February 10th, 2009
Hello there! Let’s get this going.
It’s taken longer to get this week’s program rolling than it takes me to grow a beard.
No, that’s not true.
I’m one of those rare people of European blood who really doesn’t grow much body hair. I’m doing just fine in the essential places: top of the head, eyelashes, pits, and groin. It’s the rest of the male-pattern hair that seems to elude me.
After three days of not shaving it starts to look like I have some dirt on my upper lip. After five days the larger bare patches become obvious. It’s almost bad enough to be a fashion statement, some kind of post-hipster grunge.
If I keep at it, maybe in five years we’ll be seeing kids wearing retro-80s hi-tops, riding single-gear banana seat bikes, and sporting goatees manicured over the course of an hour every morning to have two little bare patches offset towards the middle.
Oddly enough, given my current condition, I was an early bloomer, with glorious (at the time) pit hair in 5th grade. Unfortunately for my dreams of growing a Star Trek alternate-universe Van Dyke, that’s about where it stopped. To this day I have no sideburns. Nothing. I’m permanently clean-cut whether I like it or not.
Timothy, on the other hand, is well-known for his luxuriant facial hair. Given two weeks in a log cabin to concentrate on the chin follicles, he can produce a full Grizzly Adams mountain man beard.
Obscenely healthy facial hair is nothing new to him. While I may have gotten an early start compared to the average, Timothy bolted right out of the gate. He was actually born fully bearded. Photos taken in the maternity ward soon afterwards show one little crib sporting a complete set of 19th century mutton chops.
He looked like a tiny admiral.
His parents took to shearing those fluffy chops, on doctor’s recommendations, because apparently children with Victorian mustache whiskers inhibit regular lactation, causing the nipple to produce something very similar to gin.
And with the image of a tiny admiral suckling on his gin-teat, we bring you the Timothy Jordan Show News for the 2nd week of February, 2009.
——
We may all need a suckle from the gin-teat in the next few months.
Okay, so I said a last month that the worst was over, that the economy had hit bottom.
This statement was made, on these radio airwaves and recorded for our podcast, on the belief that the nation’s wealthy, the investing class and the surviving investment houses had nowhere else to go, nowhere else to put their money than under the mattress.
Well apparently they’re putting it under the mattress.
The latest figures out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics aren’t pretty. The essential problem in a recession is that the money held by wealthy investors and financial institutions stops circulating. In a bad recession those bonds and shares are liquidated, turned into raw cash and pulled out of the market by some investors looking to protect what they have.
This is called capital flight. It’s what caused the Asian economic crisis earlier in this decade.
And it nearly happened here, according to Pennsylvania’s Rep. Kanjorski. In a Q&A session hosted by CSPAN earlier this week, he told viewers that on September 15th of last year the U.S. Treasury began tracking a massive run on U.S. financial institutions.
Investors were getting ready to put their cash into offshore bank accounts, essentially throwing it under the mattress. Rep. Kanjorski said that the Treasury saw a half-trillion dollars in cash about to flee the country. They immediately made deals to increase Federal deposit insurance and back-room promises to protect the banks.
Our listeners may remember this flurry of government activity around September 15th. There had just been a major decline in the stock market. Senator McCain was still unconvinced that we were facing an economic crisis. It was just over one week later that he reversed course, offering to suspend his campaign in order to resolve the pending economic disaster.
McCain’s freak-out meltdown on the national stage seemed really odd at the time. But as a candidate only a few weeks away from the election, he was most certainly being kept up to date on the economy by the White House. He knew what was going on behind the scenes, and he couldn’t handle it.
Given the stakes of the financial crisis, it’s a very good thing that we ended up with the President that we have. Charts of the current job figures show a double-black diamond decline into some seriously off-piste terrain.
And yes, it’s been far, far too long since I was able to hit the ski slopes, and it’s starting to show.
So speaking of steep vertical descents, consider that the country lost a half-million jobs lost in the last month. This is what we’re up against.
• Rep. Kanjorski on the Sept. 15th event
——
Meanwhile there’s the running fiasco that is the compromise version of President Obama’s spending bill passed earlier today in the Senate.
