Financial wisdom

For those of you looking above the trench line, we wrote something last August (read it here) that still applies.

Not that we are all that prescient. This morning, we read something from Todd Harrison that really struck home:

"...There are few opportunities in our lives to literally watch history tick before our eyes. These are the times our grandchildren will study, like we study the Great Depression, puzzling over the bizarre circumstances that came together to form this perfect storm.

"What is most misunderstood is that this not only a financial crossroads, but a societal one as well. The repercussions of government policy and our individual actions will echo loudly throughout future generations.

"We have a choice to make. We can face our mistakes with bravery, accepting consequences as they come, confident we can meet the challenge while rebuilding a more sustainable structure; or we can continue to let fear and greed drag us along the road to ruin.

"The former, while more challenging, is the path of perseverance. It is the only noble road, one that accepts responsibility for our actions and paves the way to better days.

"They say admitting you have a problem is the first step towards solving it. It’s about time that we, the people, practice what we preach."

(Click here for full article).

Hillary is a liar

Oh, crap.

Really didn't intend to get into this, don't want to, but this was ugly, and it's necessary. Silence is what earned us 8 years of George Bush.

Hillary Clinton is a liar who will say whatever it takes to achieve her ambition.

"In a speech in Washington on March 17 Clinton said of the Bosnia trip: 'I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.' " Clinton was quoted by Reuters. (Read it here)

It didn't happen. From the same story:

"Several news outlets disputed the claim, and a video of the trip showed Clinton walking from the plane, accompanied by her daughter. They were greeted by a young girl in a small ceremony on the tarmac and there was no sign of tension or any danger."

In other words, Hillary lied to make herself look like she had experience under fire.

She said she "misspoke." That her memory was different. That she was human.

No, she lied.

This finishes her campaign. Hillary just told one of those despicable lies spouted in bars by guys who claim to be Green Berets or Navy Seals or another branch of a special service when all they did was push paper at Fort Bragg if they served at all.

By claiming she faced a threat to her person, one that did not exist, she earns the disdain of all who did face a threat and paid dearly with arms and legs, forever maimed, the disdain of those who lost comrades, and of course, the disdain of families of men and women who died serving this country, 4,000 so far in Iraq, 58,148 in Viet Nam, the disdain of 170,000 troops facing IEDS and snipers in Iraq, the disdain of soldiers everywhere, in all nations.

She tried to steal the warrior's honor, and use it for political gain.

Even if in the unlikely event she were to beat Obama, Clinton would be finished against John McCain, a true war hero who spent years in a prison camp.

In an effort to change the subject, Clinton is trying to smear Obama with words spoken by the pastor of Obama's church. Terrible words, words that Obama has repudiated.

Her perspective twisted by power lust, Clinton ignores the fact that Obama never spoke the offensive words.

Clinton did. She lied about war zone experience in a claim she was qualified to be Commander in Chief. Thereby proving she is not.

Hillary: Get off the stage. Your time is done.

“No Country for Old Men”

There are many characters in “No Country for Old Men.” Among the most potent is the State of Texas.

This is an intense movie about evil. It is unrelenting. It grinds away at the viewer as evil grinds away at good men. It is a story of struggle, much death, and no reward.

The Devil himself may walk the streets, obeying a code of morality that finds no value in humanity, that finds threads of causation leading to death as meaningful as those leading to any individual.

The angels are tired, and ready to retire. The world has changed, Texas has changed, there are too many drugs and there is too much money and there a man’s courage, even his goodness, is simply not enough. There is no salvation.

No one could have made this film from the Cormack McCarthy book besides the Cohn brothers, Joel and Ethan. Think “Fargo.” But worse. Or better, depending on how you feel about their work.

There are many outstanding performances in this film. The weariness of Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Tom Bell makes your bones ache. Javier Bardhem is soulless as Anton Chigurh, a satanic figure who, under McCarthy’s pen and the Cohn brother’s craft, refutes the idea that evil is randomly uncaring but actually targets the good.

Josh Brolin, as protagonist Llewelyn Moss (hero is the wrong word, wrong concept) gives much false hope for an ending in which we could find comfort. Woody Harrelson does his typical work as a bad man we could like, but is insufficient, both in the role and as the character he plays.

There is randomness in this film, call it heads or tails, but within that there is the intent to destroy and there are no scales to bring balance between a good act and an evil one.

