The Little Thread Which Grew - the Apollo '73 to Everything But

[lkwdblds]

Two questions, one hard and one easy.

Enjoyed this tremendously Lakey.

Whatever happened to David Brenner?

Yeah, how is it that the Jews came to run Hollywood too?

If I convert can I collect on some of the overdue good karma.

Question 1 - I know nothing about him.

Question 3 - Yes

Question 2 - That is a tough one to put one's finger on!! How did the Jews come to run Hollywood? I don't have an answer for that. Some industries seem to be dominated by one group or another. You don't see much Jewish influence, if any, in the automobile business or the oil business or the steel business. Also they are conspicuously absent in electronics, high tech industries and major league sports.

Where you find heavy concentrations of Jews is in the legal profession, the medical profession, in the faculties of universities, dentistry, finance and then entertainment. Why Jews end up in these fields and are not in the other fields which I mentioned is a mystery to me. We need to pull a string to unravel this. I am going to bed now. I may have more to say in the morning.
Lakey

 

[Ted]

One of My Favorite Jews

Hey, is that racist or what?

Oh, well... Just playing along on thread topics.

Here's Barbra Streisand. What a voice! What phrasing! What tone! All of her notes are beautiful!

No. I am not gay! Hey, is that homophobic or what?

I would like her even more if she kept her politics to herself. There is nothing she could say that would get me to consider Al Gore or Barack Obama as worthy candidates for service to the country in its highest offices.

Back to the music. The "Guilty" album from 1980 still holds up to my ears. It is tireless, my wife's and my favorite Streisand album.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr-fOJdeUus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdQ6o9Aig9o&feature=related

 

[CarmeloOrchards]

Barbara Billingsley, Beaver Cleaver's TV mom, dies
Associated Press - October 16, 2010 11:08 PM PDT

http://omg.yahoo.com/news/barbara-billingsley-beaver-cleavers-tv-mom-dies/49082?nc

FILE - In this Sept. 27, 2007 file photo, Barbara Billingsley, of 'Leave It To Beaver,' smiles as the cast members reunite in Santa Monica, Calif. Billingsley, who gained the title supermom for her gentle portrayal of June Cleaver, the warm, supportive mother of a pair of precocious boys in 'Leave it to Beaver,' has died Saturday, Oct. 16, 2010. She was 94.


LOS ANGELES - Even decades after the show ended, Barbara Billingsley expressed surprise at the lasting affection people had for "Leave it to Beaver" and her role as the warm, supportive mother of a pair of precocious boys.

The actress, who gained supermom status for her gentle portrayal of June Cleaver in the 1950s television series, died Saturday after a long illness. She was 94.

"We knew we were making a good show, because it was so well written," Billingsley said in 1994. "But we had no idea what was ahead. People still talk about it and write letters, telling how much they watch it today with their children and grandchildren."

Billingsley, who had suffered from a rheumatoid disease, died at her home in Santa Monica, said family spokeswoman Judy Twersky.

When the show debuted in 1957, Jerry Mathers, who played Beaver, was 9, and Tony Dow, who portrayed Wally, was 12. Billingsley's character, the perfect stay-at-home 1950s mom, was always there to gently but firmly nurture both through the ups and downs of childhood.

Beaver, meanwhile, was a typical boy whose adventures landed him in one comical crisis after another.

Billingsley's own two sons said she was pretty much the image of June Cleaver in real life, although the actress disagreed.

"She was every bit as nurturing, classy, and lovely as 'June Cleaver,' and we were so proud to share her with the world," her son Glenn Billingsley said Saturday.

She did acknowledge that she may have become more like June as the series progressed.

"I think what happens is that the writers start writing about you as well as the character they created," she once said. "So you become sort of all mixed up, I think."

A wholesome beauty with a lithe figure, Billingsley began acting in her elementary school's plays and soon discovered she wanted to do nothing else.

Although her beauty and figure won her numerous roles in movies from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she failed to obtain star status until "Leave it to Beaver," a show that she almost passed on.

"I was going to do another series with Buddy Ebsen for the same producers, but somehow it didn't materialize," she told The Associated Press in 1994. "A couple of months later I got a call to go to the studio to do this pilot show. And it was 'Beaver.'"

After "Leave it to Beaver" left the air in 1963 Billingsley largely disappeared from public view for several years.

She resurfaced in 1980 in a hilarious cameo in "Airplane!" playing a demur elderly passenger not unlike June Cleaver.

When flight attendants were unable to communicate with a pair of jive-talking hipsters, Billingsley's character volunteered to translate, saying "I speak jive." The three then engage in a raucous street-slang conversation.

"No chance they would have cast me for that if I hadn't been June Cleaver," she once said.

She returned as June Cleaver in a 1983 TV movie, "Still the Beaver," that costarred Mathers and Dow and portrayed a much darker side of Beaver's life.

In his mid-30s, Beaver was unemployed, unable to communicate with his own sons and going through a divorce. Wally, a successful lawyer, was handling the divorce, and June was at a loss to help her son through the transition.

"Ward, what would you do?" she asked at the site of her husband's grave. (Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward Cleaver, had died in 1982.)

The movie revived interest in the Cleaver family, and the Disney Channel launched "The New Leave It to Beaver" in 1985.

The series took a more hopeful view of the Cleavers, with Beaver winning custody of his two sons and all three moving in with June.

In 1997 Universal made a "Leave it to Beaver" theatrical film with a new generation of actors. Billingsley returned for a cameo, however, as Aunt Martha.

"America's favorite mother is now gone," Dow said in a statement Saturday. "I feel very fortunate to have been her "son" for 11 years. We were wonderful friends and I will miss her very much."

In later years she appeared from time to time in such TV series as "Murphy Brown," "Empty Nest" and "Baby Boom" and had a memorable comic turn opposite fellow TV moms June Lockhart of "Lassie" and Isabel Sanford of "The Jeffersons" on the "Roseanne" show.

