CarmeloOrchards
Crusader
wait for the Cliff's Notes
The Little Thread Which Grew - the Apollo '73 to Everything But
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wait for the Cliff's Notes
Hatshepsut
Crusader
http://www.rense.com/general85/ownh.htm
http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollyw...he_jews_and_hollywood_anti-semitism_20100730/
Lakey,
Balancing the energy centers using the 10 sephiroth of Jewish Kabbalah
by Rabbi David Zaslow
http://www.lauralee.com/index.cgi?asx=052004.asx
http://www.lauralee.com/index.cgi?pid=3067
Hatshepsut
Crusader
I read an article in the Sunday paper today. Banks have been swapping and trading mortgages like baseball cards and the people executing the signing are NOT qualified in many cases as this article mentions above. One man was 14 cents short on his payment and the bank picking up his mortgage sought to make a quick profit by trading it again.
CarmeloOrchards
Crusader
http://www.rense.com/general85/ownh.htm
http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollyw...he_jews_and_hollywood_anti-semitism_20100730/
Lakey,
Balancing the energy centers using the 10 sephiroth of Jewish Kabbalah
by Rabbi David Zaslow
http://www.lauralee.com/index.cgi?asx=052004.asx
http://www.lauralee.com/index.cgi?pid=3067
There is Christmas merchandise in the stores already, so perhaps this is appropriate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrd9p47MPHg
Hatshepsut
Crusader
somebody please let me celebrate Halloween first! Don't lets steal the thunder of the big Boo 
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CarmeloOrchards
Crusader
more Halloween dogs
somebody please let me celebrate Halloween first! Don't lets steal the thunder of the big Boo
programmer_guy
True Ex-Scientologist
Oh, but thousands of posters can be very wrong at times.
Have you ever read the book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds"?
Look it up on Amazon and buy it. I highly recommend it.
Hatshepsut
Crusader
Every one of dem halloween dogs is major major cute!
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CarmeloOrchards
Crusader
Voters too!
from yesterday's New York Times
October 16, 2010
The Rage Won’t End on Election Day
By FRANK RICH
CARL Paladino began his New York gubernatorial campaign by bragging he’d “clean out Albany with a baseball bat.” When an ally likened his main Albany target, the (Jewish) leader of the State Assembly, to “an antichrist or Hitler,” he enthusiastically endorsed the slur. We also learned of Paladino’s repertory of gag e-mails — among them a pornographic picture of a woman having sex with a horse and a photo of an African tribal ritual captioned “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal.” How blind we were not to recognize that his victory in a Republican primary under the proud Tea Party banner was inevitable.
A week ago New Yorkers were presented with a vivid reminder of how a bat can be used as a weapon. A pack of young thugs was charged with torturing three men in the Bronx for being gay, one of whom, The Times reported, was sodomized with “a small baseball bat.”
It’s probably safe to assume that no one in this lynching party has heard of Paladino. Presumably he has heard of them, but a man of Tea Party principles will not compromise, no matter what may be happening in the real world. Don’t tread on Carl! And so last Sunday, as the city was reeling from both the Bronx bloodbath and the earlier leap of a bullied gay Rutgers freshman off the George Washington Bridge, Paladino visited a fringe Orthodox synagogue in Brooklyn to stand his ground. He attacked gays for supposedly plotting to brainwash children into accepting the validity of homosexuality.
We don’t know what will happen on Election Day, but one fairly safe bet is this: Paladino will not be the next governor of New York. However tardily, he’s been disowned not only by the state’s extant, if endangered, cadre of mainstream Republicans but even by some of the hard right. No one apparently told him that while bigotry isn’t always a disqualifier for public office, appearing on YouTube vowing to “take out” a reporter from Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post can be. As a rule, it’s career suicide to threaten to murder your own political base.
But if New Yorkers may take comfort from the pratfall of this particular barbarian at their gate, the national forecast is not so sunny. Paladino is no anomaly in American politics in 2010. He’s just the most clownish illustration of where things have been heading for two years and are still heading. Like the farcical Christine O’Donnell in another blue Northeastern state, he’s a political loss-leader, if you will, whose near-certain defeat on Nov. 2 allows us to indulge in a bit of denial about the level of rage still coursing, sometimes violently, through our national bloodstream.
