First, The “Bowel Movement Bandit”; Now, This…

First, The “Bowel Movement Bandit”; Now, This….

Maverick Hunt

This blog is a follow up to a KSCO 1080AM “Saturday Special” call in radio suggestion I made for a car for the station.

A look at the Ford Maverick –
A looks at the early 1970s Ford Maverick.

Regional tie-in of the Maverick name on the international Surf Scene – The Biggest of Big Wave Surf Competitions taking place yearly – less than an hour away.

The political reason for the Maverick suggestion – The big McCain Maverick Machine of 2008.

Example of the Community resources
Community for the best selling US V8 Sport Sedan in the age of the Muscle Cars.

Starting a quest now near home –
Raw $1,000 in Santa Rosa
Rough and on the market.

Half baked $5,000 in SF
A project that got out of hand.

A gem in the raw in Dublin?
Sweet Simplicity

Parting is Such sweet sorrow –
Have a body for $1,100 in vallejo?
Parts is Parts

Or you could import a ready to impress from New Jersey?
Purrrr…. like a kitten.

PAY-TO-CHEAT

Once you can pay real money to buy your way out of a tough spot in a computer game, you know the days of it being cool are numbered.  It might make some money off parents, who are happy to pay cash to not be pestered by kids hoping mom or dad can play them out of a tough level, but as soon as that happen the integrity is lost to the skilled gamers the little kids wanted to impress by playing the game in the first place and it’s end is near.

 

This quick money makes the game leave a sour taste in the mouth.  It not only stops sales of the game but the end of future profits from all the future merchandising and spin offs from the concept of the game.  

 

When “Angry Birds” was a pay for access to play only game, they made forty times the five dollars I paid per game off of me buying Angry Birds merchandise.  After they introduced what I call the “Pay-to-Cheat” extras a few years later, I could hardly get him to play with the stuff I bought much less him wanting me to buy more.

 

The wildly popular “Plants verses Zombies” totally missed it’s merchandising window.  Kids at the elementary level were wild about the characters in this innovative strategy game they saw their older siblings getting so excited about.  Parents could have been forced to by hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise to appease the youth so they could be respected by their elders even if they couldn’t get through all of the levels by themselves.

 

Instead of filling toy and clothing store shelves with funky faced protecting pea plants and potatoes and joke filled cute looking Zombies and happy sun creating sunflower shirts for parents to happily spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on, they bring out a “Plants verses Zombies 2” complete with advanced “Pay-to-Cheat” cash spending options about a week ago.  

 

I found myself telling my son no, we are not going to pay real money for fake coins and upgrade because that is cheating.  He hasn’t played a level since.  I’m not sure what makes it so distasteful to them.  It might be because they know others will “Pay-to-Cheat” and the scores will never accurately reflect another kids skill.  It might be because to say you’ve been playing a “Pay-to-Cheat” game automatically makes it possible that you seem the kind of person who cheats.

 

I am sad the world will probably never see a “Plants verses Zombies” cartoon and Crazy Dave won’t become the cultural icon he deserves to be.  I’ll still fly my son’s “Angry Birds” Bad Piggy kite at the beach with him but with a little more embarrassment than in the Golden Age before they went for the shameful money of the “Pay-to-Cheat” scams.

Veiled Hypocrisy

We often use the issue of the Islamic practice of veiling women as a point of contention to give the Judeo-Christian tradition societies the upper hand.   There are religious, economic, climatic and safety reasons for this practice.  

 

The reverence of the prophet for his older wife, whose power and influence in his new home helped him gain power, might be a root of veiling as it is an equalizer of the age of women by hiding grey hair.  

 

In societies that forced women into giving wealthy males legal claim to their off-spring via marriage, due to the limitations on outlets to make their own wealth, stopping them from selling the life saving cloth used for a veil might have to be a law.  When caught in the common event of a sand storm a cloth shield for the mouth and nose saves lives.  Not to mention the protection of the head from the ever present sun.

 

In the Industrialized countries, the extreme loss of life during World War I became the end of the labor intensive culture that corseting women entailed.  The decline in whaling with the beginning of petroleum production also made the whale bone used in the corsets more rare and expensive with the decline of whale oil use.

 

These situations led to the unconstrained youth fashions of the twenties.  However, when the Flappers started flapping more and more after child birth, a new form of elevating bondage was developed.  

 

The brazier used new elastic technology to bind and hang the offending organs in a youthful position.  However, this technique didn’t have the millennia of experimentation that the constrain and lift technique of the corset had.  

 

When breast cancer became a major killer of women a few researchers finally looked to the method of constraining the chest over the body’s major lymphatic toxin by-pass area and forcing those poisons to pool in the breasts as a cause.  By this time the bra was a standard of Western Culture which many fashions and industries are based on that makes major amounts of money.  Thus, news of the health risks of bras have been seriously underplayed.