Listen to the dialogue. Listen to McCarthy’s words spoken by Jones, by Ellis (Barry Corbin). Those words tell a tale of desperation, of futility, of nobility ground into dust by the Devil himself acting on a people who have lost both the ability to believe and reason to fear.

And look at Texas. It is the stage for this malevolent drama, and no place could have provided a better backdrop. Empty highways, cheap motels, sour coffee in dirty diners.

This is a film, like “The Departed,” that makes no apology, pulls no punch. It is harsh. It is also outstanding art. It is a phenomenally good movie at a time when we need good films.

When the lights came up in the theater, the woman in the row in front of me was incredulous, unsettled. “That’s it?” she asked.

“You wanted more?” I replied, exhausted after slightly more than two hours of mayhem and death. “I actually had quite enough.”

“But I wanted a different ending. I want some closure,” she lamented.

It’s not there. Not in the film, and not in the script, maybe not for any of us.

Go see “No country for Old Men.” Expect to be moved, not entertained.

The banking windmills

Bank of America sent me a wonderful offer the other day. I am sure you've gotten one too.

A low rate loan (9.99%) to CleanSweep® my debt. No collateral. No application fee. No annual fee. Up to $50 grand.

Oh, there's some fine print, of course. The rate is actually between 9.99% and 22.99%. I may be prohibited from using the loan to pay down debt if their company is profiting from my overdue balances. And that low, low rate that they say is "not a variable rate tied to an index..." is actually a rate they can vary "at our discretion."

Makes me want to just bend over and say "please."

The Oregon legislature regulated "payday" loan companies last session. And there are many noises coming from Congress and politicos that something has to be done to "fix" the mortgage crisis. But folks, if they really wanted to address the credit mess, they would start right there, with that little piece of plastic in your wallet.

Default rates of 27.99% used to be the province of crime lord vigorish. "Important account information enclosed" is printed on envelopes when what they are trying to do is help you dig yourself deeper into debt, get a little behind, so they can milk you like a cash cow. They flood your mailbox with these, so when the bill does actually does arrive, it gets tossed with the other junk it so looks like.

Now that the banks issuing these cards have had their puppets in Congress make bankruptcy so difficult, we need a crusader from the left, or the right, it does not matter since this is a bipartisan issue with plenty of moral authority from anyone's ideology, to get these blood suckers off our back. At least get their teeth out of our neck.

Give people a reasonable interest rate. Regulate bank card communications, how they represent their products. Allow people a chance to address their debt without incurring more debt at a higher rate.

We have laws that govern our banks, and we are going to have a few more that govern our mortgages. Misleading representations are prohibited in other banking.

It is time that we regulate in some way what has become the fuzzy concept of our money.

Charlie Wilson’s War

In our world, unintended consequences often define the course of history, yet good intentions can still prevail. “Charlie Wilson’s War” is about this world.

It’s a fine film, in many ways an important film, based on the true and unlikely story of how we “won” the war in Afghanistan.

Charlie Wilson was a hard drinking, womanizing congressman from Texas who may have been more important to the defeat of the Soviet Empire than Ronald Reagan. Wilson funded weapons for tribesmen of Afghanistan who were then able to defeat the mighty Soviet army, causing the Soviet retreat and possibly leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Director Mike Nichols’ resumé goes back to “Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolf” and “The Graduate” of the 1960s and extends to the more recent “The Birdcage” and the disturbing “Closer” of 2004.

Nichols shapes the film brilliantly. He urges the movie right along, propelled by the series of unlikely events it describes. And the events are true, chronicled in the book “Charlie Wilson’s War” by George Crile that describes the remarkable story of how “Charlie did it,” defeating the Soviets from his chair in an appropriations committee and meetings in Israel, Egypt and Pakistan.

The primary cast delivers well, with Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman comfortable in roles that are true in feel to the book.

The profane script was written by Aaron Sorkin, writer of “West Wing” and “Sports Night.” If you follow Sorkin, you will recognize his work: smart, fast and funny.

One review warns potential viewers that the movie contains drug use, drinking, smoking, nudity and strong profanity. True. All true. It was the 80s.

The film also captures why the war in Afghanistan was probably a battle, not a war, for democracy. The war for democracy is never over, and we are fighting other battles today because we failed to see that one through.

When we left Afghanistan, after filling the country with guns and after training its already ferocious people as fighters, we just left.