Woah, let me back up for a moment. That’s not quite true. It’s no longer Obama’s bill. This is the Congress’ bill, and like the Congress itself it has become loaded with the baggage of a thousand special interests.
We were willing to overlook some of the crap glommed on by the House, but the Senate operates differently.
The rules of the Senate require a quorum, sixty votes, in order to move forward on a spending bill. These aren’t the original rules of the Senate, but a set of conditions originally imposed in the 1974 Budget Act, and made more arcane in nearly every one of the 35 years since then.
What it all means is that sixty votes are needed to approve budgeting, authorization, and appropriations for any spending that adds to the deficit.
And the spending plan will most certainly add to the deficit. They need the sixty votes, and as it stands the Democrats have fifty-eight seated members. One of their most liberal members, Al Franken of Minnesota, has yet to be seated, still held up in recount hell. Franken’s absence is being sorely felt this week.
It means that the Senate majority leadership needed two Republicans to cross over to their side of the aisle. It also meant that conservative Democrats had a wedge to exploit.
Is a billion dollars of extra funding for our nation’s nuclear weapons complex going to stimulate the economy? Not likely, but they’re getting it in the Senate bill.
Two billion dollars for “one or more near zero” coal powerplants. This is money set aside for the so-called clean coal powerplant, FutureGen, a billion-dollar boondoggle recently abandoned by its industry sponsors because they determined that it would never work.
But Senators from coal-producing states haven’t given up on making coal clean, even if energy researchers have.
Other interests are circling.
Hollywood studio friends of Vice President Biden have been spotted prowling around Capitol Hill, looking to insert provisions into the final conference version of the spending bill that would give them ability to require that Internet service providers install powerful network management filters on hardware paid for by the bailout plan.
That amendment didn’t make it into either bill, but there’s still a compromise version to be worked out, and stranger things have happened.
• S.366, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
——
And strangely enough, this News segment is coming to an end, but not before our regularly scheduled dose of excellence.
It’s…
There’s a yearly conference attended by fabulously wealthy people who gather to listen to fabulously intelligent people talk about fabulous things.
The TED conferences are more fabulous than excellent, although they have played host to excellence in the past.
This year’s conference saw a moment of near excellence worth mentioning. Well, actually, in any other week the image of Bill Gates, Microsoft Überlord, releasing a crate of mosquitos onto a theater packed full of fabulously wealthy people would have been excellent. Or, come to think of it, it also could have meant that he was announcing Stage 3 of his plan to take over the world with mosquito-borne zombie-juice. If you wanted to take over the world, turning the attendees at a TED conference wouldn’t be a bad way to go.
Hmm…
But I digress, we’re here to talk about excellence.
And excellence is best demonstrated in what physical form?
Bacon, of course.
A man named J. Michael Nelson is doing something that many of us have considered, but few have actually dared to do. He’s going to live on bacon for a month.
No condiments, sauces, or dressings. No vegetables, no breads.
It is, according to Mr. Nelson, Bacon Stupidity Month.
He’s going to eat nothing but bacon for the entire month of February. His only other source of nutrition will be water, beer, wine, and martinis.
There’s no word as to where the line on cocktail onions has been drawn. If its over two, is it still just a garnish? As for the bacon, he’s sampling the offerings from different companies, from local butchers and international craft purveyors, to the big national chains. Thin sliced, thick cut, smoked on hardwood or dry-aged, if it’s bacon, he’s going to eat it.
We’re going to try and get a word with him in the coming weeks, an audio report on his month of Bacon Stupidity.
Those of you out there curious to find out how Mr. Nelson is doing can follow his blog, conveniently linked from this evenings News post on the Timothy Jordan Show website.
He is on Day 10, and doing well. Today’s bacon feasting involved pieces and ends, the scraps left over from bacon production that aren’t quite long enough to form a traditional strip. Apparently they’re surprisingly good.
I’m off to find some pieces and ends of my own, so I’ll offer an end for this, by piecing out this week’s Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence to Mr. J. Michael Nelson and Bacon Stupidity Month.
—–
And that’s the News for the Second week of February, 2009.