 

Both the veil and the bra help hide the age of women.  Youth was traditionally the only selling point women had when forced to be uneducated and without occupations besides child bearing in marriage.  Maybe both cultures can ease up on it’s youth worship of women.  In the professions modern women now enter routinely, experience can be a plus as never before.  Maybe we can stop crippling our potential with dangerous and outdated needs?

Personal Info Market Place Blues….

Have you ever misspelled a controversial word, on the internet, to avoid it getting you mentioned on lists you might not want to be on?  We may have problems with the Government gathering information about us;  but, at least we saw our Representatives give our right to privacy, where the Government was concerned, away in Congress in the form of “The Patriot Act”.  If we had really had a problem we have had many years before now to make it the major political issue it now is.

 

The problem of demanding a higher standard from Our Government, than the general population, is that it puts the Government at an extreme disadvantage.  Do you even know what your official advertising Demographic is? Do you or I have access to that information?  Are we even allowed to know it?  How many of us even know what that is, where the information they use to define us in this way comes from or who can and is accessing that information?

 

You might think, “oh, who cares.”  

 

But wait a moment, if a foreign Government can buy your Demographic information but your own can not it might know how to target you while your own Government won’t know to protect you.  

 

“Protect from what?” you might ask.  

 

You don’t have to declare war on a country if you know which citizens to disable it cripple it?  Some of a near infinite examples of information about you for sale are, what book clubs are you in, websites you post on or words in blogs you write.  Maybe something about physics or computing?  Wouldn’t you be the type of person to be pestered with life debilitating incidents by a competitive Foreign Power?  The kind of person who obviously could make a major impact on the vitality of your country.  

 

What does it hurt America to shoot some soldier,  with maybe a high school diploma looking at a lifetime career as a fast food chain store manager, who is currently in some of the most back water areas of the world policing potential world problems? 

 

What does it hurt to get the next Steve Jobs on a DUI before he makes his impact?  For the cost of having a spy in a bar see him go over his limit a bit and making an anonymous call to the police they could cost the Government potentially Billions in tax revenue by tainting this prospective mover and shaker’s reputation and limiting the trust someone might have in him in the future.

 

Information collection is an international problem.  The information we are yelling about the United State having on us seems to have already been collected and for sale by global third parties and is simply a commodity on the open market to be pick up at retail prices like a can of beans on a shelf.

Is Saudi Oil a Bluff?

I read a recent book called “On Saudi Arabia” that mentioned an interesting tidbit that brings a different slant to Middle Eastern question.  No clear indication has been put forth about the quantity of oil left in the massive Saudi Arabian oil fields since the early 1980s.  This was a little after the time the  roguish wildcat driller Jean Paul Getty had died leaving his stake in half of that country’s reserves to his heirs that include the sensible classical composer Gordon Getty.  The heirs sold the company for billions a few years after their father’s death at about the time the author of the book on Saudi Arabia said that the last accounting of the oil underground had been released.

 

The book mentioned talk by the Saud Family of which is the Royalty of Saudi Arabia, that receives the remaining money from the oil deal that Getty helped create, of slowing production to save oil for future generations.  There could be some truth to this or it could be a way to cover up declining production from a drained field.

 

The Saud Family, who collect the oil money, run the country and give to those who spend their lives learning how to suck up to them the best, have a centuries old history of manipulating others to do their dirty work.  That the recent history of wars in the Middle East have been against religious rivals to the Saudi Arabia extreme Sunni Islam with the help of the United States makes the state The Saud family’s reserve very much our business.

 

Iraq was much more secular than most of the Middle East and a heavy competitor in the oil market and the destruction of that country infrastructure  has left it’s Shiite majority at a market disadvantage.  If you think of Islam as one big happy family remember that comparing it to the historical conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland is an understatement.  The rift between Shiite and Sunni is over a millennia old where as that Christian conflict is only several hundred.

 

As America is continually being pushed to be the force behind changing non-Sunni regimes in the area, like Syria and Iran, we must examine the situation very carefully.  Should we get further into bed with The Sauds only to find out there is no stuffing left in their mattress?

Is Too Big To Fail – Too Big To Learn?

The AIG bailout, should it have happened?  While the actual money given to bail it out was supposedly returned to the American people was the lessons of it’s failure lost on the Investment Community? Is there any logic to continuing an organization with the impossible quest of securing the money interests against losses of any kind?  We think of the Mortgage Crisis as a big failure.  We blame it on trusting the little people.  