We left behind guns, we left behind a country torn by war, we left behind poor teenagers expected to fight like men, we left behind mines masked as toys designed to maim children, we left behind tribes with centuries of hatred and no means to resolve conflict, we left behind Muslims who had come from around the world to fight, including Osama bin Laden.

We did not build schools or hospitals or power plants or sewage plants or roads, or courts or democracy. We just left. Possibly nothing would have prevented the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan. But we did not try, we were done, we just left. This may have been amoral, it was definitely shortsighted.

But that is our history in the region, our “can do, mission accomplished,” history. Unfortunately, history has a longer point of view, and will return again and again the phrase, “We’ll see,” when the obvious conclusion is also too easy, a Zen parable, “We’ll see.”

Caveat: This writer is biased: having traveled in Afghanistan and Pakistan five years before the Soviets invaded in 1979, I closely followed the war in whatever news media offered coverage at the time. Yet not until I read Criles’ book did I understand the essential story of how the war played at the highest level of our government, and that of Pakistan.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” is a wonderful film, if you are interested. And you should be. It is important, because it describes why we have today soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Before dinner Sabrina came upstairs and asked for an old shirt, a smock, in which to paint my Christmas present. I told her I had taken most of the shirts I no longer wore to the second hand store, but took her to my closet, in the bath area. I would find something.

"Is THAT your shower?!?" she asked.

"Yes," I replied.

"Is that the shower door?" she asked of the tan cotton draped across the inside of the keystoned doorway, concealing yet revealing the mottled brown stone walls behind.

There is no door, I told her. Just the curtain. "Don't you remember when we got the curtain rod and drapes at Fred Meyer?" I asked.

I watched the memory return, of the three of us in the curtain aisle of the home improvement section, selecting the rods, thinking about color. I watched the memory fit itself into the present, the pieces falling into place. "THAT's why we bought those?" she asked.

"You have to clean shower doors," she finally said.

"I will throw that in the washing machine," I replied.

I showed her the strange shower heads. The stone. She laughed her laugh of surprised joy. "I SO love this house. It is SO the red string," the abbreviated reference cementing K.C. 's metaphor into our family lexicon, that this steel sided barn house is a red string in a box full of gray string.

As to metaphors, K.C found another one in the truck after we left the coffeehouse on 14th Street late this afternoon. Laura the barista had made the girls some nice drinks, much better than the awful ones we had gotten earlier at the strip mall. Sabrina's Chai Tea was especially a disappointment, thin. K.C. said it was skim milk instead of whole milk.

"You mean really made with skim?" I asked her. She said no, just that it had no flavor.

I told her she had just come up with another metaphor, and she said, "I did, didn't I?" So on the way home we looked for cars that were skim milk, the Malibu's and Accords, and noted even people could be skim milk, or strong coffee.

We talked of people who were easy to see through, as though they were hiding in a water glass. K.C. laughed hard and sudden when she got that one.

The girls put up the lights and ornaments when we got home. K.C. said it was kind of cool having two trees to decorate.

Reflections on a mountain

This morning, long before dawn, after putting on the coffee I turned out the lights to bath in the stillness. There was some wind outside and a slight spitting of snow, but it would be hours before carpenters came to split the morning with power saws and compressors and nail guns. My steel shack was solidly silent, warm.

It is becoming easier to navigate the house in the dark. There are a couple of potential pit falls -- literally. The stairs to my loft are nearly six feet wide -- the adjacent passage back to my bedroom and bath is only four feet. If I turn too soon there will be a tumble to the lower landing.

The cooking island stands right in the middle of the u-shaped embrace of the kitchen. And I don’t always know where the sink might be.

Back in my chair with a fresh cup of coffee and facing the mountains and quiet storm, I think of other homes I have navigated at dawn. It frightens me a little how fresh memories can be. First up is the rental house after the marriage came apart, with its tall white walls and glass fireplace, two sets of sliding glass doors. Two years ago there is a small pine branch blocking the track of one of those doors, and a shampoo bottle clatters to the floor of the shower.

After that the single level house, level only by accident where it was level at all, where I try to cobble together a blended family without any of the proper tools, four stools for four children along the peninsula behind which I cook eggs and sausage, doors that either swing open by themselves or closed, depending on which room you are in, which way the house is tilting.

Years before that I walk into the narrow pantry of the log house, with unfinished stairs leading onto the dirt floor of a low basement or tall crawl space, your call, tucked below the kitchen. I still see gaps in the plaster left as logs settle, heavy pine posts on the deck wobble as wood gives way to moisture.