That wave of anger began with the parallel 2008 cataclysms of the economy’s collapse and Barack Obama’s ascension. The mood has not subsided since. But in the final stretch of 2010, the radical right’s anger is becoming less focused, more free-floating — more likely to be aimed at “government” in general, whatever the location or officials in charge. The anger is also more likely to claim minorities like gays, Latinos and Muslims as collateral damage. This is a significant and understandable shift, if hardly a salutary one. The mad-as-hell crowd in America, still not seeing any solid economic recovery on the horizon, will lash out at any convenient scapegoat.
The rage was easier to parse at the Tea Party’s birth, when, a month after Obama’s inauguration, its founding father, CNBC’s Rick Santelli, directed his rant at the ordinary American “losers” (as he called them) defaulting on their mortgages, and at those in Washington who proposed bailing the losers out. (Funny how the Bush-initiated bank bailouts went unmentioned.) Soon enough, the anger tilted toward Washington in general and the new president in particular. And it kept getting hotter. In June 2009, still just six months into the Obama presidency, the Fox News anchor Shepard Smith broke with his own network’s party line to lament a rise in “amped up” Americans “taking the extra step and getting the gun out.” He viewed the killing of a guard by a neo-Nazi Obama hater at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington as the apotheosis of the “more and more frightening” post-election e-mail surging into Fox.
The moment passed. Glenn Beck, also on Fox, spoke for most on the right when he dismissed the shooter as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Those who showed up with assault rifles at presidential health care rallies that summer were similarly minimized as either solitary oddballs or overzealous Second Amendment patriots. Few cared when The Boston Globe reported last fall that the Secret Service was overwhelmed by death threats against the president as well as a rise in racist hate groups and antigovernment fervor. It’s no better now. In a cover article last month, Barton Gellman wrote in Time that the magazine’s six-month investigation found that “the threat level against the president and other government targets” is at its highest since the antigovernment frenzy that preceded Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
While Obama-hatred remains a staple of the right, the ebbing of his political clout may have diminished him as a catchall for America’s roiling, inchoate rage. The president is no longer the sole personification of evil. For those who see government as Public Enemy No. 1, other targets will do, potentially some as remote from Washington as Oklahoma City.
Dana Milbank, a Washington Post columnist who has written a new book on Beck, has been tracking the case of Byron Williams, a bank robber on parole who injured two California Highway Patrol officers in a July shootout. Williams was out to start a revolution, his mother said, because “Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.” But instead of picking Congress as his target, Williams was gunning for progressives closer to home, at the Tides Foundation and A.C.L.U. in San Francisco. The Tides Foundation? It’s an obscure nonprofit whose agenda includes education and AIDS prevention. But it’s not obscure to Beck fans, who heard him single it out for vilification 29 times in the 18 months before Williams grabbed his gun.
As Milbank has written, “it’s not fair to blame Beck for violence committed by his fans,” but he would nonetheless “do well to stop encouraging extremists.” The same could be said of the many politicians who are emulating the Beck template — especially given the tinderbox state of the nation. Whether it’s Sarah Palin instructing her acolytes to “reload” or a congressman yelling “baby killer!” at a colleague on the House floor or Sharron Angle, the Tea Party senatorial candidate from Nevada, proposing that citizens consider “Second Amendment remedies” to “protect themselves against a tyrannical government,” we know where this can lead.
Even Paladino’s short, crumbling campaign can take credit for a share of the real-world damage in New York’s civil war over the “ground zero mosque” this summer. His television commercials calling the proposed Islamic center “a monument to those who attacked our country” helped push his primary campaign over the top, noticeably raising the city’s temperature. The fever peaked not quite three weeks after his ads first appeared, when a passenger slashed a New York cab driver in the face and throat simply because he was a Muslim.