"Now some people, they just associate you with that one role (June Cleaver), and it makes it hard to do other things," she once said. "But as far as I'm concerned, it's been an honor."

In real life, fate was not as gentle to Billingsley as it had been to June and her family.

Born Barbara Lillian Combes in Los Angeles on Dec. 22, 1915, she was raised by her mother after her parents divorced. She and her first husband, Glenn Billingsley, divorced when her sons were just 2 and 4.

Her second husband, director Roy Kellino, died of a heart attack after three years of marriage and just months before she landed the "Leave it to Beaver" role.

She married physician Bill Mortenson in 1959 and they remained wed until his death in 1981.

Twersky said Billingsley's survivors include her sons, a stepson and numerous grandchildren.

___

Associated Press writer Bob Thomas in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

 

[CarmeloOrchards]

from the NY Times

October 16, 2010
Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened
By MARTIN FACKLER
OSAKA, Japan — Like many members of Japan’s middle class, Masato Y. enjoyed a level of affluence two decades ago that was the envy of the world. Masato, a small-business owner, bought a $500,000 condominium, vacationed in Hawaii and drove a late-model Mercedes.

But his living standards slowly crumbled along with Japan’s overall economy. First, he was forced to reduce trips abroad and then eliminate them. Then he traded the Mercedes for a cheaper domestic model. Last year, he sold his condo — for a third of what he paid for it, and for less than what he still owed on the mortgage he took out 17 years ago.

“Japan used to be so flashy and upbeat, but now everyone must live in a dark and subdued way,” said Masato, 49, who asked that his full name not be used because he still cannot repay the $110,000 that he owes on the mortgage.

Few nations in recent history have seen such a striking reversal of economic fortune as Japan. The original Asian success story, Japan rode one of the great speculative stock and property bubbles of all time in the 1980s to become the first Asian country to challenge the long dominance of the West.

But the bubbles popped in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Japan fell into a slow but relentless decline that neither enormous budget deficits nor a flood of easy money has reversed. For nearly a generation now, the nation has been trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of prices, known as deflation, in the process shriveling from an economic Godzilla to little more than an afterthought in the global economy.

Now, as the United States and other Western nations struggle to recover from a debt and property bubble of their own, a growing number of economists are pointing to Japan as a dark vision of the future. Even as the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, prepares a fresh round of unconventional measures to stimulate the economy, there are growing fears that the United States and many European economies could face a prolonged period of slow growth or even, in the worst case, deflation, something not seen on a sustained basis outside Japan since the Great Depression.

Many economists remain confident that the United States will avoid the stagnation of Japan, largely because of the greater responsiveness of the American political system and Americans’ greater tolerance for capitalism’s creative destruction. Japanese leaders at first denied the severity of their nation’s problems and then spent heavily on job-creating public works projects that only postponed painful but necessary structural changes, economists say.

“We’re not Japan,” said Robert E. Hall, a professor of economics at Stanford. “In America, the bet is still that we will somehow find ways to get people spending and investing again.”

Still, as political pressure builds to reduce federal spending and budget deficits, other economists are now warning of “Japanification” — of falling into the same deflationary trap of collapsed demand that occurs when consumers refuse to consume, corporations hold back on investments and banks sit on cash. It becomes a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle: as prices fall further and jobs disappear, consumers tighten their purse strings even more and companies cut back on spending and delay expansion plans.

“The U.S., the U.K., Spain, Ireland, they all are going through what Japan went through a decade or so ago,” said Richard Koo, chief economist at Nomura Securities who recently wrote a book about Japan’s lessons for the world. “Millions of individuals and companies see their balance sheets going underwater, so they are using their cash to pay down debt instead of borrowing and spending.”

Just as inflation scarred a generation of Americans, deflation has left a deep imprint on the Japanese, breeding generational tensions and a culture of pessimism, fatalism and reduced expectations. While Japan remains in many ways a prosperous society, it faces an increasingly grim situation, particularly outside the relative economic vibrancy of Tokyo, and its situation provides a possible glimpse into the future for the United States and Europe, should the most dire forecasts come to pass.

Scaled-Back Ambitions

The downsizing of Japan’s ambitions can be seen on the streets of Tokyo, where concrete “microhouses” have become popular among younger Japanese who cannot afford even the famously cramped housing of their parents, or lack the job security to take out a traditional multidecade loan.

These matchbox-size homes stand on plots of land barely large enough to park a sport utility vehicle, yet have three stories of closet-size bedrooms, suitcase-size closets and a tiny kitchen that properly belongs on a submarine.

“This is how to own a house even when you are uneasy about the future,” said Kimiyo Kondo, general manager at Zaus, a Tokyo-based company that builds microhouses.

For many people under 40, it is hard to grasp just how far this is from the 1980s, when a mighty — and threatening — “Japan Inc.” seemed ready to obliterate whole American industries, from automakers to supercomputers. With the Japanese stock market quadrupling and the yen rising to unimagined heights, Japan’s companies dominated global business, gobbling up trophy properties like Hollywood movie studios (Universal Studios and Columbia Pictures), famous golf courses (Pebble Beach) and iconic real estate (Rockefeller Center).

In 1991, economists were predicting that Japan would overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2010. In fact, Japan’s economy remains the same size it was then: a gross domestic product of $5.7 trillion at current exchange rates. During the same period, the United States economy doubled in size to $14.7 trillion, and this year China overtook Japan to become the world’s No. 2 economy.

China has so thoroughly eclipsed Japan that few American intellectuals seem to bother with Japan now, and once crowded Japanese-language classes at American universities have emptied. Even Clyde V. Prestowitz, a former Reagan administration trade negotiator whose writings in the 1980s about Japan’s threat to the United States once stirred alarm in Washington, said he was now studying Chinese. “I hardly go to Japan anymore,” Mr. Prestowitz said.

