SeniorJunior

To Heck With the Big Guys Someone close to me was one of those victims of Wells Fargo (Could have been B of A or J.P. Morgan Chase, any of the Big Guys... ) charged $35 each for several overdrafts on his debit card before he caught on what was happening. As a college student, $35 here and there amounts to a big deal. And of course I'm groused out about how the big banks are exploiting credit card holders, not lending like they should, soaking up public funds, overpaying their executives, lobbying against reasonable regulations, etc. So we decided to take our meager funds out of Wells Fargo and put them in a local credit union. And that was BEFORE Huffington Post came up with the "Move Your Money" campaign. But I really like how Huffington approaches this. Check it out here . Chances are, you will actually save money by moving it to a credit union or a locally owned bank. art credit

Only Dummies Believe in Free Rides National Debt Growing Huge Infrastructure Falling Apart Education Decaying Medical Bankruptcies Rampant Wars With No Civilian Sacrifice On and on and on and on and on...... Bad stuff, all that. So what do numbnuts do? Attack the IRS! Scream that taxes take "my money." So I'm screaming "take my money!" Tax me fairly. Use the money wisely. Don't let America slide into shambles. Paying our way is the American way. (P.S. as a retired person, I am reminded every day that those FICA taxes were the best money I - and my employers - ever spent.) And I want America to stay the world leader it should be. For that to happen, we all have to shoulder our share of the load. So TAX ME. pix credit

Wouldn't You Know It The Prez sets out to recover our (we the taxpayers') TARP money from the banks we saved. Then before the plans get finalized, we have this Reuters story: Banks, experts eye possible ways around Obama fee Dan Wilchins NEW YORK Thu Jan 14, 2010 6:20pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - No sooner does Washington propose a new tax than an army of experts tries to figure out ways to avoid it. That is already the case with U.S. President Barack Obama's proposed fee on banks, designed to ensure that Wall Street banks pay up to $117 billion to reimburse taxpayers for the financial bailout: Bankers, lawyers and consultants are already considering ways to avoid paying the fee. "This law could be a real boon for lawyers and consultants like me. There are tremendous opportunities for coming up with new mechanisms to avoid it," said Bert Ely, a bank consultant in ...

86 is a "B" Isn't It? An oft repeated thing I say (and have said and said) is: "I discovered the limits of my brain's capacity in differential equations." Usually I'm explaining how I went through four majors and five years at four universities without winning a degree. (Then I say, "a broad, shallow education.") It's no small thing to actually have a hard number on your limits. But now I have one. 86. Oh, not that I don't strive for and occasionally reach, say, 90. But it never holds up long. The measuring metric is - get this - FreeCell Solitaire. Note: Squint hard, and you will see the "86%." Wins, that is. That, by the way, is up from 80% at about 500 games, begging the question, "How much time do you waste on FreeCell?" Well, Duffer? If I hit 90%, I'll give you an update.

It Just Keeps Getting Worse Ye who have checked this humble blog occasionally might sense that I have been on the anti- BPA ( Bisphenol Acid in common plastics in our lives) bandwagon for quite a while. And NOW... whoo , boy... it seems BPA in the blood correlates with heart disease. Not good. Anyway, check out Web- MD's take on the research. And watch what the stuff you eat and drink is packaged in. [Here are my prior rants on the stuff: http://seniorjunior.blogspot.com/search?q=bpa+]

THE JOY OF PUBLICATION As gratifying as blogging is, there is something more special about seeing one's letter in a paper. This in the Dec 31-09 alibi , the hot "alternative" paper in Albuquerque:

How About Some (brilliant) actual Progressives for Obama's Economic Advisers ? Oh, now that it's out that Lawrence Summers blitzed Harvard for a billion bucks with derivatives (not to mention a huge whack to its gender equality image), ... doesn't our Prez now have the perfect excuse to put some, you know, real Democrats into the financial cat bird seats? I recommend Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman , and Texas University's James Galbraith ( Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government . ) If you haven't seen these guys on TV, on the Net, in print or somewhere, you are just not paying attention. They are SMART (and I happen to think, right on economic issues). At the very minimum they look more alert than Summers.