 

We forget to look at at least one of the potential problems which was purely bureaucratic.  The Mortgage industry depends on Real Estate Appraisal to know how much a property is worth.  This is done by collecting the sales prices of other properties in similar situations.  However, when a mortgage is originally defaulted on it goes to the classic old style American ‘Auction on the Courthouse Steps’.  You can read about these in the Legal Section of your local paper, meet the auctioneer in front of the Courthouse where the property is located, bring lots of cash and walk away with the deed.

 

Where this became the root of the Mortgage Crisis was that properties sold this way did not enter into the Real Estate Appraiser’s calculations.  These homes sold for the amount that was owed to the banks plus what the auction bidders had to add to get the property from other bidders and didn’t exist on the Real Estate Appraiser’s books to bring down the overall price of all properties.  

 

The landslide that brought everyone down was a slight natural fall in real estate prices.  When this happened what was owed on the properties was more than what they were worth.  This stopped the purchases on the Courthouse steps and sent the underwater homes into Foreclosure where they would be bought for less than what was owed.  These actual losses to the banks were inconvenient.  The result of these homes going to Foreclosure rather than being sold on the Courthouse Steps Auctions was catastrophic.

 

The small amounts investment buyers saved by waiting till the defaulted loan homes became foreclosures cost their industry exponentially.  The reason was that Foreclosed homes are included in the Real Estate Appraisals.  It isn’t that the prices really did go into a tailspin.  These defaulted loans were always there.  They just weren’t calculated in because of a technicality of the bureaucracy of the Mortgage Industry.  Once cash buyers started waiting till Foreclosures the home prices kept falling leaving more defaulted homes owing more than the were technically worth on the market leading to less Courthouse Steps Auction sales leading to more Foreclosures and lowering of overall home values leading to more defaults, ex cetera, ex cetera, ex cetera.

 

This part of the crisis lead to another.  Since the problem was blamed on giving loans to people who couldn’t pay the mortgages.  The lenders suddenly tightened the qualifications for giving out loans not only because of the qualifications of the buyer but of the quality of the property.  Homes that had still been available to mortgage buyers over the years despite serious code violations suddenly were excluded.  A gigantic underclass of housing developed that no one could get a mortgage on.  Now the only people buying these difficult properties are cash buyers who likely are not planning to live in them and do the difficult work of maintaining these problem homes to the civilized level a home owner would.  

 

These older yet solid code problem homes are dumped onto rental management companies whose bread and butter is to compound the problems with more and more substandard repairs and even gutting of them for any of their valuable materials like well aged solid woods and rare fixtures that they can sell or burn as firewood while replacing them with the lowest quality products at the lowest available levels of labor skill for the maximum costs.  These are rented out in neighborhoods that once contained mainly conscientious owners.  As management companies further gut these rentals the quality of renter goes down farther and farther until once thriving neighborhoods are full of meth labs and grow houses that destroy the value of all homes around them.

 

Here we come back to the reason it was not a good idea to not let the protection to the Investment Classes, that are still depending on mortgages and now on rental returns, fail.  When AIG hits the next wall and all the people who believed that thoughtlessly trusting money to be cared for meant security get their next shock, will we be foolish enough to throw money at those who provide this false promise?  Wouldn’t it have been kinder to make then do the research and really get their act together the first time rather than just throwing them a check.  If something is too big to fail isn’t it also too big to learn?

When Will the ‘Relaxed Age’ Start?

There comes a point in a mature life when you need to look around at the world your elders have created and ask, “What is wrong?”

 

What impressed them has been carved into the hours and minutes of our daily lives and builds the very substance of our being.  When you reach the age that you know you are absolutely over what they considered luxury that is the time to take the reigns.

 

The term often used to describe their lives betrays their hubris and agenda.  It is termed ‘The Modern World’.  This mind set is the stage for the noise, clutter, anxiety and separation from others and the environment that is the hallmark of the achievements of the past few generations.

 

The Modern World requires a gigantic amount of trust and very little thought.  It is a full sounds that remind them they are not the lonely immigrant peasants their parents were who grew up with the silence of a pastoral old world.  They fill themselves with the processed nutrient deprived fast and frozen foods that make it seem they are the wealthy folks of old who need not wait or work for a labor intensive meal.  They have eliminated the pride in physically working for your sustenance that made a healthy body and active mind.  They even sneer at the term ‘The Working Classes’ that so simply implies that ‘The White Collar’ jobs they prize aren’t even work.

 

It is easy to criticize but harder to say what you want.  I suggest more knowledge and less trust.  I wish for more interaction with reality.  The media has found it’s rightful place.  Not as timed streaming programming that controls our days but in uploads whose broadcast times we can control.  Let us fill this new found freedom with using the ‘Information Age’ to inform us how to reintegrate ourselves with the environment.  With this great access to on demand knowledge we can make our backyards and city parks places that give us exercise, food, relaxation, living space and that integrate us to other creatures we share this planet with.

