Picking Losers

There's a lot to be said about the evils of direct government funding of businesses - the picking-winners-and-losers meme.  One company, Solyndra, really stands out.  The USA lent it about half a billion, and after a refinance we aren't even senior.  Now they are broke and now its officers are taking the Fifth, so you know it's all going someplace bad.  Maybe even someplace really bad for the Administration, its first major scandal.


The New York Times covered Solyndra in a piece the other day that was well-positioned but seemed awfully restrained.  One point stuck out for me:  the lobbying.  I certainly think it's basically wrong for the USA to lend money to a private company.  But it seems really, really wrong for them to spend $1.8 million of that money to go and lobby for more money.  There probably were restrictions on the use of proceeds - I know there are in an analogous situation, government procurements - but borrowed dollars are fungible.

The lobbyists are $1.8 million richer, we are $1.8 million poorer, and that's it.  No other benefit.  Pretty clear who's the loser.  We got picked.

Publish or Perish

I had forgot Bird by Bird, a book about writing that was pretty persuasive.  The main message:  don't wait for inspiration, just sit down and do it.

The problem is that the only-vaguely-inspired stuff can be tedious.  The stuff you crank, if you're just cranking, may be well written but that may be it.  Anyone who does this for the Fat Lady, as I do, and maybe for posterity wants it to be well-written and insightful and even interesting to read.  Will you always get there just by putting your butt in a chair?

Gets one to the difference between the kind of writing the Bird by Bird author, Ann Lamott, was writing about, and this blogging stuff.  If you're working on a novel or a play or a history you presumably generate a big pile of writing - OK, bird by bird - and then go back and reread it and edit it and then someone else reads and edits it and maybe someday it is published.

These squibs just emerge, a spellcheck if I remember, and off they go.

So if you do them everyday, whatever the inspiration or lack thereof, the risks of suckiness go way up.

But if you don't - in this medium, who wants to wait for a damn thing?

Calling Ronnie

I'm not part of that Reagan-Was-God crowd, but he had an amazing ability to see fundamental wrongs that everyone had got used to - or figured would never change -  and say they were still wrong.  Like the Soviet Union.  Like marginal tax rates of 80 percent.  Like nuclear war, as a matter of fact.

No one around with that kind of vision.  I don't know what's fundamentally wrong that everyone accepts - perhaps China? - but I know that 20 years from now, whatever it is, it will then seem obvious.

Battling Back

With the Fall coming in, I'm afraid Strays is going to turn back to some of that serious policy wonkie stuff that will reduce its readership from about ten to about one, but it's in the air.  With a jumpy philosophical twist.  So here goes, Mr. (or Ms.) Reader:

Back up on the table with the Republic of Equity.  The name - it is simply to imply the opposite of the Empire of Debt - means that we move back to a global society where more free people own more of their own stuff and rely less on borrowed money.  Top to bottom.  Drive that car after it's paid for.  Prepay the mortgage until it  hurts.  Let failed businesses fail. Let Greece default  and tell them - much as I like all the Greeks I know - that they can't borrow their way out, they will have to live on what they earn.  The point being, if we are coming to the end of a Kondratiev wave, let's get there.  Liquidate, take our lumps, reconstitute our moral strength, go to work, and move on.

And don't try to reflate the economy, don't monetize the debt by running the printing presses, and don't start another war.

I know it sounds a little like calling for the Dark Ages.  But I don't think we go back to that, or anything near, because technology has made intelligence and communication cheap.  Knowledge won't be limited to the monasteries.  There won't be a priesthood that can deny us heaven.

Labor Day

Oops... sometimes these babies hang up in draft....

As usual the day was for serious labor, including ducking into the chateau from time to time to bang out a contract.   Outside it was vines removal.  This puppy had been clinging to the NW corner and was home to many critters.

I figured I'd have a lot of angry birds, real ones.  The sparrows in particular inhabited this hanging forest throughout the winter, and I figured a few would stick around and make a claim.  But as it happened, not a sound.  No nests, no remnants of nests.  Some chewing or pecking away at some of the exterior, but mostly pretty clear, once the brush was down.

It's late summer.  They probably have more to worry about than some middle-aged guy on a ladder with a pair of clippers.

Engineered Cute

I was thinking again how cute - sorry, there's really no better word - is Isabel, our pup. And she really is.

But she is engineered, the result of generations of breeders breeding generations of Westies in order to sell them to people like me.   She is very intentionally cute.

Isabel doesn't know she's cute, or that she's engineered, but she does know that she's alive and, all day long, she wants to engage.  There's a huge hopeful point in there.

We too are engineered.  My parents did their parental things, and in this nature-nurture thing nurture still counts for something.  Add natural selection, a grand engineer, generations of breeders breeding lines of individual humans, all of whom survived long enough to procreate.  Which mine did, leading to me.

But there is a lot more engineering to come, tons more.  It's clear that we will be able to manipulate our offspring, and ourselves, and integrate a world of knowledge into each individual head.  Our parents (or the state, or the caliphate, or someone) will be able to bioengineer us from conception.  Once out, we can continue to invent ourselves, and not just through will power and resolve.  One wonders if we will still be people.

It doesn't necessarily sound good.  But as with Isabel, whatever the mods and intervention, engineered people should still be happy to be alive and ready to engage.  I don't think that can be engineered out.  I don't know how long it lasts, now or then - as to each of us, it may have a half-life - and maybe it should.  But for a time there will be a will to be human and survive.

River's Edge

Down in Texas they haven't had much rain in months and everything is drying up.  Here in St. Louis, the draught seems to be coming to town too, but it's different.  We are a confluence of two great and two pretty good rivers (OK, the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Illinois, and the Meramec), and there is plenty of water underground in Missouri.  So unless there is some kind of catastrophe, we will go on pulling water from our rivers and keeping our vegetation alive.

That's one way the rivers prop us up, and there are others.  You can drink the stuff, based on treatment systems that have been around for 100 years.  You can track your culture - and previous cultures, like Cahokia - that expanded and contracted with the rivers.  They flood, but for the most part the floods come slowly and they always recede.

What surprises me a little is that we don't seem to have a distinguished architecture built around this.  There are houses at the rivers' edges that anticipate the floods, but they usually look impoverished, or at least unlovely.

(A photo taken for its irony.  I'm sure there are way better illustrations of the point.)

I don't see why there can't be a wonderful river's edge architecture.  It seems perfect, first of all, for treehouses - the real deal, houses in trees.  Or wonderful cantilevered things with giant balconies.  Or how about houseboats, moored but ready to float -  hearkening back to riverboats.

Well, maybe not.

Could be a class thing, or an economic thing.  River people are pretty down-market.  I think they are proud of that, but they sure don't seem to be celebrating their lifestyles in their structures.