Isebrand.com

Roubini & Taleb

Nouriel Roubini (RGE Monitor) and Nassim Taleb (author, The Black Swan) on the current financial situation. These were two men who predicted the financial crisis. They are now calling for the nationalization of failed banks. They also rightly point out that the entire financial system is in shabbles, and it cannot be reconstructed so long as the same people who oversaw the collapse and utterly failed to see it coming remain in charge. I agree, and again thank Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) for voting against the appointment of Timothy Geithner. I also did not support Sec. Geithner's appointment. Hopefully, I'll end up looking a bit silly for having objected to his nomination. Time will tell.

Earliest human footprint found in Kenya

From the BBC: "The earliest footprints showing evidence of modern human foot anatomy and gait have been unearthed in Kenya."

This is an interesting discovery that might prove to be (wait for it...) ground-breaking. Unfortunately, however, science reporting in the form of short articles will always be a partially unsuccessful one as scientific fields become ever more specialized. Understanding the full context of this footprint, for instance, means looking at it in light of other pieces of fossil evidence over the last 150+ years, knowledge of the trajectories of human anatomical evolution that, over the decades, have been variously proven or discredited based on evidence, the geological record, comparative anatomy (mostly comparative relative to primate species both extant and extinct), even physics, and more. Paleontology is sort of like a forensic criminal investigation--to get the whole story of "what happened" means drawing on a lot of realms of expertise and knowledge, sometimes seemingly unrelated. It's just impossible to do more than allude to all that in a short article to be read by non-experts like me who aren't going to have the time or attention span to read something lengthy even when we have the desire to do so.

Poem - "On Divination by Birds"

Hat-tip to bioephemera for bringing my attention to this poem, "On Divination by Birds."

It put me in mind of the colossal murders of crows that in autumn in Orange City, Iowa, where I went to college, would fill some great naked tree or two and bellow, squawk, whir, and warble in the dusk, there hundreds of voices audible blocks away. They were an ominous elevated mass beyond the yellow glow of the street lamp. They would die down into croaky murmurs and the random flutters of agitated individuals given time. But if you got too close, their calls and movements increased in volume, and some or most might take flight cacophonously, and circle once or twice like a mass of little hearses all wailing their horns, before they'd settle again to quaver some more in the tree. You would swear you could hear them breath and talking amongst themselves.

On Divination by Birds

I don't need that black

wind of crows kicking up from flax to tell
heavy weather coming, white days to drop
barricades across the interstate,

against two hundred miles of trackless white.
(The crows so obvious then against the miles
of trackless white!) More tricky the magpies

flicker and croak at the sunken carcass
of a roadkill deer, raveling with beaks
the rubbery guts, picking gravel

from scant meat: there must be in their turn-taking
some pattern, some elegant design
beyond need, something in the raw trouble

of jays, the ragged braying geese flown south.

I gaze at their weightless wingbeats daylong
working to discern whether V might stand

for valediction, or vigilance, or
the blank indifference of velocity.

- poem by Kimberley Johnson, A Metaphorical God; via Verse Daily

- photo by Chad Johnson, constellation & crows

Tough week - He looks like I feel

Must earn $120,000+ to make middle class in NYC

From the Daily News:

A new report...by the Center for an Urban Future, shows that New York City is hands-down the most expensive place to live in the country. Among the findings:

• A New Yorker would have to make $123,322 a year to have the same standard of living as someone making $50,000 in Houston.
• In Manhattan, a $60,000 salary is equivalent to someone making $26,092 in Atlanta.
• You knew it was expensive to live in Manhattan, but Queens? The report tagged Queens the fifth most expensive urban area in the country.
• The average monthly rent in New York is $2,801, 53% higher than San Francisco, the second most expensive city in the country.

“Income levels that would enable a very comfortable lifestyle in other locales barely suffice to provide from the basics in New York City,” the report concludes.

Other belt-tightening details include: New Yorkers paid about $34 a month for phone service in 2006. In San Francisco, similar service cost $17 a month. Home heating costs have jumped 125% in the past five years and are up 243% since 1998.

Also, Lisa Colangelo's column about the report:

The city's "average effective rent" during the first quarter 2008 was $2,801, the report states. That's three times the national average.

And building decent, affordable housing for middle-class New Yorkers doesn't seem to be on anyone's priority list.

"New York desperately needs more housing for the middle class, yet almost all of the new housing being built in the five boroughs has been aimed at the luxury market or the poor," reads one section of the report, titled, "If You Build It. ..."