Paladino’s fanning of Islamophobia was common among his national political brethren this summer. Equally common was the violence against Muslims and mosques that ensued, whether in Tennessee, Texas or California. Paladino’s antediluvian brand of homophobia is also making a comeback, from O’Donnell, who has called homosexuality an “identity disorder,” to Carly Fiorina, the Senate candidate in California whose campaign is allied with the National Organization for Marriage, notorious for its fear-mongering horror-movie ads portraying same-sex marriage as the apocalypse. Two weeks ago, Jim DeMint, the South Carolina senator who serves as the G.O.P.’s Tea Party kingmaker, reiterated his desire to ban openly gay schoolteachers. Michele Bachmann, Tea Party doyenne of the House, refused to condemn Paladino’s homophobia when asked about it last week on the “Today” show. As Stephen Colbert observed last week, after the G.O.P. repudiated a Congressional candidate in Ohio for wearing an SS uniform, the only line you can’t cross as a Republican is dressing as a Nazi. (Though, as Colbert added, “dressing the president as a Nazi” is O.K.)
Don’t expect the extremism and violence in our politics to subside magically after Election Day — no matter what the results. If Tea Party candidates triumph, they’ll be emboldened. If they lose, the anger and bitterness will grow. The only development that can change this equation is a decisive rescue from our prolonged economic crisis. Not for the first time in history — and not just American history — fear itself is at the root of a rabid outbreak of populist rage against government, minorities and conspiratorial “elites.”
So far neither party has offered a comprehensive antidote to our economic pain. The Democrats have fallen short, and the cynics leading the G.O.P. haven’t so much as tried. We shouldn’t be surprised that this year even a state as seemingly well-mannered as Connecticut has produced a senatorial candidate best known for marching into a wrestling ring to gratuitously kick a man in the groin.
CarmeloOrchards
Crusader
from yesterday's New York Times
October 16, 2010
Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore
By ROBERT H. FRANK
PEOPLE often remember the past with exaggerated fondness. Sometimes, however, important aspects of life really were better in the old days.
During the three decades after World War II, for example, incomes in the United States rose rapidly and at about the same rate — almost 3 percent a year — for people at all income levels. America had an economically vibrant middle class. Roads and bridges were well maintained, and impressive new infrastructure was being built. People were optimistic.
By contrast, during the last three decades the economy has grown much more slowly, and our infrastructure has fallen into grave disrepair. Most troubling, all significant income growth has been concentrated at the top of the scale. The share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners, which stood at 8.9 percent in 1976, rose to 23.5 percent by 2007, but during the same period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage declined by more than 7 percent.
Yet many economists are reluctant to confront rising income inequality directly, saying that whether this trend is good or bad requires a value judgment that is best left to philosophers. But that disclaimer rings hollow. Economics, after all, was founded by moral philosophers, and links between the disciplines remain strong. So economists are well positioned to address this question, and the answer is very clear.
Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. His first book, “A Theory of Moral Sentiments,” was published more than 25 years before his celebrated “Wealth of Nations,” which was itself peppered with trenchant moral analysis.
Some moral philosophers address inequality by invoking principles of justice and fairness. But because they have been unable to forge broad agreement about what these abstract principles mean in practice, they’ve made little progress. The more pragmatic cost-benefit approach favored by Smith has proved more fruitful, for it turns out that rising inequality has created enormous losses and few gains, even for its ostensible beneficiaries.
Recent research on psychological well-being has taught us that beyond a certain point, across-the-board spending increases often do little more than raise the bar for what is considered enough. A C.E.O. may think he needs a 30,000-square-foot mansion, for example, just because each of his peers has one. Although they might all be just as happy in more modest dwellings, few would be willing to downsize on their own.
People do not exist in a social vacuum. Community norms define clear expectations about what people should spend on interview suits and birthday parties. Rising inequality has thus spawned a multitude of “expenditure cascades,” whose first step is increased spending by top earners.
The rich have been spending more simply because they have so much extra money. Their spending shifts the frame of reference that shapes the demands of those just below them, who travel in overlapping social circles. So this second group, too, spends more, which shifts the frame of reference for the group just below it, and so on, all the way down the income ladder. These cascades have made it substantially more expensive for middle-class families to achieve basic financial goals.
In a recent working paper based on census data for the 100 most populous counties in the United States, Adam Seth Levine (a postdoctoral researcher in political science at Vanderbilt University), Oege Dijk (an economics Ph.D. student at the European University Institute) and I found that the counties where income inequality grew fastest also showed the biggest increases in symptoms of financial distress.
