Tag: Beauty Platform

Casting the Beauty Platform for a Third Party

Its been quite a while since I have cast the Beauty Platform at Docudharma ~ nearly four years since Casting the Beauty Platform for the Afghanistan Quagmire (that cast for that one was “Retreat”, by the way … with no moving lines. Just Retreat. Pretty good call for $0.03).

But this morning I saw that Robert Reich had called for a Third Party.

Well, not really, what Robert Reich said was,  

Democrats can’t be trusted to control Wall Street. If there were ever an issue ripe for a third party, the Street would be it.

This is “Calling for a third party!” like saying “ever stronger hurricanes would suck” is “Calling for action NOW on climate change!”. Saying that the Democrats can’t be trusted to control Wall Street is one of those “The Sky is BLUE!!!” statements that is only to any degree controversial to the extend that people have been following an American media debate whether the sky is red or green (complete with supporting daily kos essays about how is it OBVIOUSLY green and anyone who thinks its red is a traitor to the country).

Its an observation of the obvious, rather than actually arguing that a Third Party would be a solution for what ails us.

Still, it got me thinking … what is the reading on the question? Is it time for a third party? As stuck in their various ruts the various established positions on the question are, this seems like an excellent question to reach for a response from the Book of Changes and reflect on the answer that results.

The Seeds of Development Strategy

The seeds of development strategy is for a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo, trapped between a massive, oppressive debt burden left it by a preceding less than legitimate regime which grabbed power with both hands but left responsibility on the table for someone else to pick up, with collapsing infrastructure, and a far less than progressive head of state working with an even weaker governing majority in the legislature.

So, nothing like the US situation, after all, but still …

… build from the bottom up. Create local producer cooperatives, to ensure fair markets in the central market town for a set of villages. Give jobs to a cadre of mostly younger people looking to establish themselves to serve continuing education, primary health care, local credit union, local cooperative work on maintaining paths for transport to the central market town and transport beyond. Trial fields to prove out crops fitted to local conditions and then make seeds and cuttings available to local farmers.

Minimize hard currency purchased inputs, maximize leverage of local resources, to keep the official value of the activity low, to stay off the radar scope of the locusts known as International Aid Agencies.

Cooperatives will fail. Some of the young cadre will be incompetent. Some of the field trials will be failures.

BUT, as opposed to the United States Agency for Locust Deployment, the low external resource cost and high leverage of abundant local labor means that instead of having to put all the resources into one trial, there are thousands of trials spread around.

Sunday Train: Doctor Dan prescribes High Speed Rail for Kentucky

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Doctor Dan Mongiardo, Kentucky’s Lieutenant Governor, has announced that he is running for the Democratic nomination for the Kentucky Senate race, to take on whoever wins the Republican nomination to challenge for the seat that Senator Bunning (R-Big$$$) has announced he is giving up.

Lots of politics to unwrap in that paragraph, which I’ll leave to the political wise-guys. The Sunday Train today is about Dr. Dan’s Rail Plan.

As far as I can tell, Dr. Dan’s Rail Plan has four main parts, and regular readers of the Sunday Train will recognize much from each of the four parts:

  • Support for expanding Kentucky’s existing and potential Amtrak routes into 110mph Emerging Higher Speed Rail corridors
  • Support for regional rail services to complete the above state rail map
  • “Hybrid Light Rail” to provide cross-metropolitan local rail services, principally to Louisville
  • Heavy investment in complementary local transit, including bus rapid transit and a high frequency driverless monotrain system for Kentucky.

Act Blue Page

For those looking to send some snake oil Doctor Dan’s way: Daniel Mongiardo’s Act Blue Page.

Hoist Them on their own Petard: Trigger the Mandate

We kept hearing about Triggers and State Opt-Ins and State Opt-Outs … for the Public Option. Its time to move an amendment to the Individual Mandate that triggers it, with an Opt-Out. Note that these can be split into two Amendments, as the Opt-Out works with or without the Trigger.

(1) The Individual Mandate is triggered when everyone subject to the Mandate in a state has available to them insurance from a not-for-profit entity, and excluding all entities owned by for-profit entities, at a premium after any public subsidy of less than 5% of their annual income.

(2) Before the Individual Mandate can come into force in any state, a measure approving the individual mandate must be placed on the ballot in the next Federal general election, and the mandate must obtain a simple majority of votes cast.

Sunday Train: Hey, Joe, I still want a Sustainable High Speed Electric Train for Christmas

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Last year, I told VP Joe Biden about the Sustainable Electric High(er) Speed Rail I wanted for Christmas (cf. links below). It involved electrifying the 30,000+ miles of STRACNET, and establishing 100mph Rapid Freight Rail paths, including support for running 110mph or 125mph long haul electric passenger services on the Rapid Freight paths.

In short, I wanted Joe Biden to take Alan Drake’s plan and just fracking DO it.

I didn’t get it for Christmas last year – but then, I guess he was only VP-elect last 25DEC08. The post today is to look at the progress toward the goal. The answer, surprisingly, is that we have made substantial progress. Certainly we are not halfway there, yet, but we are much further along than I expected to see.

Casting the Beauty Platform for the Afghanistan Quagmire



   No moving lines.
Retreat

   Retreat. Success.

   In what is small, perseverance furthers.

The Image

   Mountain under heaven: the image of Retreat.

   Thus the superior man keeps the inferior man at a distance,

   Not angrily but with reserve.

________________________________

No moving lines: this does not contain within it the immediate seeds of its own change – though of course, all things contain within them the ultimate seeds of their own change.

Retreat. The inner trigram is “the sky”, “The Creative”. We have mountains at home if we need them, and Big Sky – there is no need to play the Game of Empire in mountains far abroad.

