Patrick’s Rants

Bush in a short clip was defending putting federal money into and behind Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae:

“People are calling this a bailout. It’s not a bailout (hyperventilate laugh). The shareholders still own the company”

Well isn’t that the definition of a bailout? Maybe he was confused with a buyout where the government would directly own Freddie and Fannie and the shareholders would have cash

This morning the Fox affiliate was reporting that John Edwards was having an affair and sneaking out of a hotel room while reporters were following him. Their source was the Enquirer. I mean if it was in the Enquirer then it must be true. So when are we going to start hearing about all of the alien abductions and sasquatch ordering pizza and then refusing to pay for it? Fox spends nearly half of each news hour covering auditions for American Idol (pretending that it’s news instead of an unpaid 30 minute commercial for a show on their network) and now their source is the Enquirer? There’s only so much stupid reporting that one can take. If only Andrea would move to another network.

Got this in the email today:

Cindy Sheehan Goes to Washington
Cindy Sheehan

There is nothing unusual about the fact that I am heading to Washington, DC today. Indeed, since my son was killed in Iraq on April 04, 2004, I have been to our nation’s capitol dozens of times.

(more…)

(Updated 2008/06/18 18:15 - wow that was freaking fast!)
(Updated 2008/06/18 18:45 - I didn’t get to respond to this last update as it was just after dinner)
(Updated 2008/06/26 19:30 I should have had a response by 2008/06/23 13:43 even allowing for a “business day 48″ So I sent the follow up email)
(Updated 2008/07/01 7:24 Still no responses from Sandisk despite two emails to the rma address)
(Updated 2008/07/03 6:40 they called and left a message on my answering machine - no concept of what time of day it is here I guess - and left a bizarre message in my RMA inbox)
(Updated 2008/07/23) I have the new MP3 Player.

---

Attentive readers might remember my Sandisk Support post. I’m now doing the dance with Sansa again and this time I’m a little steamed. I filed a support request that was closed after two contacts. I’m going to post the saga in all its glory. The Sandisk is dead. Won’t power on.
This is a long post. I will add an update line to the top of the post as it progresses. (more…)

We’re having an impact! Today we reached a quarter of million mark, a huge fundraising milestone. We’ve collected almost 8000 signatures from committed voters in San Francisco. And for the first time since she’s taken her seat Madame Speaker (Pelosi) has had to talk about why’s she’s taken impeachment off the table.

This week the House Judiciary Committee will hold clearly imperfect and pandering hearings into the “abuses” of the Bush administration. Cindy for Congress, of course, believes with the vast majority of San Franciscans that impeachment hearings should have begun in January of 2007 and, if so, would have been completed by this time.
(more…)

Last Tuesday a memorial service was held for seven helicopter crash victims here in Flagstaff¹. This town is both big and small at the same time. While you might not recognize everyone that you see here everyone is connected to everyone else and there are many stories about the people involved and more untold about this event.

The crash occurred Sunday June 29 at around 3:45pm.² Investigators combed over the crash scene for almost a week. They collected pieces of the choppers to send to Phoenix to reconstruct the scene.

I have heard a few stories regarding the crash and some of the people involved. (all second hand of course) There’s Michael McDonald the firefighter who needed emergency treatment for an adverse antibiotic reaction, whose crew mates reportedly left the fire in the Grand Canyon upon hearing about the crash. One of the the pilots seemingly knew he was going down and had begun to unstrap and remove the fire extinguisher in his cockpit but was unable to use it. The flight nurse hung on for several days at the Flagstaff Medical Center in critical condition while hospital staff held very little hope that he would survive. On one of the helicopters a crew member got out at the Flagstaff airport due to weight limits unknowingly saving his own life and setting himself up for the condition known as survivor’s remorse. Although flights were grounded, the remaining employees and crew members insisted on being allowed to get back to work flying.

One commentator has said that we don’t say thanks enough to these heroes in the sky. We probably don’t. They fly in, grab someone who needs serious medical attention and fly off with them in the space of minutes. It is a dangerous job for which they receive a little extra pay that may or may not make up for the incredible amount of stress and levels of high adrenaline that tend to be maintained throughout the entire flight.

1. Memorial Service
2. Initial crash reporting

I don’t comment much on the passing of public figures, but I chanced upon the passing of Joe Barr this morning. While I didn’t know the more playful side of Barr that is written about, I did read his column from time to time.

This morning we also hear that Tony Snow has died. Snow was a staunch Fox News Republican defender who worked for the White House as well before he resigned to concentrate on fighting his cancer. The link also mentions that he subbed on the Rush Limbaugh show which is no major surprise.

If we are going to remember Snow, we must also remember Tim Russert. A quiet persevering host who never let his guests off easy.