The decline has been painful for the Japanese, with companies and individuals like Masato having lost the equivalent of trillions of dollars in the stock market, which is now just a quarter of its value in 1989, and in real estate, where the average price of a home is the same as it was in 1983. And the future looks even bleaker, as Japan faces the world’s largest government debt — around 200 percent of gross domestic product — a shrinking population and rising rates of poverty and suicide.

But perhaps the most noticeable impact here has been Japan’s crisis of confidence. Just two decades ago, this was a vibrant nation filled with energy and ambition, proud to the point of arrogance and eager to create a new economic order in Asia based on the yen. Today, those high-flying ambitions have been shelved, replaced by weariness and fear of the future, and an almost stifling air of resignation. Japan seems to have pulled into a shell, content to accept its slow fade from the global stage.

Its once voracious manufacturers now seem prepared to surrender industry after industry to hungry South Korean and Chinese rivals. Japanese consumers, who once flew by the planeload on flashy shopping trips to Manhattan and Paris, stay home more often now, saving their money for an uncertain future or setting new trends in frugality with discount brands like Uniqlo.

As living standards in this still wealthy nation slowly erode, a new frugality is apparent among a generation of young Japanese, who have known nothing but economic stagnation and deflation. They refuse to buy big-ticket items like cars or televisions, and fewer choose to study abroad in America.

Japan’s loss of gumption is most visible among its young men, who are widely derided as “herbivores” for lacking their elders’ willingness to toil for endless hours at the office, or even to succeed in romance, which many here blame, only half jokingly, for their country’s shrinking birthrate. “The Japanese used to be called economic animals,” said Mitsuo Ohashi, former chief executive officer of the chemicals giant Showa Denko. “But somewhere along the way, Japan lost its animal spirits.”

When asked in dozens of interviews about their nation’s decline, Japanese, from policy makers and corporate chieftains to shoppers on the street, repeatedly mention this startling loss of vitality. While Japan suffers from many problems, most prominently the rapid graying of its society, it is this decline of a once wealthy and dynamic nation into a deep social and cultural rut that is perhaps Japan’s most ominous lesson for the world today.

The classic explanation of the evils of deflation is that it makes individuals and businesses less willing to use money, because the rational way to act when prices are falling is to hold onto cash, which gains in value. But in Japan, nearly a generation of deflation has had a much deeper effect, subconsciously coloring how the Japanese view the world. It has bred a deep pessimism about the future and a fear of taking risks that make people instinctively reluctant to spend or invest, driving down demand — and prices — even further.

“A new common sense appears, in which consumers see it as irrational or even foolish to buy or borrow,” said Kazuhisa Takemura, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo who has studied the psychology of deflation.

A Deflated City

While the effects are felt across Japan’s economy, they are more apparent in regions like Osaka, the third-largest city, than in relatively prosperous Tokyo. In this proudly commercial city, merchants have gone to extremes to coax shell-shocked shoppers into spending again. But this often takes the shape of price wars that end up only feeding Japan’s deflationary spiral.

There are vending machines that sell canned drinks for 10 yen, or 12 cents; restaurants with 50-yen beer; apartments with the first month’s rent of just 100 yen, about $1.22. Even marriage ceremonies are on sale, with discount wedding halls offering weddings for $600 — less than a tenth of what ceremonies typically cost here just a decade ago.

On Senbayashi, an Osaka shopping street, merchants recently held a 100-yen day, offering much of their merchandise for that price. Even then, they said, the results were disappointing.

“It’s like Japanese have even lost the desire to look good,” said Akiko Oka, 63, who works part time in a small apparel shop, a job she has held since her own clothing store went bankrupt in 2002.

This loss of vigor is sometimes felt in unusual places. Kitashinchi is Osaka’s premier entertainment district, a three-centuries-old playground where the night is filled with neon signs and hostesses in tight dresses, where just taking a seat at a top club can cost $500.

But in the past 15 years, the number of fashionable clubs and lounges has shrunk to 480 from 1,200, replaced by discount bars and chain restaurants. Bartenders say the clientele these days is too cost-conscious to show the studied disregard for money that was long considered the height of refinement.

“A special culture might be vanishing,” said Takao Oda, who mixes perfectly crafted cocktails behind the glittering gold countertop at his Bar Oda.

After years of complacency, Japan appears to be waking up to its problems, as seen last year when disgruntled voters ended the virtual postwar monopoly on power of the Liberal Democratic Party. However, for many Japanese, it may be too late. Japan has already created an entire generation of young people who say they have given up on believing that they can ever enjoy the job stability or rising living standards that were once considered a birthright here.

Yukari Higaki, 24, said the only economic conditions she had ever known were ones in which prices and salaries seemed to be in permanent decline. She saves as much money as she can by buying her clothes at discount stores, making her own lunches and forgoing travel abroad. She said that while her generation still lived comfortably, she and her peers were always in a defensive crouch, ready for the worst.

“We are the survival generation,” said Ms. Higaki, who works part time at a furniture store.

Hisakazu Matsuda, president of Japan Consumer Marketing Research Institute, who has written several books on Japanese consumers, has a different name for Japanese in their 20s; he calls them the consumption-haters. He estimates that by the time this generation hits their 60s, their habits of frugality will have cost the Japanese economy $420 billion in lost consumption.

“There is no other generation like this in the world,” Mr. Matsuda said. “These guys think it’s stupid to spend.”

Deflation has also affected businesspeople by forcing them to invent new ways to survive in an economy where prices and profits only go down, not up.

Yoshinori Kaiami was a real estate agent in Osaka, where, like the rest of Japan, land prices have been falling for most of the past 19 years. Mr. Kaiami said business was tough. There were few buyers in a market that was virtually guaranteed to produce losses, and few sellers, because most homeowners were saddled with loans that were worth more than their homes.

