Finally...

congress does something right. No bailout. That's all I have to say. Hopefully they won't just roll over on the next bailout proposal that's sure to come. At least for once I can say my politicians acted the way I wanted them to.

Some people know what the hell they're talking about

Great post about why we're fucked right now.

Pay especially close attention to the videos at the end. Ron Paul knows what the hell he's talking about. I'm still reading a lot about the Federal Reserve and how exactly things work with it, which was intentionally made complicated to keep people from understanding how big a scam it really is. Keep in mind, the Fed was created by a bunch of bankers on Wall St because there was too much good competition in the banking industry for Wall St to keep its power over the financial sector. This total meltdown of our financial system is almost 100 years in the making.

Not really important, but an update of some sort at least

So I went to the Sprint store yesterday and got me one of them there Blackberry Curve 8330's. Part of the reason was that I wanted a way to dick around on the interwebs while watching a game, but not have to be constantly running back and forth between the living room and bed room. Part of it was to be able to geek out away from my PC. Oh, and the fact that Sprint is rebating them down to $100 for upgrade customers until November was a nice touch. It's been awesome so far, though I haven't actually tested the call quality.

Scary stuff

1944, Bretton Woods: The IMF and the World Bank
1945, San Francisco: The United Nations
1994, Marrakech: The World Trade Organization
History knows where it is going.... The World Trade Organization, the third pillar of the New World Order, along with the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.

New York Times, April 15, 1994, p. A9

Back in first

Despite David Wright's best efforts, the Mets are now back in first place in the NL East. Wright has been having a terrible September at the plate and it's now starting to have an effect on his defense. That throwing error last night was inexcusable. They managed to pull the win out, but this sort of thing can't happen as the season winds down and with the division race so tight.

The Phillies and the Brewers also lost last night, putting the Mets a half game up on the Phils in the division and knocking Milwaukee further down in the wild card standings. It's beginning to look like the Mets' chances of at least clinching a wild card berth are likely, but I can't be comfortable until they actually have clinched. They need to at least take two of three in this series with Atlanta considering they play four games with the Cubs this coming week.

Because the next nine days will be so damn stressful

more animals

This is painful to watch

The season got really ugly really fast. They finally managed to beat the worst team in baseball after losing two in a row to them. Ugh.
Jerry Manuel had a great quote after the game:
"No, I'm not enjoying this. Are you crazy? Walking out there every three minutes? [Fans] didn't come to see me. They come to see the guys play."

Another day, another bailout, another set of financiers saved from consequences at our expense

So the government (which of course means you and I) has bailed out AIG. The moral of this story is that if you or I make stupid, bonehead investments because of the potentially high yeild, we can be fucked by the market, but if you are a bank/mortgage lender/insurer/other fianancial institution, you can make all the money you want on high risk/yeild investments and never face the consequences of your risks if they go sour.

If is NOT in the public's best interest to prop up insolvent institutions, like the Fed says it is. This will just lead to another round of malinvestment in the future, more bubbles and busts, more transfer of wealth from us to the already wealthy elite. We need to move toward a monetary policy and system that is stable and protects against John Maynard Keynes' favored system of credit expansion through levereged borrowing that leads nowhere other than inflation. The elite have been manipulating the system for far too long to get the wealth out of our hands, and it's working beautifully. The sad thing is, no one seems to notice or care.

What did the government do to our money...?

"The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit....

The Law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes....

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.... The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the "hidden" confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
- Alan Greenspan, "Gold and Economic Freedom", in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, ed. Ayn Rand (New York: Signet Books, 1967), p. 101

For once it's not Bush's fault

Anyone that starts screaming about how this nice little financial mess we find ourselves in was caused by Bush is an idiot. The seeds of this collapse were sewn in the early post-war era with the creation of the Fed, the FDIC, and the creation of all the Federally insured mortgage companies because 'everyone should be able to own a home'.