And let’s not forget George Carlin. In the days after his death he was remembered on NPR, NBC (playing early Saturday Night Live episodes) and Limpbaugh’s show. Unfortunately, although Limpbaugh claims that George was behind Limpbaugh on environmental issues (quoting from rushlimbaugh.com)

CARLIN: Let me tell you about endangered species, all right? Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control nature. It’s arrogant meddling. It’s what got us in trouble in the first place. Doesn’t anybody understand that? Interfering with nature. Over 90%, way over 90% of all the species that have ever lived on this planet, ever lived, are gone. They’re extinct. We didn’t kill them all. They just disappeared. That’s what nature does. We’re so self-important, so self-important. Everybody is going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails. And the greatest arrogance of all, save the planet. What?

RUSH: This is great stuff. And of course these are the things the left ignores about George Carlin. But listen to this next one.

Listen to this next one indeed. I found the skit funny. But I can see it for what it is: a routine. Limpbaugh, unfortunately for him, cannot. Instead he sees this as support for tearing up the planet.

CARLIN: I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths, people trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. There is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are (bleep) — difference, difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. It’s been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little more than 200 years.

RUSH: Yes. Does this not sound like things you have heard on this program?

CARLIN: Two hundred years versus four and a half billion, and we have the conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat, that somehow we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us, been through all kinds of things worse than us, been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are! We’re going away.

And did you notice? He says, “Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. It’s been here four and a half billion years”
Well Limpbaugh, if you don’t understand it’s a skit now, you’re just dumb. I mean, the evangelical born agains think the earth is only 6000 years old and that humans road around on dinosaurs. That makes extinctions scarier not less scary. But Limpbaugh sees this as supporting his ideas that we should essentially be “Earth first, we’ll mine the rest of the planets later.”

Yes my friends. Rush Limbaugh here again. I know what’s right for you. Don’t listen to those Democrats. They want you to use those toxic light bulbs - those curly fluorescent things. The ones that have as much mercury as a year’s worth of fish. The old light bulbs will be illegal my friends and you won’t be able to eat the fluorescent ones! That’s something you won’t hear from the gangstas in the drive by media.

Oops! I’m off track here. I really wanted to talk about that myth, “global warming”. Today on my web site I cite an isolated example where the ice is actually expanding in Northern California. My friends, if global warming were anything more than the Democrats way of controlling your life, there would not be this expansion of the ice sheets in California. And aside from that, my ice maker would stop working. Inside my freezer the temperature hovers around zero degrees celsius which proves that Al Gore is still bitter over the stolen legitimate election in 2000 and he’s making up global warming to try to blame on the Republicans. I mean, Jimmy Carter knew global warming wasn’t real. He told people to put on a sweater to conserve energy! You don’t put on a sweater unless it’s cold my friends; so Jimmy Carter single-handedly rebukes the global warming “theory”.

So now you know. Global warming isn’t real. And even if it were, the biggest “green house gas” is water vapor my friends and no one’s suggesting that we get rid of rain! Plants and trees need carbon dioxide so more is better! Let’s drill the hell out of the coast line and the Alaska wildlife preserve. Heck, I’m not going to be around for the consequences and frankly I don’t care.

Or - the other things that happen in the futures/commodities market.
Rush stated on his show:

“So once again, my friends, it falls to me, becomes my responsibility to give you a short course on speculators and speculation. We’ve done this a couple of times before, but let me try a different tack. What is speculation? What is the commodities market? It’s the futures market, by definition, speculating on what’s going to happen in the future, which means that people are betting on the price of whatever commodity in the future is going to be, be it soybeans, be it corn, be it oil. “

Right so far…

“Speculators are just bettors, and they make money both ways if they’re right. If they bet the price is going to go down and they sell their contract and it goes, they’ve made money. If they bet it’s going to go up and they buy a futures contract, they make money.”

Um… I think what he’s trying to say is that if you short or sell a contract and the price goes down you make money. Same if you are long or buy a contract and the price goes up you make money. But, if you are short and the price goes up you lose when you have to close out your contract. Same thing for the longs. If you buy and the price goes down you lose when you close your contract.

He goes on:

“But there’s nothing about futures or options that makes it any more attractive to bet that commodities will go up than to bet they will go down. If you guess wrong on the direction, you lose money. That’s all you need to know about speculation. When you speculate on the price of a commodity, what you’re doing is betting on whether the price will rise or whether it will fall. You’re not betting on whether you want it to rise or fall. This is the difference. Everybody thinks that the speculators are trying to drive the price up or trying to drive the price down, that’s not what they’re trying to do. They’re guessing. They’re betting. It may be educated guessing, educated betting, but they still are. You’re not betting that you want what you’re doing will cause the price to rise or fall, not whether you hope it will rise or fall. Your money is going to do nothing to cause the price of oil to rise or fall. It’s gonna base itself, all the results on the good old laws of supply and demand.”

