banking, known as the Glass-Steagall Act.

By becoming bank holding companies, the firms are agreeing to significantly tighter regulations and much closer supervision by bank examiners from several government agencies rather than only the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now, the firms will look more like commercial banks, with more disclosure, higher capital reserves and less risk-taking.

For decades, firms like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs thrived by taking bold bets with their own money, often using enormous amounts of debt to increase their profits, with little outside oversight.

They were the envy of Wall Street, dominating the industry’s most lucrative businesses, landing headline-grabbing deals and advising companies and governments around the world on mergers, stock offerings and restructurings.

But that brash model was torn apart over the last several weeks as investors lost confidence in the way they made those bets during the recent credit boom, when investment banks expanded with aplomb into esoteric securities, the risks of which were not easily understood.

Radical Shift for Goldman and Morgan (New York Times, 22 September 2008)

Next step: Look for Goldman and Morgan to buy their favorite existing commercial banks under this new structure, rather than the other way around.

The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal's stories are linked below.

• Storied Banks Scrap Wall Street Model (Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2008)
• Goldman, Morgan Stanley to become regulated banks (Financial Times, 22 September 2008)
  

Thought for the day

Hanlon's (Heinlein's) Razor meets Clarke's Third Law:

"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

Grey's Law

Hat tip: Carrie.

Ninja cat

Ninja cat comes closer while not moving!

LOLYeats

Related and really cool link: The Internet Meme Timeline @ Dipity.com

Achieving work-life balance

BusinessWeek is running a piece on how people have - and haven't - successfully achieved that state of enlightenment known as "work-life balance".

Does this sound familiar? 350 e-mails a day in my inbox. BlackBerry, cell phone, and laptop constantly in tow. Check my Outlook calendar and see that I'm double- or triple-booked in meetings every hour, plus a 7 a.m. global conference call. Being told by management that we cannot hire additional head count because of a hiring freeze, despite the hefty increase in responsibilities for my team. That was me a year ago. The red tape, politics, ridiculous expectations, and meager resources made it nearly impossible to do my job as an advertising and brand manager for a large tech company...

...I quit. So did my husband, who worked in a top advertising agency. In fact, we both quit on the same day: Sept. 11, 2007. We decided that life was too short and we had had enough. What was our worst-case scenario if we quit? Having to sell our home and look for jobs elsewhere? Better than losing our marriage and our sanity.

Our friends and colleagues could not understand it. Rumors were flying that we had come into some family money. Nope. Just several years of saving for a rainy day. And boy, was it pouring. My husband started consulting immediately. I wanted to spend some time with my ill father. The marketing consulting business my husband started took off, and because of our similar backgrounds and experience, it was a natural fit for us to work together.

Ten months after quitting, we have more business than we can handle. My husband named the business reeboot strategy because in explaining our rationale for quitting our big corporate jobs he would say: "We needed to hit Control + Alt + Delete on our lives and start over."

Work-Life Balance: How To Get A Life And Do Your Job (BusinessWeek.com)

Financial Crisis FAQs

They're doing a good job of explaining the basics (and the details) over at the Freaknomics blog.

It's our watch now

Over at They Rode On, Doc responds to this post with some ruminations on Big Changes.

Excerpt:

We look back on history and we wonder how some of the worst things could have been allowed to happen. Where were the good Germans during the Holocaust? Why didn't someone stand up to Joe McCarthy sooner? How was the massacre in Rwanda allowed to happen? You can find your own example of something, I'm sure, that you just know you'd never have allowed to take place on your watch. Well, it's our watch now. In the coming days, probably years, there will be ample opportunities to show our mettle, or to burrow into a corner in the interest of self-preservation. I had said "cower in the corner," but I'll not cast that stone. For some, saving one life will mean putting other lives for which they're responsible at risk. The firefighter who's a sole breadwinner for a family does that every day. Not everyone faces that dilemma, and not everyone facing it decides for altruism.

We look back on history and wonder. When our children and grandchildren look back on the coming days and wonder, it will fall on us to explain. If we can.

Be kind to one another. Putting one foot in front of the other will carry our bodies through this. Nothing less than kindness will ferry our souls across.

They Rode On: The Coming Crash

Read the whole thing.