Some years ago, he came up with an idea to break the gridlock. He created a company that guides homeowners through an elaborate legal subterfuge in which they erase the original loan by declaring personal bankruptcy, but continue to live in their home by “selling” it to a relative, who takes out a smaller loan to pay its greatly reduced price.

“If we only had inflation again, this sort of business would not be necessary,” said Mr. Kaiami, referring to the rising prices that are the opposite of deflation. “I feel like I’ve been waiting for 20 years for inflation to come back.”

One of his customers was Masato, the small-business owner, who sold his four-bedroom condo to a relative for about $185,000, 15 years after buying it for a bit more than $500,000. He said he was still deliberating about whether to expunge the $110,000 he still owed his bank by declaring personal bankruptcy.

Economists said one reason deflation became self-perpetuating was that it pushed companies and people like Masato to survive by cutting costs and selling what they already owned, instead of buying new goods or investing.

“Deflation destroys the risk-taking that capitalist economies need in order to grow,” said Shumpei Takemori, an economist at Keio University in Tokyo. “Creative destruction is replaced with what is just destructive destruction.”

Steve Lohr contributed reporting from New York.

 

[RogerB]

Yes, a nice summation of the Japanese scenario that piece, CarmelO.

Here's a piece on Bloomberg about the current dilemma facing the US Federal Reserve and the economy wonks.

The writer of the piece really calls the stupidity for what it is.

Also in the NY Times today was an editorial piece about what is screwing up all the economic models and predictions of our vaunted economists . . . . guess what's screwing their predictions up? People! Helllooo, economists . . . people do make decisions
________________________________

Fed Wants to Hoodwink Public, Only Fools Itself: Caroline Baum
By Caroline Baum - Oct 14, 2010
Bloomberg Opinion

If I were a central banker, I would be afraid.

If I were a central banker getting ready to embark on another round of quantitative easing, I would be very afraid.

Here’s why. Central bankers in the U.S. are being bombarded with market-based signals suggesting their fears of deflation, or falling economy-wide prices, may be misplaced.

Gold prices continue to set new highs. The U.S. dollar, the global reserve currency, keeps sinking amid expectations the Federal Reserve will dilute the existing stock starting at its Nov. 2 to 3 meeting.

Commodity prices, both industrial and agricultural, are on a tear. The CRB Spot Raw Industrial Price Index, which includes scrap metals, cotton and rubber -- but not oil -- hit an all- time high this week.

Junk bond issuance already set a record for the year, with demand for high-yield debt narrowing spreads to Treasuries. Investors are pouring money into emerging markets debt issued in local currencies by countries that used to be considered banana republics. Mexico sold $1 billion of 100-year bonds last week, double the announced issue size, at a yield of 6.1 percent. Just ask yourself: Would you lend money to Mexico for 100 years? Exactly.

Blowing Bubbles

If the Fed’s goal was to make investors move out the risk curve, it succeeded. An alternate interpretation: Zero-percent interest rates are causing a misallocation of capital, a nice way of saying, “asset bubbles.”

The markets aren’t validating the Federal Reserve’s preoccupation with a deflationary spiral. In fact, the message is just the opposite.

And why not? The Fed has told us inflation is below the level it considers consistent with maximum employment and price stability. For the record, various measures of inflation show prices rising anywhere from 0.9 percent to 1.5 percent on a year-over-year basis.

As a general rule, if a central bank wants higher inflation, it gets higher inflation, sometimes more than it bargained for. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon -- something easy to forget amid the preoccupation with inflation expectations -- and the Fed is the proprietor of the U.S. dollar printing press.

After 30 years of price stability uber alles, the Fed now wants us to believe that it wants higher inflation (wink-wink, nudge-nudge)?

Fed Sharp Shooters?

And that’s not all. We’re asked to believe the Fed can hit a precise inflation target. (How’d that money supply targeting work out in decades past?)

“If inflation in 2011 were a 0.5 percentage point below the Fed’s inflation objective, the Fed might aim to offset this miss by an additional 0.5 percentage point rise in the price level in future years,” New York Fed President Bill Dudley said in an Oct. 1 speech.

To invoke price level targeting -- stabilizing the price level, or the consumer price index, not the percent change in the CPI -- at this point is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.

Take a look at the upward sloping CPI, even during the Great Moderation starting in the mid-1980s, and you will see the price level is anything but stable. The U.S. dollar buys less than half of what it did in 1982-1984, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Textbook Reality

For more than 40 years, the price level has been rising, year in, year out. And now policy makers want to compensate for what they claim is a one-year undershoot in the rate of change in the CPI?

That’s only part of the Fed’s strategy, as outlined in the minutes from the Sept. 21 meeting, released Tuesday.

With the benchmark rate already near zero, “an increase in inflation expectations lowers short-term real interest rates, stimulating the economy,” according to the minutes.

What about lowering real long-term rates, the Fed’s motivation for QE2? For that to happen, nominal rates would have to stay stable, which is fine for a textbook but not in the real world, says Jim Glassman, senior U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Lost in Translation

Perhaps Fed chief Ben Bernanke will sort through this tortured logic when he speaks about monetary policy in a low- inflation environment at a Boston Fed conference today. Here’s the Cliffs Notes version to help in translation:

“You know the Fed is committed to price stability in the long run. In the short run, we want you to think that we want higher inflation, which we really don’t and don’t intend to deliver. Just believe what we say, not what we do, and everything will work out fine.”

Every time policy makers talk about inflation expectations, I want to know just whose expectations they are targeting. The man on the street? The 14.8 million Americans who are unemployed? Small businesses, which are more concerned about the rising cost of health care and taxes than higher prices? Or is it bond traders’ expectations, reflected in the price of Treasury securities? The Fed never makes that clear.