Futures markets are a combination of futures contracts and options on those contracts. Suffice it to say that it gets complex. There are speculators in these markets but the biggest players are the suppliers and the consumers. In this market the suppliers are the oil drillers and pumpers, the consumers are the oil companies themselves. In some cases the oil companies can be the suppliers as well. An oil producer might want to be long or short depending on which way they think prices will go.

Let’s take a hypothetical oil producer - some guy in Kuwait for instance. He is trying to get the highest price for his oil that he can while trying to maintain a minimum dollar amount that he will get per barrel (bbl). So Kuwait guy decides to lock in a price of $80.00 bbl. He enters a contract to sell (shorts) one contract¹ at $80 bbl. We’re going to assume that he will hold his contract until expiration. If the price of oil is $90 bbl he loses because his contract is for $80 bbl and that’s all he gets. If the price goes down to $60 bbl, he gets $80 bbl; the price he locked in. Shell Oil decides that they don’t want to pay any more than $80 bbl at the same time as Kuwait guy decides to sell and they buy one contract at $80 bbl. We’ll assume they hold their contract until expiration as well. If the price goes to $90 bbl, up Shell Oil only pays $80 bbl because that’s the contract they bought. If the price falls to $70 bbl they still pay $80 bbl.

Enter the speculator or investor. When the guy in Kuwait decides to short but Shell Oil isn’t ready to buy the investor enters the contract. He buys the contract for $80 bbl. If the price starts to rise Shell might decide they want to lock in their price at $85 bbl and buy a contract. The speculator decides to sell at $85 bbl and that’s the contract that Shell ends up with. In this case the speculator made $5 bbl² the Kuwaiti producer makes nothing and Shell locks in their price at $85.

There are a couple of interesting things about commodities contracts. First the margin requirement - or amount of cash that you have to have in commodity trading account - is quite low when compared to stocks. It changes over time and by how much money you have outside of the account, but it can be as low as 10% of the contract amount and quite close to 100% depending upon the volatility of the market. If you have a contract and don’t close it out by buying when you are short or selling when you are long you are required to either deliver (if you are short) or receive (if you are long) and pay up if you happen to be long.

Where the speculators do can affect the price of oil (or other commodity) is if they believe that the price it too low and there is no one to short a contract (for each buy there is an equal and opposite sell). The shorts don’t get into the market until the price is too high. If there is no one to sell you a contract you can’t buy one. They don’t make the price go up or down.

Like I said, Rush got it partly right. I didn’t add the options on the commodities markets which adds that much more to the mix. If you want more, check out one of the many commodities brokers, such as Lind-Waldock

---

1. 1000 bbl
2. Times 1000 barrels = $5000.00

We went camping at Blueridge over the weekend. It’s generally quiet, out of the way and not too far to drive to. We’ve got a new trailer cargo rack that we used a couple of weeks ago at Dead Horse and it worked very well. We had to take care of some stuff at Juvenile Court and then we were ready to head out.
Everything was going well until we were almost to Happy Jack Lodge when i noticed an “exploding cloud” in the side view mirror. “We lost something,” I tell my wife. I started pulling over as a Forest Service truck pulled in behind us. My wife and I got out and walked to the rear of the van to look at the hitch storage. Part of the bungie style web had snapped, releasing several items from their snug space. I could smell the burnt plastic and aluminum from one of our folding chairs that had apparently been dragging behind us for a while.

The Forest Service guys walked toward us, “I was trying to flash my lights at you. This started about two miles back. Most of your stuff is there on the horizon.”
I’m pretty sure that I thanked them and they climbed back into the government truck and started it back up. (Saving gas while they talked to us)

At the top of the hill, visible in the late afternoon sun was one of our storage containers. The one that held the majority of our dry food as well as a couple of rolls of toilet paper - part of that white cloud that I had seen. We quickly yanked the remaining storage container from the back of the van, crammed things in on top of the kids. Re-secured the remaining items and drove to the scene of the “release”. We looked around and found a few items that we were able to recover immediately. A roll of toilet paper (30 feet or so was wrapped into the branches of a tree - we left that) a box of cookies, a jar of pickles that didn’t make it, strewn for hundreds of feet.

My wife starting walking back up the road while I drove slowly along trying to see anything else littering the sides of the road. M walked along crossing the road often to see if there was anything left. After somewhere around three or four miles we decided that we had everything that we were going to recover; somewhere around a quarter of the dry stuff. Also lost was a small folding table and a sleeping roll - my wife claims to have seen possible remnants of the table broken up along the road, but there was no sign of the sleeping roll. After taking stock of what we had left we decided to continue our mini vacation. (more…)