Blog For Darwin - a Global Effort

More than 130 bloggers participated in Blog For Darwin February 12th-15th in celebration of the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth (February 12th, 1809). Hailing from the Galapagos, Catalonia, Britain, Turkey, the US, and elsewhere, participants included paleontologists, poets, geneticists, visual artists, biologists, members of the clergy, nanotechnology experts, historians, oceanographers, and more.

A few submissions remain to be posted. For easier reference, the Participants list will soon be alphabetized and all submissions will eventually be categorized by topic (e.g., "Darwin Aboard the Beagle), type (e.g., "Essay," "Illustration"), or both.

(Illustration by Art Robins.)

BLOG FOR DARWIN IS IN PROGRESS!

Check out: Blog For Darwin (www.blogfordarwin.com)

Wall Street 2.0?

According to an article in Crain's New York Business, there are a few green shoots on Wall Street, and possibly the beginning of some manner of Wall Street 2.0. Maybe. But my worry is that what is being observed is not a totally new operating system (to stay with the computer metaphor), which is what's needed, so much as an update downloaded to fix a few bugs. I.e., that things will pretty much be "business as usual," which is not good necessarily very good for the middle class, but will, of course, be great for the very wealthy.

What is more, many of the same people who got us into this mess are still at the helms of big ships, and they're not telling everything that their TARP money is being used for. That doesn't sound very "2.0" to me.

From the article:

Don't look now, but amid the darkest times to hit Wall Street in nearly 80 years there are stirrings of life. As the new Obama administration races to repair the shattered banking system, investors are beginning to place their bets. They are abandoning big banks and instead placing their chips on a group of financial institutions whose survival seemed very much in doubt last autumn....

Hitting the pause button

The relentless “boutique-ification” of Manhattan (and much of Brooklyn) and corporatization has paused for a time. Commercial rents are way down and vacancies up. Residential property prices have started to decrease (finally) too. Good.

I mostly disliked what the city was becoming, especially during the last 5 years. Manhattan lost a lot of its dynamism and a great deal of its cultural diversity because most of the middle class can't afford Manhattan. The rich got richer and the middle class was (and still is) getting squeezed. The rich got richer and the middle class saw real wages actually decline while the cost of living skyrocketed. Corporate presence still is expanding everywhere. Mom and Pop stores and decades-old neighborhood fixtures were priced out by corporate and large-scale operations benefiting from corporate welfare. (Not that that's new in New York City. Madison Square Garden still doesn't pay taxes.) Commercial property owners have tax benefits to enjoy for leaving properties vacant and holding out for sky-high rents that only high-end or corporate tenants can pay. Thus, high-priced boutiques and corporate outlets spread like cancers. There are the intersections in Manhattan with a bank branch on two of the four corners, and  stretches of avenues with a bank every or every other block--bank branches where there used to be Laundromats, delis, diners, hardware stores, night clubs, bakeries, neighborhood dentists, doctors, and attorneys, book shops, restaurants, grocery stores, etc. And are all--any--of those bank branches closing now during the economic crisis? Of course not. Because there is no crisis for the banks--only bailouts. (At the same time, these banks they aren't issuing any loans, either. For them, it's all get-from-the-taxpayer and give-nothing-back.) In fact, two new ones have opened within a block from my office door in Chelsea in the last four months, and one's about to open down the block. I guess that's part of our TARP money at work: more bank branches.

My concern is that the current crisis reflects a pause in, not a re-orientation of, how business is done in America, that it's like rebooting a computer when what it needs is a new operating system, that everything will be back to the way it was, that "business as usual" won't change, but will merely for a short time be dormant as we muddle through a brief period of business unusual.

Tom Friedman Bested by Bink

Over at DailyKos.com, a diarist with the screen name bink seriously takes Tom Friedman to task for his off-base and off-putting column. From bink's diary:

During the last eight years, incomes for working people have stagnated or declined. Poverty rose.  We had eight years with no net job creation. The nutrition problem in our country grew worse, culminating with ten percent of the population on food stamps -- and this was before the financial collapse! We experienced skyrocketing costs for housing, higher education and medical care at the same time government was threatening to yank away safety net programs like Social Security.
.....
Now, rich people like Tom Friedman are calling for austerity?

Tom, actually the world is an oblate spheroid.

(Photo: Tom Friedman by the World Resources Institute Staff)