House of the rising Moonglum

A friend on another blog recently suggested that there was little difference between what Obama is doing now and what McCain would have done as president. I highly disagree, in tone and tenor much more than anything else. I like having a president that tries to let off the steam of mad populism and stamp it out. Having just read a biography of Washington, and seeing how much he worried about the US revolution turning into the French one, it really drove home the point to me that generating fear to uphold your rule is really only going to produce backlash.

But that is a subtle difference that we can’t really know would have been different, given the other choice. A tangible verifiable difference: The EPA has its teeth back. Three items, first an immediate hold on mountaintop removal coal mining. Second, no more unregulated pollutants in streams. Finally and most importantly: greenhouse gasses have been declared harmful to human life. This means that the new administration is now required by law to regulate the release. I simply don’t see any of those things having happened under McCain.

The first space hitchhiker ever was a small bat. Here is a tribute to you, brave, brave space bat.

Here’s an interesting chart that makes it look like the current down market matches the great depression. The problem with this comparison is that if you go back just 6 months in the chart it perfectly matches the other two major bear markets of the past century. “past performance is no prediction of future gains.” That is for sure.

New CD: $12. Wow. I haven’t payed that little for a U2 album since the 80s. Nice. And apparently it is $4 on Amazon for download. I bet they double their sales for a price that low.

I do not think that I will be attending the conference I was invited to at the Hilton Hanoi Opera Hotel. No. Seriously people. It looks stunningly beautiful, but I just don’t think that the Hilton company is allowed to ever open a hotel anywhere in Vietnam. They were very careful with the name though. Reversing the normal word order and throwing Opera in the name.

From now on I want my stock charts from 0. Lets see some absolute numbers. I want to know when we are 90% down from the peak so I can buy me some stocks.

Just saying.