The Flat Ten Years of Climate Temperature Never mind the stolen climatologists' e-mails (aka Climate-gate), the biggie among climate change deniers is the fact that worldwide temperatures have been more or less flat for the last ten years or so. "SEE!?" they say, "NO WARMING!" Well, three things: (1.) The flat temperature where the thermometer is stuck is still warm enough to be melting the North Polar Cap and glaciers all over the world, i.e. "stuck on warm." (2.) A likely reason for the pause in warming is that the sun is in " the deepest solar minimum in almost 100 years " cutting its radiation to the Earth - a situation not likely to last very long. (3.) In the context of even a brief period of time - one century - this flat spot is just a normal wiggle in the temperature graph. See the flattening there? (top chart, right side) When the sun "wakes up," you can bet the line will start up again. Trends aren't smooth line...

Running Out of Water, Land and Trees Gotta love this: Now THAT's a farm! Check it out . And this baby produces food 24/7/365, using a tiny percentage of the water the same production would use in flat farming. (Still Sci-Fi, btw.) On a smaller scale there is Valcent . (Full disclosure: I bought some penny shares in Valcent.) And further pumping up my Sci-Fi sense, when we master farming vertically, we will be ready to grow greens on the moon and Mars. Gotta have your greens, SpaceBusters. Look ahead; behind is a mess.

Create These Jobs, Oh Government o'Mine I hear from the right (a lot), "The government create jobs? Riiight." Like that is impossible . Well how about fixing some pure government stuff, like this: As Sewers Fill, Waste Poisons Waterways Yuck! This N.Y. Times headline spun me around a few times. Let's face it, sewer systems are mosdef government thangs. So fix them! Expand them! Hire a bunch of people ("create jobs"), buy lots of concrete and steel (American, of course, creating jobs), buy mucho equipment (from American manufacturers, creating jobs), and get underway right away, PLEASE. How many jobs would be created? I'm guessing tens of thousands, but I am but a blogger, bud, so I really don't know. However, this paragraph from the Times article makes it sound reasonable: "In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems — including those in major cities — have reported violating the law by dump...

How to Respond to Reeely Rotten Politics Wow, the hard Right is pee-ing all over President B. H. Obama. The Moonies' Washington Times revisited the whole Birther thing in a sideways slap at the Prez as "not one of us enough to know how wrong he is." (Heard about it on Rachel Maddow, MSNBC.) So if the right is going to get (stay) irrational, untruthful and just nasty, maybe the rest of us shouldn't be so hard on Obama if he's not moving as fast as we'd like on some issues. I mean, he's had almost a year , for heaven's sake! We snipe a lot, apparently expecting him to be FDR, Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln all rolled into one right away. Now. Today. Ooops, too late. So let's keep our support for the issues and principles we believe in, and our backing for the best guy likely to come along for a while for getting them done. I'm just saying...

Those Blasted Blue Dogs Don't I remember a lot of media noise during the 2006 Democratic take-back of Congress about how one way they did it was to nominate appropriate candidates in normally red districts and states who could ride the wave of Bush nausea and beat the incumbent Republicans? And what amounted to "appropriate?" Why conservative Dems, of course. What a concept! Now, what do I get on the e-mail machine? "Let's Beat the BlueDogs - and Blanche Lincoln!" This apparent rethinking of the 2006 strategy comes from http://www.actblue.com/page/democratscom. That's the "Progressive Wing" of the Dems. I hear no contradiction from the center of the Dems, where ever that is. (Kerry? Bingaman?) Ah, well. I'm just finishing a book about Harry Truman (more later on that), and I'm reminded that politics is a mysterious art. Picture credit: Michele Spiziri here.