The Fed sets the percentage of a bank's deposit that must be held on hand at any time. The rest of the money may be lent out for the bank to earn interest on. Because banks, and other Federally insured operations, have the insurance of the FDIC they are protected if they become insolvent. Now, these financial institutions all pay the same rates to the FDIC for this insurance regardless of their performance or risks. This allows banks to be as reckless as they want with how they loan their money out, as they will be covered by this insurance if they fuck up. So what you have is no discouragement to these people to make lots of risky investments that have the potential for high returns. As many other mortgage brokerages did in recent decades, they made a habit of giving out very risky mortgages that would lead to really good returns if there was no default on the account. Because of this, housing prices were artificially inflated which led to riskier loans and so on.

Fast forward to today, where all these risky investments are going south. Now everyone looks for the Fed to bail them out. Keep in mind that the FDIC only has enough money on hand to cover $50 Billion of the $1 Trillion of insured assets. So the government is subsidizing restructured mortgages for people (tax-payer dollars), nationalized Freddie and Fannie which shifts liability for these companies to the taxpayers, the FDIC pays out for the insured accounts, and the Fed has to come to the rescue when all else fails to keep these companies solvent. That usually means the Fed (the "Lender of Last Resort") allows the insolvent bank/firm to offer tax-free bonds, which the Fed then buys with newly printed money (inflation). Through all of this, the people that suffer are investors and tax-payers, while the owners of the banks/firms are shielded from too much, if any, loss. And this is happening across the board in all financial industries right now.

The one sane proposal I have seen to remedy the horrible way our system is setup is to make payment into the FDIC insurance protection fund entirely based on the firm's risks in their investments. You pay more if you perform more risky lending. It would probably be the simplest way of regulating the whole thing.

Then of course there's the issue of continuing to support the Federal Reserve, an entity that does not answer to Congress but prints money at its leisure. (Note: It is unconstitutional for anyone but Congress to coin money) However, the issue of central banking and the crooks that created the idea is for another day.

The Final Stretch Begins

Today, the Angels beat the Yankees and with the Rangers' loss, the Angels have now clinched the AL West. Rodriguez also got his 56th save, inching him to within one of Bobby Thigpen's record of 57 in one season.

The Phillies lost today to the Marlins 7-3. This means that if the Mets win their game tonight, they will increase their lead to 3 1/2 games over Philadelphia.

Tonight, Jose Reyes set the Mets' club record with his 283rd stolen base in the third inning moving him past Mookie Wilson. He went on to also steal third in the middle of a six run inning for the Mets.

It's going to be an interesting final three weeks of the season. All I'm going to hear about everyday is the collapse of '07.

Ithaca Brewfest: After Action Report

This Saturday I drove my friends Jeff and Angela to Stewart Park in Ithaca for the second annual Ithaca Brewfest. The forecast was calling for widespread rain across across our part of the state for the latter half of the day, but we saw none of that in Ithaca (though we went through some spots of pouring rain on the drive down). It was in the low 60's when we left Rochester, but it was warm and muggy when we got out of the car in Ithaca. Fortunately, the weather quickly changed for the better when a nice cool set of air started moving in from the lake and things were comfortable after that.

I need to start bringing a camera to these things, which would require either digging mine out or buying a new one, which is what I'd like to do as my camera is really old (by CCD standards). The event was at Stewart Park which is right on the southern tip of Cayuga Lake. They used a good portion of the shoreline of the park for the event. Now, as with the Flour City Brewfest they gave us a nice looking 4 oz sample glass. They also gave everyone a little green card with eighteen numbered circles on it which was intended as a sort of moderating factor. The people serving beer at the brewery tables were supposed to mark off a circle each time you got a sample. It quickly became apparent that no one really cared about that. I must have had somewhere between fifteen and twenty samples and my card only has two marked off.

When it comes to setup I vastly preferred Ithaca's plan over the Flour City plan. For the Flour City Brewfest it was all held inside the concession area at Frontier Field, this being essentially a really long hallway area under the stands. That got really crowded really fast. The setup for the Ithaca Brewfest was much more open. When we walked in there was a ling of four tents to our right that traced along the shoreline of the lake. Each tent was probably 30 ft by 20 ft (I'm lousy at judging distance, though), and were about 15 ft apart from each other and had four or five breweries setup underneath. To the left there was one tent facing away from the entrance with a large open area in front of it that led to a stage where there were some actually pretty decent local bands playing. Behing the band was another tent (containint, among others: Stone, Ommegang, Ithaca and Weyerbacher) and a pavilion that had a few breweries in it (Middle Ages, Hook and Ladder, etc). There were a couple more tents lining the other side of the area around the stage. All in all, I'd say there were probably more than 30 breweries there, and even a few I had never heard of. The open space of the setup was great because we were able to get in, grab a beer, then get out and hang out with each other while not being in everyone's way.