For example, even after controlling for other factors, these counties had the largest increases in bankruptcy filings.
Divorce rates are another reliable indicator of financial distress, as marriage counselors report that a high proportion of couples they see are experiencing significant financial problems. The counties with the biggest increases in inequality also reported the largest increases in divorce rates.
Another footprint of financial distress is long commute times, because families who are short on cash often try to make ends meet by moving to where housing is cheaper — in many cases, farther from work. The counties where long commute times had grown the most were again those with the largest increases in inequality.
The middle-class squeeze has also reduced voters’ willingness to support even basic public services. Rich and poor alike endure crumbling roads, weak bridges, an unreliable rail system, and cargo containers that enter our ports without scrutiny. And many Americans live in the shadow of poorly maintained dams that could collapse at any moment.
ECONOMISTS who say we should relegate questions about inequality to philosophers often advocate policies, like tax cuts for the wealthy, that increase inequality substantially. That greater inequality causes real harm is beyond doubt.
But are there offsetting benefits?
There is no persuasive evidence that greater inequality bolsters economic growth or enhances anyone’s well-being. Yes, the rich can now buy bigger mansions and host more expensive parties. But this appears to have made them no happier. And in our winner-take-all economy, one effect of the growing inequality has been to lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase for financial bonanzas on Wall Street.
In short, the economist’s cost-benefit approach — itself long an important arrow in the moral philosopher’s quiver — has much to say about the effects of rising inequality. We need not reach agreement on all philosophical principles of fairness to recognize that it has imposed considerable harm across the income scale without generating significant offsetting benefits.
No one dares to argue that rising inequality is required in the name of fairness. So maybe we should just agree that it’s a bad thing — and try to do something about it.
Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.
October 16, 2010
Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore
By ROBERT H. FRANK
PEOPLE often remember the past with exaggerated fondness. Sometimes, however, important aspects of life really were better in the old days.
During the three decades after World War II, for example, incomes in the United States rose rapidly and at about the same rate — almost 3 percent a year — for people at all income levels. America had an economically vibrant middle class. Roads and bridges were well maintained, and impressive new infrastructure was being built. People were optimistic.
By contrast, during the last three decades the economy has grown much more slowly, and our infrastructure has fallen into grave disrepair. Most troubling, all significant income growth has been concentrated at the top of the scale. The share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners, which stood at 8.9 percent in 1976, rose to 23.5 percent by 2007, but during the same period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage declined by more than 7 percent.
Yet many economists are reluctant to confront rising income inequality directly, saying that whether this trend is good or bad requires a value judgment that is best left to philosophers. But that disclaimer rings hollow. Economics, after all, was founded by moral philosophers, and links between the disciplines remain strong. So economists are well positioned to address this question, and the answer is very clear.
Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. His first book, “A Theory of Moral Sentiments,” was published more than 25 years before his celebrated “Wealth of Nations,” which was itself peppered with trenchant moral analysis.
Some moral philosophers address inequality by invoking principles of justice and fairness. But because they have been unable to forge broad agreement about what these abstract principles mean in practice, they’ve made little progress. The more pragmatic cost-benefit approach favored by Smith has proved more fruitful, for it turns out that rising inequality has created enormous losses and few gains, even for its ostensible beneficiaries.
Recent research on psychological well-being has taught us that beyond a certain point, across-the-board spending increases often do little more than raise the bar for what is considered enough. A C.E.O. may think he needs a 30,000-square-foot mansion, for example, just because each of his peers has one. Although they might all be just as happy in more modest dwellings, few would be willing to downsize on their own.
People do not exist in a social vacuum. Community norms define clear expectations about what people should spend on interview suits and birthday parties. Rising inequality has thus spawned a multitude of “expenditure cascades,” whose first step is increased spending by top earners.
The rich have been spending more simply because they have so much extra money. Their spending shifts the frame of reference that shapes the demands of those just below them, who travel in overlapping social circles. So this second group, too, spends more, which shifts the frame of reference for the group just below it, and so on, all the way down the income ladder. These cascades have made it substantially more expensive for middle-class families to achieve basic financial goals.