We moved from there so long ago, lifetimes ago, and yet I can feel my feet slide across the wide-plank oak floor, the cool gray tile of that bathroom, the small splash of pink in tiny flowers outlined in gray, the window sill in the living room sags under the pressure of posts holding up the gable end and curved glass window.

There is the transition house, small twin girls and one bathroom, a tight one car garage for some reason full of camping gear, it is cold with its hollow core doors, rough wood siding of a room added by the previous owner, the smell of chlorine from an indoor hot tub. There is that mysterious cavity between the new and old rooms you can crawl into from where the firewood is stacked and then stand, you could hide in there for days or even weeks with preparation.

Reaching back 25 years, there is the apartment on Lovejoy, with the small white tiles in the kitchen, the narrow plank floors, the bathroom I rough plaster and paint blue, grass wallpaper, a window to the outside over the tub I rig into a shower with a hose, casement windows once painted shut I bang back into use with the heel of my hands in a fierce uppercut, tightly spring roll-up shades.

When I close my eyes in the easy chair facing the mountains it feels like I could open them into any one of these rooms of the past and present.

But when I do open my eyes I see lights where there should be no lights. The mountains are shrouded, I think, Black Butte only promising to become visible. The lights I see are halfway up where I know Mt. Jefferson to be. That is wilderness, that is high up the side of a snow-laden mountain.

From my chair in the dark I see rescue teams have marked with lights the location of a lost hunter or climber. They are waiting for dawn to bring in a helicopter for evacuation. It is too early to call the news desk, it would be too much an interference to call dispatch.

For a half hour the lights do not move on the mountain. There are two of them, one slightly brighter than the other. I wished I could see the mountain through the dark to tell how high the rescue teams might be, if they are above or below the tree line, the line-of-life in these and in most mountains.

It is not until dawn starts to gray the skies and I need another cup of coffee that I literally bark in laughter at myself, at these silly musings. There are no other lights. At all. There are no other rooms but this room.

In my predawn, the lights that I thought illuminated a mountain 20 miles away were simply the reflection of an illuminated button on the coffee pot behind me, bouncing back from the double paned window through which I am viewing the world. Memories are just that, too, poorly filtered reflections, fading somewhat slowly with the light of each new day.

Let’s talk about it

Confession: Yesterday I called my daughter Sabrina on her cell phone.

She was in the house. Downstairs. I was in the house. Upstairs.

All right, mea culpa. But there are a lot of stairs. The twins, 14, had their music on and their door closed. I was in a hurry and she is on my speed dial, and I use an ear piece. There is no doubt that it was faster to call than to walk downstairs, knock, wait for them to hear the knock, and tell her to come up and see the mountains as the sun rose. She is trying to paint those mountains.

Yes, I called her on her cell phone to come up and look at the view.

But then I started to think about this turn of events. Perhaps what I did is really just the squeezing of inefficiencies by technology, as technology is intended to do.

For some six months I have been among the ranks of those who no longer have a land line. Instantly I can name of four others close to me who no longer have a tether to Ma Bell or any of her children, although one of them has a land line linked to his cell phone in a way I don’t understand. In my case, I have no land link at all, since I don’t get cable or DSL. Everything is wireless by some form of technology standard, WiMax or WiFi or Bluetooth or cell.

In other words, I no longer have a phone. I have a Star Trek communicator. Instead of a hand held device or a badge on my breast like Jean Luc Picard, I have a dongle in my left ear (the hearing in the right a little dim from shotgun reports or rock and roll or the finish grind barrel at the cement plant where I worked eons ago).

And with free family to family minutes, it is more efficient and less costly to tap my left ear twice and ask my daughter to come up stairs. In the 50s and 60s there were intercoms. Stand at a box in the wall of the kitchen and talk to a bedroom. Now I tap my ear and talk to my daughter.

We are on the cusp of being able to do the same upstairs to downstairs, Hawaii to New York, with voice or image, with mass amounts of data on the internet or simply a reference to commonly accessed URL’s.

It’s not a telephone, it’s a communicator. It will soon interface the personal area network (earpiece, iPod, Bluetooth) with the local area network (my house, my printer, my computer) and the wide area network (the internet, my office, you).

And because technology puts the squeeze on inefficiency (while introducing a few of its own, ask any homebuilder watching hourly subs on their cell phones), it will replace the old methods, as surely as it is difficult now to find a typewriter.