The high points of this adventure will be detailed below. I discovered a couple more breweries in the southern Finger Lakes region that are within easy driving distance of Ithaca, making a really set of tours doable in a Saturday afternoon (which must occur sooner rather than later!). First up is Horseheads Brewing. For those wondering, Horseheads is a small town about 40 minutes South-Southwest of Ithaca and is a place I've visited frequently because of its good mall (the Arnot Mall) and the local aviation museum. So, Horseheads Brewing had a number of beers there including: their Pumpkin Ale, Newtown Brown Ale, Pale Expedition Ale, and their Lackawanna Steam Lager (a Steam beer, or 'California Common' as the style is now known). There's extremely little information about these beers on Beeradvocate so I'm linking to the images on the brewery's website of the bottle labels. I had the Pumpkin and Brown ales. The brown was a pretty solid representation of the style, being very well balanced. The pumpkin, though, was phenomenal. It's easily the best non-homebrewed pumpkin ale I've ever had. The best pumpkin ale I'd had before this was the Southampton Pumpkin Ale, as it had a great mix of the pumpkin pie spices and was nice and balanced. Horseheads went the extra step of making it slightly sweeter to complement the spices and give it a more authentic pumpkin pie flavor, all while maintaining a flavor that still reminds you you're drinking beer. They did a great job of adding just enough sweetness to make it perfect. The website says it's now available in 22 oz bottles, so I must acquire these!

The other new discovery was Market Street Brewing Company in Corning, NY. They weren't quite as impressive as Horseheads, but still good. The beer of theirs I tried was the D'Artagnan Dark British Ale which was touted as a British Mild. It definitely doesn't fit the Mild style very well as it has a 6.5% ABV and has a more assertive flavor than you'd expect. That being said it was still pretty good. It wasn't very hoppy which is fine by me.

The next noteworthy drink was a new release from the Ithaca Brewing Company. Ithaca has been experimenting with small production run beers called their Excelsior Series, recently releasing a beer called Brute which is classified as a Golden Sour Ale. This is a light, slightly hazy golden beer with a very dry and moderately sour taste. There's a very slight hint of sweetness to it which balances things out and winds up delicious. A very good find, indeed.

Another beautiful find was Weyerbacher's new anniversary beer called Thirteen. It's a 'Belgian inspired Imperial Stout'. It's got the heavy, thick and roasty body of an imperial stout with the alcohol bite to back it up, but it also has some of the characteristic Belgian yeast fruitiness in the background. There is something slightly off about it, and looking at the top review on Beeradvocate, a guy suggests there are a bit of fusels in this beer. That sounds like what we were tasting in it. In my opinion they're not as pronounced as the reviewer thinks so I guess it depends on how refined your taste is. Overall I liked it a lot, though there are far better imperial stouts out there.

So when we finished with the brewfest we were in need of food, Angela demanding pancakes, so we headed over to the State Diner a few blocks west of the Ithaca Commons on State Street. A few shots of coffee and an infusion of bacon goodness and I was all set for the drive back. All in all it was a fun day and one I definitely will be going back for in the future. Next up will be a brewfest at Custom Brewcrafters in Honeoye Falls sometime in October, an Oktoberfest in Irondequoit sometime later this month, and there must be plans made for a round of tours through Ithaca, Watkins Glen, Corning and Horseheads. Now that would make for a great weekend.

I now have geek +10!