These Fed folks and their academic acolytes need to step away from their models and get out in the real world. (For an alternative view of inflation expectations, see my March 2007 survey.)

Maybe the Fed can fool some of the people some of the time, but it can’t fool all of the people all of the time. In the process, policy makers may end up fooling themselves that they can create expectations of a little more inflation without delivering a lot of the real thing.

(Caroline Baum , author of “Just What I Said,” is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Caroline Baum in New York at [email protected].
To contact the editor responsible for this column: James Greiff at [email protected]

 

[lkwdblds]

Gore is in worse case shape, Obama is more dangerous

Hey, is that racist or what?

Oh, well... Just playing along on thread topics.

Here's Barbra Streisand. What a voice! What phrasing! What tone! All of her notes are beautiful!

No. I am not gay! Hey, is that homophobic or what?

I would like her even more if she kept her politics to herself. There is nothing she could say that would get me to consider Al Gore or Barack Obama as worthy candidates for service to the country in its highest offices.

Back to the music. The "Guilty" album from 1980 still holds up to my ears. It is tireless, my wife's and my favorite Streisand album.

.........<snip>.............................

To me, it is very apparent that Al Gore is heavily sedated on powerful phychiatric type drugs. When you look at him and watch him speak, his actual beingness is embedded deeply behind many layers of mental fog and residues resulting from his heavy doses of medications of powerful psychiatric drugs. His own true beingness, identity or valence is not available to manifest itself except perhaps when he blows his stack claiming how badly George W. Bush betrayed his country.

If speaking to a labor union, he will dress in work clothes, if speaking to the lumber industry, he will dress like a lumberjack with jeans and a flannel shirt. if addressing a women's group he will wear a sport shirt and attempt to be witty and charming. To a men's group, he will wear suit and tie. He has no idea who he really is but want's to be loved and be all things to all people.

If I were going to C/S his case, I would start with at least 100 hours of Book and Bottle. Perhaps he would need much more than that to even get anywhere close to being in present time. He needs huge batteries of objective processes, upper indoc TR's, reach and withdraw from objects, etc.

Just to even think that this messed up human being came within a gnat's eyelash of becomming the president of the United States is absolutely frightening. As bad a job as Bush did, I simply can not imagine how Gore would have handled 9/11/2001. It is simply way above his "pay grade" to deal with a situation such as what happened on that day.

Another whack job is our Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. That woman is nearly certifiably insane. She appears to me to also be on heavy psychiatric medication but nowhere near as much so a Gore is.
You could pick a Speaker of the House by throwing darts at a telephone directory and 90% of the people's names the darts landed on or near would be better suited to the job than Pelosi. How do peple of her calibur get rewarded with important and cushy jobs?

Barack Obama is a completely different animal. He is intelligent, inspirational, likeable, a great speaker and seems to even be a kindly person. In effect this makes him much more dangerous than a Gore or a Pelosi.

Why am I against him? It is not merely that he holds political views nearly opposite to my own, I am okay with that! I respect many people who hold opposite views. What I object to is very common with others of his ilk and that is that they are sure that they are right. While claiming just the opposite, they demonize anyone who disagrees with them, and actually feel that such a person has some sort of brain disease or else is an evil person or a monetarily greedy person, opposing them merely for financial gain.

OBAMA AND OTHERS OF HIS ILK CAN NOT CONCEIVE THAT A DECENT PERSON WHO IS INTELLIGENT AND NOT GREEDY CAN OPPOSE THEM. They feel that if someone is opposed, the opposer is either, mentally ill, ignorant or stupid, or really knows better but only oppose them for financial gain. THIS TYPE OF ATTITUDE IS A SERVICE FACSIMILE! IT MAKES OBAMA RIGHT AND HIS OPPOSITION WRONG AND JUSTIFIES IN HIS MIND, USING ANY MEANS POSSIBLE TO RAM HIS PROGRAMS INTO PLACE EVEN IF THE MAJORITY OF THE VOTERS DO NOT WANT THEM!

A SERVICE FAC POWERED BY FIXED IDEAS OF HOW THINGS SHOULD BE IS A DEADLY COMBINATION IN A LEADER, ESPECIALLY IN A LEADER WITH A LOT OF SOUL AND CHARISMA SUCH AS OBAMA!
Lakey

 

[Ted]

[

snippage...]

OBAMA AND OTHERS OF HIS ILK CAN NOT CONCEIVE THAT A DECENT PERSON WHO IS INTELLIGENT AND NOT GREEDY CAN OPPOSE THEM. They feel that if someone is opposed, the opposer is either, mentally ill, ignorant or stupid, or really knows better but only oppose them for financial gain. THIS TYPE OF ATTITUDE IS A SERVICE FACSIMILE! IT MAKES OBAMA RIGHT AND HIS OPPOSITION WRONG AND JUSTIFIES IN HIS MIND, USING ANY MEANS POSSIBLE TO RAM HIS PROGRAMS INTO PLACE EVEN IF THE MAJORITY OF THE VOTERS DO NOT WANT THEM!

A SERVICE FAC POWERED BY FIXED IDEAS OF HOW THINGS SHOULD BE IS A DEADLY COMBINATION IN A LEADER, ESPECIALLY IN A LEADER WITH A LOT OF SOUL AND CHARISMA SUCH AS OBAMA!
Lakey

If Obama could sing like a male Streisand I might forgive him for his feckless, narcissistic treatment of the Office of the President -- provided he vacated the office and just stuck to singing.

I will point out that an entire philosophy/ideology can function as a service fac.

You be right, though. BO got dat serfac thing going on big, big time. He is feckless and divisive and quite a poor speaker without the teleprompter -- as anyone would be who had much goings-on and things he must not say or must not be found out. We called that withhold and missed-withhold phenomena in old scientology.)