Retreat. The outer trigram is “the mountain”, “Keeping Still”. In poise, we advance without effort, but the sword that is constantly taken from its scabbard will rust and break.

Retreat. An imposing mountain from without, but within a whole sky to explore. A cabin in the woods, the autumn woods rustling at night, quiet conversation among friends.

Retreat.

Celebrating the Fall of the American Empire

Burning the Midnight Oil for the Next American Revolution

Now up at Agent Orange

As people look back to the decade just past, and as we look ahead to the long, hard job ahead of us, many people describe the decade in many different ways – tumultuous, chaotics, catastrophic, liberating, tragic, joyous – but it seems that nothing recycles so easily as a phrase, and so the punditry online seem to have settled on The Roaring Teens.

But consider how it could have all gone so badly wrong, had the American Empire not collapsed. Whether you were thrilled or dismayed by the Roar in the Roaring Teens, consider what might have happened to our revived Republic had history taken a different turn in the aftermath of the Currency Collapse of 2011.

It is this perspective I wish to offer, since I can recall the New Year of 2010 arriving, and I feared much of what did in fact happen in 2011 – and yet because I did not see the possibility of the liberation of our nation from our self-imposed shackles of Empire, I did not for a minute imagine what the decade would bring.

Sunday Train: Growing Green Transport

See Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence for crosspost links

On Thursday, djrekluse at the Daily Kos said:

Despite considerable tension and even aversion in green communities to the subject, we cannot talk about “going green” without making it a discussion about growth through various hierarchies of human development.  Really, the subject of growth should come as second nature to “green” thinkers and communities-after all, a blade of grass must grow to two inches before it can grow to six; a tree must grow from acorn to sapling before it can someday become a mighty oak.  In much the same way, our consciousness, our values, and our cultures must also move through several distinct stages of growth before we can even begin to even see the problem, let alone care enough to do anything about it.

In other words, “going green” really means “growing green,” and represents the crux of almost all the global issues we presently face: it’s not a problem of human imagination, technological innovation, or even political will-it’s a problem of human growth

Consciousness, Culture, and Climate: Growing Green

This provides a frame for thinking about growing an energy independent transport system, and about the multiple ways that local, regional, and inter-regional rail systems can help in that growth.

The Robust Public Choice Made Simple

Burning the Midnight Oil for the Next American Revolution

crossposted from The Hillbilly Report, also available in orange

From some online dictionary somewhere:

Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses, pressures, or changes in procedure or circumstance

So: (1) Public Choice

“No Taxation without Representation”. Every single person facing an individual mandate must be provided with the choice of a publicly administered plan. Otherwise the government is forcing the citizen to pay without the elected representatives of the citizen controlling the spending.

You want to put a trigger on the public option. Fine, except the exact same trigger applies to the individual mandate.

You want to restrict access to the public option to some smaller group? Fine, except the same restriction applies to the individual mandate.

The system is not politically legitimate if it requires payment to for-profit commercial corporations.

(2) Robust

It cannot be lumbered down with any restrictions not faced by private insurers.

State by state public options? Really? You are really prepared to restrict the corporations to firms with no commercial activity across state lines? If they are free standing state by state public options, it has to be state by state for profit corporations. Oh, not allowing UHC into the exchanges defeats the purpose of lining private pockets at the public expense? Yeah, kind of thought so.

No Captive Markets: No Public Choice = No Mandate


     NO CAPTIVE MARKETS!

   WE ARE NO CORPORATE PLAYING FIELD:
      LEVEL US AT YOUR PERIL

   NO GOVERNMENT MANDATED
      CORPORATE MURDER BY SPREADSHEET

     HEALTH INSURANCE BOARDS ARE THE REAL DEATH PANELS

     NO WELFARE FOR INSURANCE CORPORATIONS

     NO CAPTIVE MARKETS!

An HSR Station Grows at Transbay (SF), Grand Finale (pt 3)

Crosspost links collected at: Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

In Part 1, the testimony representing the Transbay Joint Power Authority, managing the Transbay project, resulted in such a pile of red herring left behind that it seemed that there was something fishy going on.

What that something fishy seemed to be was whether the Transbay Terminal “train box” was suited for serving as the main northern terminus for both California High Speed Rail (HSR) services and for Caltrain services.

But … what if the Transbay Terminal is not the terminus of the HSR services?

In that case, the problem turns from physical limits … to legal requirements that the design has to meet. A garbled version of that is showing up in the newspapers … join me beyond the fold as I try to ungarble the story.

For lack of a better term, call it Capitalism

Burning the Midnight Oil for the Beauty Platform

Johnny Venom, in an extended comment on a Robert Oak post at The Economic Populist, says (note … much good stuff snipped, so click through):

My take on all this madness

What’s happening here is the collision of several realities:

1. You had institutions, who years if not decades, believing the hype they built themselves to sell to their clients.  …

2. That you can’t simply create your own damn financial instrument to meet a client’s needs. …

3. Derivatives products work when they are designed well and implemented on a regulated environment. …

4. Many of these items will never be liquid.  This brings us to today.  The reality of the situation is that we now have to be discriminating between those derivatives that are somewhat liquid and those that aren’t.  The former can have mark to market, but there needs to be a proper exchange for these things.  Both the CME and ICE are going to have such a thing, and these banks should be made to trade them on it to get these things off their books.  As for the iliquid ones, well unless our goal is to bankrupt these banks in some attempt to punish them, we will have to facilitate either a suspension of FASB 157 for these or some hybrid.

5. Banks holding on to these illiquid derivative step children, that must be re-engineered, will have to realize they won’t get all their money back. …

6. Lastly, new accounting rules and financial regulations must be in place to keep in check the establishment of new positions. …

My response and thoughts after the fold.

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