Cosmic arrived a couple days ago. It took a while to get here after the auction cause I bought it from one of them Canadians. It's only the basic game, meaning I have two expansions to get (though Swilly has an extra copy of More Cosmic and I have beer for him in exchange), but this basic set was fucking worth the $175. It's in nearly perfect condition. The box looks like was just taken out of the shrink-wrap except that the corners are a little bit worn. The guy said he bought it years ago cause he heard it was awesome, then punched out the tokens, and promptly never played the game. So now it's mine! The cards look like they've never been shuffled and the alien power cards are pristeen. I'm hoping that sometime after the Ithaca Brewfest today I can get some Rochester folks playing.

Alternative views on global warming

Some scientists, with research being performed over the course of decades, are point to the sun as a possible cause of the increase in temperature of our planet. The hypothesis being that the eleven year magnetic cycle of the sun's surface also impacts the solar irradiance (energy emitted by the sun). Solar irradiance is the single largest factor in global temperatures (obviously). Apparently, the evidence is pointing some to believe that the sun's magnetic cycle is a part of a larger cycle of solar irradiance. Every couple centuries, it is opined by some, the sun will either hit a lull in magnatic activity and causing a serious cooldown in the solar system, or there will be a flurry of magnatic activity that will increase temperatures. Some of the evidence supplied shows that our current temperatures are close to where they should be given that the sun is has experienced higher than normal sunspot activity during its cycles over the past few decades, and that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be having a minimal effect if that were true. Keep in mind, carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas, water being another. If Sol increases Earth's temperature slightly, air will inherently become more humid and ice will melt; the melting ice will result in less solar radiation being reflect thus heating the ground further, and less ice cover means more exposed ground to absorb the heat.

Anyway, that's sort of a haphazard summary of what the authors of the following two articles are saying. The first one also saying that the United Nations' own report on global warming is ridiculous, though I haven't been able to read any of the academic papers he cites, so I can't yet add any of my own opinion. Basically, global warming is way more complicated than people say, and there's no argument yet that ends the discussion, as some windbags out there would like to say.

BE SKEPTICAL!

The first article talking about the UN report and the gross misrepresentations of the truth that it makes

The second article detailing research on historical data of the sun and the artic ice sheets

I hope to be doing a lot more research on this and other topics over the coming weeks, and I'll probably post some of the more interesting stuff on here if I get the motivation.

Things I'd like to look into more:

• I've heard reference to how Earth's temperature has historically increased significantly just before its various ice ages and I would like to investigate the studies on this.
• I want to look more closely at the evidence posited about the change in solar irradiance over time.
• My background in solar physics is pathetic at best, so I need to go back and look through some of my textbooks and notes from my astrophysics class. I know the sun is not a stable system, with the radius constantly fluctuating and massive convection currents roiling around, but I want to investigate the irradiance changes.
• Carbon dioxide's impact on warming the planet is the hottest topic and I would like to investigate how they're determining the level of impact it has. Yes, CO2 absorbs energy in the near infrared region and re-emits it, but how much does a 50% increase over 100 years in the CO2 levels really impact the overall absorption?
  

Down to the wire

As the calendar passes into September we enter the final month of the season and the demons that come with it. The Mets ended the month of August with a series in Florida that showcased the strengths and weaknesses of the team. All three games involved strong starting pitching with Oliver Perez, Mike Pelfrey and Pedro Martinez all holding the Marlins to two runs in each game and pitching into the seventh inning. The offense, led by Reyes in the midst of a 9-game hitting streak, scored in the first inning in two of the three games with Beltran also having a big series. Young Nick Evans hit his first major league home run yesterday, as well. The defense was also solid during the series.

The weak point of this series was the bullpen, not surprisingly. After taking a 5-2 lead in the top of the ninth on Friday, the bullpen coughed up two runs in the bottom of the inning before finally closing the deal. Things were even worse on Saturday. Pelfrey pitched a strong game and left with a 3-2 lead in the seventh inning. The first batter of the eighth homered to tie the game, then Heilman walked in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth. I can take it if the opposing team earns their winning run in the ninth, like hitting a home run or something, but when you walk in that run things aren't forgiven so easily.

So the Mets now have a one game lead over Philly going into September. They're 10-5 against the Phillies this season, which is something I hope they can maintain during the series the teams play next weekend at Shea. Every game the Mets lose this month will draw comments from everyone about the collapse last season, so now it's up to the team to redeem themselves. Things will certainly be interesting this month.