While McCain was a poor choice for president, Obama is far, far worse. At least there is no doubt McCain loves his country.

 

[Hatshepsut]

O

Hey, is that racist or what?

Oh, well... Just playing along on thread topics.

Here's Barbra Streisand. What a voice! What phrasing! What tone! All of her notes are beautiful!

No. I am not gay! Hey, is that homophobic or what?

I would like her even more if she kept her politics to herself. There is nothing she could say that would get me to consider Al Gore or Barack Obama as worthy candidates for service to the country in its highest offices.

Back to the music. The "Guilty" album from 1980 still holds up to my ears. It is tireless, my wife's and my favorite Streisand album.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr-fOJdeUus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdQ6o9Aig9o&feature=related

I purchased this CD about ten yrs ago. I had the boombox playing in the laundry room outside. It was so damn good and the acoustics so great out there in the rain that I never brought the towels in from the dryer and it was an hour later I finally returned. Just the best. You know Barry Gibb wrote a lot of great songs for big stars. Islands inThe Stream,
To Love Somebody, Heartbreaker etc. The collaboration oh he and his brother Robin gave us real classics. They weren't really hot when their soundtrack hit big with Saturday Night Fever. Just one song was going to be used for the film and they were then asked to supply more at the last minute.

I for one though, appreciated them in the 60s with For Whom the Bell Tolls, New York Mining Disaster, Emotion, I Started A Joke.

 

[Ted]

Public Service Announcement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnt79eSSEyg&feature=related

 

[lkwdblds]

Phone Calls with Top People

Last night I was at Joan's party. Her Sister Laura was there with her husband George. Johnny the Magic Thetan was there and then Joan's and Laura's brother Ralph <name redacted> was there. Then there was Joan's son, Remi and her daughter Sophie. Remi is a professional chef and catered the affair and he is a splitting image of his now deceased Father, Jacob.

There were about 20 other people there whom I did not know. They were Church and business associates of Joan's. It was a fantastic party. Joan has a very nice accessory building in her back yard which is a pottery factory with ovens and all the equipment needed to make fine pottery.

Johnny said that he will leave for Seattle on Thursday and return in 4 days and then post here on ESMB when he gets back. Also Johnny is planning on attending Edey's birthday party today.

TODAY'S PHONE CALLS - Candy Swanson (aka Purple Haze) called me and we had a wonderful talk. She has a new boyfriend now and is having the time of her life. This is a real 2D in the fullest sense of the word. Her energy level and tone level are out the roof. She is up there around tone 15 or 20. What a dynamo of energy she is! I invited her to come to Edey's party and she said she would attend.

I had sent Hatsheput a private email in the morning and asked her to call me and she did. I just got off the phone with her after a very long call. What a charming and delightful person. She is quite different from anyone else whom I have ever talked to. I got genned in to her entire situation. It is a bit on the complex side but we had a very fruitful conversation which ended on a very high note. Hats couldn't get over how young my voice sounded, not like a 70 year old but more like I was 35 years old.

Lakey, never a dull moment. Lakester

 

[CarmeloOrchards]

Hey, is that racist or what?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upvZdVK913I

 

[Ted]

Funny Stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upvZdVK913I

Funny stuff! When "Blazing Saddles" first came out I laughed my ass off over Alex Karras slugging the horse and the campfire farting scene. It's still funny stuff; potty humor strikes my juvenile funny-bone. That Western is one of the great spoofs of all time.

Many years ago, my wife and I decided to take in a drive-in movie. We weren't interested in what was playing so much as just having the movie experience at the drive-in. "My Name Is Nobody" was playing.

When I laugh I tend to laugh loudly, without inhibition, much to my wife's embarrassment. She was glad we were in the car. I laughed my ass off over this movie. It's still funny. If you are feeling unOT, used and abused, put this one in the DVD player, get your popcorn out, and enjoy that glass of wine before the movie gets started unless you wanna be shooting wine out yer nose.

Here's a scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoXkG-nS2mg

 

[lkwdblds]

I agree with all of Ted's points!

If Obama could sing like a male Streisand I might forgive him for his feckless, narcissistic treatment of the Office of the President -- provided he vacated the office and just stuck to singing.

I will point out that an entire philosophy/ideology can function as a service fac.

You be right, though. BO got dat serfac thing going on big, big time. He is feckless and divisive and quite a poor speaker without the teleprompter -- as anyone would be who had much goings-on and things he must not say or must not be found out. We called that withhold and missed-withhold phenomena in old scientology.)

While McCain was a poor choice for president, Obama is far, far worse. At least there is no doubt McCain loves his country.

Excellent points which you make. We have 100% agreement.

Hey Ted, do you have any ideas why the Jews were able to take control of Hollywood? That problem is just banging around in my mind and I haven't got a clue of why that is or how that came to be. Not many actors, actresses and directors are Jewish, probably just the number coinciding with their percentage of the U.S. population, about 2.5%. Yet, when it comes to producers or the owners of the studios, they are mostly all Jewish. WHY IS THAT? This has been rolling around in my mind all day and I am not comming up with any answers.
Lakey

 

[dexter gelfand]

Mel Brooks

Excellent points which you make. We have 100% agreement.

Hey Ted, do you have any ideas why the Jews were able to take control of Hollywood? That problem is just banging around in my mind and I haven't got a clue of why that is or how that came to be. Not many actors, actresses and directors are Jewish, probably just the number coinciding with their percentage of the U.S. population, about 2.5%. Yet, when it comes to producers or the owners of the studios, they are mostly all Jewish. WHY IS THAT? This has been rolling around in my mind all day and I am not comming up with any answers.
Lakey

This reminds me about Mel Brooks' movie Spaceballs, and its original working title: "Jews in Space" No lie.