 

We have come far enough in deconstructing the Modern World to know we need to reintegrate physical activity for our own health.  It has been done by making exercise a luxury commodity that sterilizes it of the need for much skill or the creation of a useful product.  This is against the inbreed economy of people, especially those on limited means, and leaves them sedentary and less healthy for the lack of money for gyms and classes, ability to risk injury for unspecified gain for cost and lack of child care when going into these adult only activity zones.  

 

The toys for these children no longer improve labor useful manual skills.  They sell media and make noises to join the rest of the loud products that make the electric home buzz with brain wave interrupting signals, sounds and their sources.  We get more dust trapping, toxic chemical releasing plastics into larger and larger spaces to store convenience products with a narrower and narrower range of uses.  It gets harder and harder to utilize raw materials and more and more is necessary to process already processed foods.

 

The work ethic of the non-‘working class’ workers excludes leaving the ‘rat race’ that defines every person’s value.  Activities that do not include a paycheck from a larger corporate organization are given little consideration.  The classical life modes of both the interested noble and the personally managed peasant are criticized.  The rich and poor need to give up their time to a higher authority rather than use their time and effort in service to managing their own money, mind or industry.  

 

We kill more people with cars in accidents than with gun but still do little to relieve people of the need to transport ourselves away from our homes to earn a living.  We don’t even have the conversation of how jarring our bodies with transport ages them.  We just calmly are thankful that babies in cars usually fall asleep which is the extreme response to toxic internal conditions in a human body.  A body become sleepy to stop the muscles from creating more cell destroying lactic acid created by moving muscle cells like what happens to a body in motion on a road surface in a car powered by reciprocating cylinders.

 

After a century of progress to make up for the huge amount of human power and skill lost to the First World War, are we ready to allow ourselves to relax.  If I had to sum up my message to the world of my generation’s coming into power it might be, “shut up and chill!”

Terrorists Coming to Dinner?

To know or not to know, that is the question.  Is it really useful to announce that something might happen, somewhere and at some time in the near future on a major portion of a very large continent?  Would a Terror Alert cause you to change your travel plans?  Is closing Embassies because of it a good signal to the world about how America deals with treats?  Have the Republicans over used the attack on the Embassy in Libya on the 9-11 anniversary a few years past as a political tool to the point that it has made the administration afraid of it’s own shadow?

 

 There are a lot of question.  If we think like a terrorist would an international alert be more likely to encourage you to proceed with a plan or less?  I f they do go through with it will it take out the element of surprise, make it seem more expected and less spontaneous?  Does doing the deed after the alert has been sounded give credit to the victim state who at least had the ability to know it was coming?

 

On the other side, if you are expected to do an act and then don’t do you look weak?  Do you look scared off?  Does sounding an alert with no act make it seem that sounding the alert did the trick and stopped the terrorist act from happening?

 

On either side of the argument the tactic is one that will wear off with over use.  Hopefully the United States had a real good reason to call this overall situation because cry wolf too many times without good reason and soon no one will listen.

America’s Cup the Sport of Empires

If Horse Racing is the Sport of Kings then The America’s Cup International Yacht Race would have to be the Sport of Empires.  When the Emperor of High Tech, who seems to currently be Oracle’s Larry Ellison, won the last Championship he won the right to choose where the next championship would be.  He brought this highest of high end sports home to the Kingdom of The Nerds the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

Larry won his crown the old fashioned way.  He earned it.  As the computer age neared mid-life, a confusing mis-match of manufactures and programs had been developed that didn’t really work together or earn the writers much more than a pat on the back.  Larry bought these up and formatted them to meet the needs of both the world’s biggest and smallest businesses.  Larry made it all work for the world and is generally considered a good egg in this mellow world of cerebral folk where billionaires and hacker bums coexist in similar fashion and fashions.

 

I remember posting on the America’s Cup profile that the conditions in San Francisco Bay seemed much harsher than what I was seeing them sail in on the Mediterranean at that time right before the announcement that the size of the boats for the San Francisco Challenge had been nearly doubled.  This increased the stakes for this oldest of modern sporting events and a lot of the challengers dropped out.  At present there are three teams vying for the right to go head to head against Ellison’s American Team at a cost of about a hundred million to put up this challenge.  Italy, Sweden and the New Zealand/Dubai teams remain after the loss of other high profile groups like South Korea, China and France.

 

Currently the challengers are racing near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay.  These will lead up to the main events in mid -September.  There is good viewing of these incredibly fast magnificent nearing flying boats from land and the race times are posted on line.  

 

 I want to thank America’s Cup viewing boat Captain Larry Jacobson, whom I talked to on the “On the Mark” radio show aired locally for some of the information in this blog.