Directing our own evolution

Stem cells have cured sickle cell anemia in mice.

Hold on to your hats, with at least one of your three hands, because we are about to direct human evolution. The rate of which has already been increasing over the last few millennia.

This is to be both celebrated and feared. Celebrated because it will rapidly take us into the unknown, and we are, after all, adventurers; to be feared because we are going someplace we have not been before, and we will not know our destination until after we have arrived.

This is very much like driving to a new town using only the review mirror to decide how to crank the steering wheel.

But the point is, in the past evolution has had a rate based somewhat on the random effects of change within a dynamic environment, where the feedback was based upon a shortening or lengthening of life span.

Sickle cell anemia is a lousy, painful disease, but confers some resistance to malaria, common in areas where the sickle cell trait is most common. An interesting thought might be to wonder if malaria will be more common if sickle cell is reduced through genetic engineering. One might assume that the advantage of resistance resulted in the increase of sickle cell trait. Those without it died.

That’s how evolution works, in fruit flies, tomatoes or men.

But it seems that evolution has been speeding up, at least in humans. According to research published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and referenced by the BBC (read it here), in the last 5,000 years human genetic change “has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period.”

“Five thousand years is such a small sliver of time,” said co-author Professor John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It's 100 or 200 generations ago. That's how long since some of these genes originated, and today they are [in] 30% or 40% of people because they've had such an advantage.”

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have introduced something new, something very powerful: pre directed evolution. Because we can imagine and dream, and because we have or soon will have the technology.

We may decide that we want to go somewhere genetically, a decision taken as a community, society, race or a species, or by a despot, and we now have the tools to go there fairly quickly. If not the master race, maybe just a marginally better one.

The last phase of “natural evolution” perhaps moved us from being animals to becoming humans.

The next phase will result in our becoming ... something else.

Christmas lights

It was daughter K.C. who kept up the nagging about Christmas lights. She is 14 and her priorities never cease to surprise me. Just now I put on some music for doing laundry and she looked over the counter and said “Bob Marley?” I could not tell if there was enthusiasm or reproach in her voice.

She had been talking about decorating the house for Christmas. It was more certain to happen this visit, they came to be with me on Thursday. I had been telling the contractors all week we were going to occupy the house this weekend. Not one more week in that trailer, it is too cold and too small and too dingy, I was not keeping life on hold for one more week.

Alan and Larry and Curt and Mike and Rod and Rick and John and Ron, they all made it happen this week. I had been cleaning up a little, a box of debris here and there, and then I just moved the girls’ beds in from the tipi, their sleeping bags from the trailer. So when the girls got out of school on Thursday, we went from piano lessons to buy sheets to sushi to what is now home.

We are home.

It’s not finished yet. Trim boards and paint and lacquer are yet to be put up or applied. But we have heat and sinks and a stove. A refrigerator, a still-unused dishwasher which may not see use even once a week. And a washer and dryer! No more scheduling around laundromat hours of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., lugging the laundry basket to and fro.

I slept in a nest of blankets on my own mattress placed on cardboard on the floor downstairs on Thursday because I was too exhausted to drag it upstairs. Friday I cleaned my bedroom and bath and Alan helped me to put the frame together when we had to take a break from the technical difficulties of reversing the handle on a dryer door.

It’s been a very rough few weeks since the divorce was final on Halloween, among the roughest, for reasons that will get no elaboration. But K.C. kept bugging me about Christmas lights. At their mom’s house, the girls put up all the decorations. I didn’t have any of my own, of course.

Bob Marley sings, “Take it easy,” after two days of listening to Alegria. We are home.

So yesterday after looking for stuff for their rooms, we stopped and bought some outside lights. This afternoon, in bitter cold, I screwed hooks into fascia shadow board, brass hooks that sit behind the drip line of the corrugated steel roof and that will be there for as long as I live in this concrete and steel mining barn on a hill top facing the east slope of Cascade volcanoes.

The girls handed up strings of lights that we stretched tight. There were enough extension cords on the job site, some of which will be reclaimed tomorrow for power saws and compressors.

But tonight, in a right now that flows outward in time and place and in peace, they power the smallest of lights because K.C. wanted to get it done. She was right, of course.

Sometime this week we will get a tree, Sabrina says it must divide the room against the wall where the window looks out on the mountains. She gets to decide. That works for me, too.