Which in turn reminds me of an issue of Mad Magazine from the 1960's. which featured "A primer on religion, in which the 3 basic branches of Judiasm were outlined as follows: "Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, which is also known as Catholic"

Love, Dex

 

[Ted]

Excellent points which you make. We have 100% agreement.

Hey Ted, do you have any ideas why the Jews were able to take control of Hollywood? That problem is just banging around in my mind and I haven't got a clue of why that is or how that came to be. Not many actors, actresses and directors are Jewish, probably just the number coinciding with their percentage of the U.S. population, about 2.5%. Yet, when it comes to producers or the owners of the studios, they are mostly all Jewish. WHY IS THAT? This has been rolling around in my mind all day and I am not comming up with any answers.
Lakey

As with any group, not all Jews are among the sharpest tacks in the box of humanity. To say there is a Jewish takeover of anything is somewhat narrow perception. Clint Eastwood isn't Jewish. Sylvester Stallone isn't Jewish. Both have produced enduring box-office hits. I am certain there are others.

New York City is a cultural center for the arts. It holds the largest Jewish population. It is a lateral move for many performers, writers, etc. going from NY to L.A. Los Angeles holds the third largest Jewish population in the States. Miami is second. There's no performing arts there unless you count the TV series "Miami Vice," "Burn Notice," and "CSI Miami." That doesn't make Miami a movie town.

I think the number of Jews is Miami is due to retirement opportunities and international finance.

As you can see, I do not have a definitive answer to your question. Maybe it's just a matter of numbers.

From Wiki: In the early 1900s, when the medium was new, many Jewish immigrants found employment in the U.S. film industry. They were able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons, after their admission price of a nickel (five cents). Within a few years, ambitious men like Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers (Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack) had switched to the production side of the business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind of enterprise: the movie studio. (It is worth noting that the US had at least one female director, producer and studio head in these early years, Alice Guy-Blaché.) They also set the stage for the industry's internationalism; the industry is often accused of Amero-centric provincialism.

Other moviemakers arrived from Europe after World War I: directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir; and actors like Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman, and Charles Boyer. They joined a homegrown supply of actors — lured west from the New York City stage after the introduction of sound films — to form one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth industries. At motion pictures' height of popularity in the mid-1940s, the studios were cranking out a total of about 400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million Americans per week.

 

[programmer_guy]

The Jews in the U.S. have tended to stick to big city living (from their days in emagration).
For example, I haven't heard of any of them living a farming life in the mid-west.

- liberal
- conservative
- orthodox

Except for the orthodox, they are mostly socialistic Democrats.
There have been a few exceptions... Ayn Rand is one.

 

[Hatshepsut]

Ted

Duet with Barry Gibb and Celine Dion

Immortality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaV58ajumh4

Absolutely Beautiful

 

[Hatshepsut]

This reminds me about Mel Brooks' movie Spaceballs, and its original working title: "Jews in Space" No lie.

Which in turn reminds me of an issue of Mad Magazine from the 1960's. which featured "A primer on religion, in which the 3 basic branches of Judiasm were outlined as follows: "Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, which is also known as Catholic"

Love, Dex

Combing the desert
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtkK3eijBso

 

[CarmeloOrchards]

foreclosures bump in the road (from the New York Times)

From a Maine House, a National Foreclosure Freeze
by David Streitfeld
Friday, October 15, 2010

Nicolle Bradbury bought her home for $75,000 and stopped paying the mortgage two years ago. (NYT)

DENMARK, Me. — The house that set off the national furor over faulty foreclosures is blue-gray and weathered. The porch is piled with furniture and knickknacks awaiting the next yard sale. In the driveway is a busted pickup truck. No one who lives there is going anywhere anytime soon.

Nicolle Bradbury bought this house seven years ago for $75,000, a major step up from the trailer she had been living in with her family. But she lost her job and the $474 monthly mortgage payment became difficult, then impossible.

It should have been a routine foreclosure, with Mrs. Bradbury joining the anonymous millions quietly dispossessed since the recession began. But she was savvy enough to contact a nonprofit group, Pine Tree Legal Assistance, where for once in her 38 years, she caught a break.

Her file was pulled, more or less at random, by Thomas A. Cox, a retired lawyer who volunteers at Pine Tree. He happened to know something about foreclosures because when he worked for a bank he did them all the time. Twenty years later, he had switched sides and, he says, was trying to make amends.

Suddenly, there is a frenzy over foreclosures. Every attorney general in the country is participating in an investigation into the flawed paperwork and questionable methods behind many of them. A Senate hearing is scheduled, and federal inquiries have begun. The housing market, which runs on foreclosure sales, is in turmoil. Bank stocks fell on Thursday as analysts tried to gauge the impact on lenders' bottom lines.

All of this is largely because Mr. Cox realized almost immediately that Mrs. Bradbury's foreclosure file did not look right. The documents from the lender, GMAC Mortgage, were approved by an employee whose title was "limited signing officer," an indication to the lawyer that his knowledge of the case was effectively nonexistent.

Mr. Cox eventually won the right to depose the employee, who casually acknowledged that he had prepared 400 foreclosures a day for GMAC and that contrary to his sworn statements, they had not been reviewed by him or anyone else.

GMAC, the country's fourth-largest mortgage lender, called this omission a technicality but was forced last month to halt foreclosures in the 23 states, including Maine, where they must be approved by a court. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and other lenders that used robo-signers — the term caught on instantly — have enacted their own freezes.

The tragedy of foreclosure is that some homeowners may be able to stay where they are if their lenders are more interested in modification than eviction. Without a job, Mrs. Bradbury is not one of them. Her family, including her 14-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son, lives on welfare and food stamps.

"A lot of people say we just want a free ride," Mrs. Bradbury said. "That's not it. I've worked since I was 14. I'm not lazy. I'm just trying to keep us together. If we lost the house, my family would have to break up."