In a recent working paper based on census data for the 100 most populous counties in the United States, Adam Seth Levine (a postdoctoral researcher in political science at Vanderbilt University), Oege Dijk (an economics Ph.D. student at the European University Institute) and I found that the counties where income inequality grew fastest also showed the biggest increases in symptoms of financial distress.
For example, even after controlling for other factors, these counties had the largest increases in bankruptcy filings.
Divorce rates are another reliable indicator of financial distress, as marriage counselors report that a high proportion of couples they see are experiencing significant financial problems. The counties with the biggest increases in inequality also reported the largest increases in divorce rates.
Another footprint of financial distress is long commute times, because families who are short on cash often try to make ends meet by moving to where housing is cheaper — in many cases, farther from work. The counties where long commute times had grown the most were again those with the largest increases in inequality.
The middle-class squeeze has also reduced voters’ willingness to support even basic public services. Rich and poor alike endure crumbling roads, weak bridges, an unreliable rail system, and cargo containers that enter our ports without scrutiny. And many Americans live in the shadow of poorly maintained dams that could collapse at any moment.
ECONOMISTS who say we should relegate questions about inequality to philosophers often advocate policies, like tax cuts for the wealthy, that increase inequality substantially. That greater inequality causes real harm is beyond doubt.
But are there offsetting benefits?
There is no persuasive evidence that greater inequality bolsters economic growth or enhances anyone’s well-being. Yes, the rich can now buy bigger mansions and host more expensive parties. But this appears to have made them no happier. And in our winner-take-all economy, one effect of the growing inequality has been to lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase for financial bonanzas on Wall Street.
In short, the economist’s cost-benefit approach — itself long an important arrow in the moral philosopher’s quiver — has much to say about the effects of rising inequality. We need not reach agreement on all philosophical principles of fairness to recognize that it has imposed considerable harm across the income scale without generating significant offsetting benefits.
No one dares to argue that rising inequality is required in the name of fairness. So maybe we should just agree that it’s a bad thing — and try to do something about it.
Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.
programmer_guy
True Ex-Scientologist
Yeah, I know about "the Tea Party".
But have you read the book that I mentioned?
But have you read the book that I mentioned?
CarmeloOrchards
Crusader
Every one of dem halloween dogs is major major cute!
I remember my reading aloud, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" to my 6th grade class. I wonder if children still read ----- that, or much of anything!
CarmeloOrchards
Crusader
I have never even heard of it. I shall follow up.
programmer_guy
True Ex-Scientologist
Buy it... you will like it. Try Amazon for the book.
It is about some old history and how people behave in "crowd mentality".
CarmeloOrchards
Crusader
somebody please let me celebrate Halloween first! Don't lets steal the thunder of the big Boo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_kOmKRhEgs
Hatshepsut
Crusader
A great Ewok Adventure
CarmeloOrchards
Crusader
somebody please let me celebrate Halloween first! Don't lets steal the thunder of the big Boo
How about TWO TWO holidays in one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kupAApHVP2c&feature=related
Hatshepsut
Crusader
They so badly needed to revamp that Haunted Mansion ride. It was breaking down all the time in Orlando. They did a great job. Good quality video 
CarmeloOrchards
Crusader
the book" (for those of you, who may have lost track)
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds
Even the Amazon reviews were worth the price of admission.
all my life, I have gone to auctions. Auctions of cattle, horses, property, estate sales, business inventories, etc.
Auctions are the crowd mentality. Feast or Famine. There are auctions where the buyers will bid a used item up over its new replacement price. The fever pitch of bidders just wanting to win is interesting to see.
Two examples from my auction going.
A year or two ago went to an auction of large set of foreclosed properties in Northern California. It was run by REDC. I saw a San Jose, CA. condo, that we had sold a few years earlier (our buyer had lost it in foreclosure) sell, in this auction, for more than we had sold it to the foreclosed buyer.
Around 1972, at a auto parts dealership closing auction, I bought a whole bunch of Porsche spark plugs for $125 for the lot. I drove five miles, and sold them on the spot to a Porsche repair shop for $250. Both the repair shop and I made out like bandits.
In any auction, you have to know what you're bidding on. If the buyers are in a frenzy, it is best to not bid.
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Hatshepsut
Crusader
You can read from it here at google books
http://books.google.com/books?id=uo...m=3&sqi=2&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false
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