It has been two years since she last paid the mortgage, which surprises even her lawyers.

"Had GMAC followed the legal requirements, she would have lost her home a long time ago," acknowledged Geoffrey S. Lewis, another lawyer handling her case.

GMAC, which began as the financing arm of General Motors, has received $17 billion from taxpayers in an effort to keep it from failing and is now majority-owned by the federal government. A spokeswoman for the lender declined to comment on Mrs. Bradbury's case because it was still being litigated.

John J. Aromando of the firm of Pierce Atwood in Portland, Me., the lawyer for GMAC and Fannie Mae, the mortgage holding company that owns Mrs. Bradbury's loan, did not return calls for comment on Thursday.

Fannie Mae and GMAC, which serviced the loan for Fannie, have now most likely spent more to dislodge Mrs. Bradbury than her house is worth. Yet for all their efforts, they are not only losing this case, but also potentially laying the groundwork for foreclosure challenges nationwide.

"This ammunition will be front and center in thousands of foreclosure cases," said Don Saunders of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association.

Just a few miles from the New Hampshire border, this slice of Maine does not have much in the way of industry or, for that matter, people. Mrs. Bradbury grew up around here, married and had her children here, and married for a second time here. Her parents still live nearby.

In 2003, her brother-in-law at the time offered to sell her a house on property adjacent to his. It was across from a noisy construction supply site. But it was ringed by maple, evergreen and willow trees, and who does not want to be a homeowner, especially when GMAC Mortgage will give you a loan for the entire purchase price and then another loan to improve the property?

"I was very happy," she remembered. "It was a new beginning."

But Mrs. Bradbury lost her job as an employment counselor in 2006 and did part-time work after that. Her husband, Scott, was in poor health and had other problems. He could not work as a roofer. She fell behind and got a modification from GMAC. It increased her monthly payments and provided no relief.

Finally, in late 2008, she stopped paying altogether, and GMAC asked a court to approve her eviction without a trial. By the summer of 2009, this removal was well under way when Mr. Cox picked up her file.

Mr. Cox, 66, worked in the late 1980s and early 1990s for Maine National Bank, a subsidiary of the Bank of New England, which went under. His job was to call in small-business loans. The borrowers had often pledged their houses as collateral, which meant foreclosure.

"It was extraordinarily unpleasant, but it paid well," he said. "I had a family to support."

The work exacted its cost: his marriage ended and a serious depression began. He gave up law and found solace in building houses. By April 2008, he said, he was sufficiently recovered and started volunteering at Pine Tree Legal.

By the time Mr. Cox saw Mrs. Bradbury's case, it was just about over. Last January, Judge Keith A. Powers of the Ninth District Court of Maine approved the foreclosure, leaving the case alive only to establish exactly how much Mrs. Bradbury owed.

Mr. Cox vowed to a colleague that he would expose GMAC's process and its limited signing officer, Jeffrey Stephan. A lawyer in another foreclosure case had already deposed Mr. Stephan, but Mr. Cox wanted to take the questioning much further. In June, he got his chance. A few weeks later, he spelled out in a court filing what he had learned from the robo-signer:

"When Stephan says in an affidavit that he has personal knowledge of the facts stated in his affidavits, he doesn't. When he says that he has custody and control of the loan documents, he doesn't. When he says that he is attaching 'a true and accurate' copy of a note or a mortgage, he has no idea if that is so, because he does not look at the exhibits. When he makes any other statement of fact, he has no idea if it is true. When the notary says that Stephan appeared before him or her, he didn't."

GMAC's reaction to the deposition was to hire two new law firms, including Mr. Aromando's firm, among the most prominent in the state. They argued that what Mrs. Bradbury and her lawyers were doing was simply a "dodge": she had not paid her mortgage and should be evicted.

They also said that Mr. Cox, despite working pro bono, had taken the deposition "to prejudice and influence the public" against GMAC for his own commercial benefit. They asked that the transcript be deleted from any blog that had posted it and that it be put under court seal.

In a ruling late last month, Judge Powers said that GMAC, despite its expensive legal talent and the fact that it got "a second bite of the apple" by filing amended foreclosure papers, still could not get this eviction right.

Even the amended documents did not bother to include the actual street address of the property it was trying to seize, reason enough, the judge wrote, to reject the request for immediate foreclosure without a trial.

But Judge Powers went further than that, saying that GMAC had been admonished in a Florida court for using robo-signers four years ago but had persisted. "It is well past the time for such practices to end," he wrote, adding that GMAC had acted "in bad faith" by submitting Mr. Stephan's material:

"Filing such a document without significant regard for its accuracy, which the court in ordinary circumstances may never be able to investigate or otherwise verify, is a serious and troubling matter."

It was not a complete loss for GMAC — Judge Powers declined to find the lender in contempt — but nearly so. GMAC was ordered, as a penalty, to pay Mr. Cox personally what he would have been paid for his work on the deposition and related matters had he been charging Mrs. Bradbury. That, he says, is $27,000.

The court's ruling on GMAC's "bad faith" is already being taken up by foreclosure defense lawyers around the country. Mr. Cox "did a remarkable job of proving the lenders not only rubber-stamped these loans on the front end, but they rubber-stamped them on the back end," said Mr. Saunders of the legal aid group.

GMAC, which this week expanded its foreclosure freeze to the entire country, is not giving up on Mrs. Bradbury. It will try for the third time to evict her when the case goes to trial this winter.

If Mrs. Bradbury is not quite victorious, she is still in her house, and for her that is the only thing that counts. If she can get her pickup fixed, she will go back to looking for a job.

"I am not leaving," she said this week, standing out on her front lawn, the autumn splendor spread all around her. "We have nowhere to go."

 

[Freeminds]

I swear, one of these days I'm going to book a week off work and wade through this thread. Should be good: thousands of posters can't be wrong!