March 21st, 2008
Now, I'm certainly no economic expert or banker-type — hell, I haven't balanced my personal checkbook in over 6 years; I just use the ATM and end-of-month statements to check on it — but even I could see what was happening in 2006 & 2007, with the hyper-inflated housing industry, as it got into the sub-prime mortgage mess, back in 2002. Since GW Bush took office in 2001, it became the prime mover behind the Ponzi-schemed US Economy, and he and his so-called "economic advisors" — Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley etc — just let it continue down the road-to-ruin, in favor of massive, short-term, sub-prime mortgage gains. Now, Bear Stearns has gone under, and CitiBank isn't far behind. Well, JP Morgan Chase owns BS, now. And despite Mr Bush's public naivete about it all, the American Taxpayer will once again foot-the-bill for this gross, calculated economic stupidity. Savings, retirements, IRAs and hopes & dreams will be wiped-out for millions of hard-working, Middle Class Americans, so that scores-of-millions of ineligible, incompetent, lowlife minorities and criminal illegal aliens, who couldn't put two nickels on the same table, could buy a $750,000 home, without the required 20% downpayment and little-to-no risk, to themselves. American Taxpayers would take all the risk, Bush & Co decided. We have spent 50+ years in this country using government to promote housing through all kinds of forced tax and assistance programs. This unnatural meddling in the economy has severely misallocated human, material and financial resources and skewed our transportation and housing systems into an irreversible, resource-wasting monster. Now our financial system has also become hostage to the political cry to save the home mortgage industry through another US Taxpayer-funded bailout. Whenever the US Gov't gets involved in anything, it screws-up whatever it touches. History is littered with the examples: Social Security (another Ponzi scheme); education; "War on Drugs"; "War on Poverty"; immigration; tax reform; agriculture; medicine; gun control; urban renewal; technological innovation and on and on and on. The list is so massive that it boggles the rational, thinking mind. But I digress. (Some people saw the $615 trillion dollar bubble getting ready to burst, as far back as 2002, and actually made some noise about it.) So the previously-mentioned banking groups created SIVs — Structured Investment Vehicles — to handle the increasingly dangerous financial risk. An SIV is a fund which borrows money by issuing short-term securities at low interest and then lends that money by buying long-term securities at higher interest, making a profit for investors from the difference. These new funds were designed to stave off what Citigroup and the others saw as a threat to the financial markets world-wide: the danger that dozens of huge bank-affiliated funds will be forced to unload many hundreds-of-billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities and other assets, driving down their prices in a "fire sale". That could force big write-offs by banks, brokerages and hedge funds that own similar investments and would have to mark them down to the new, lower market prices. Globally, SIVs had $400 billion in assets as of August 28th, according to Moody's. On Monday, Citigroup will have to publish its quarterly results. The other banks will use the immediate time pressure for some very profitable (for them) and costly (for Citigroup) provisions for the bail out. Either Citigroup will agree or go belly up. In case you wonder why this is happening, don't look any further than the corrupt, criminal US Congress and the Bush Administration. Because SIVs are off the balance sheet, it is difficult for investors to size-up the full financial risks that they pose. Off-balance-sheet liabilities played a major role in the 2001 collapse of Enron Corp, and the makers/ regulators of accounting rules have generally sought to get affiliated entities back on the balance sheets of the companies creating them. Can you say, B-R-I-B-E-S? Net, net: If anyone ever thought the old "too big to fail" doctrine was only a theory, well, there is the proof that it exists. Welcome to "The New World of Finance" where rocket science (bullshit) suspends risk, and when gravity (reality) takes over, banking regulators (criminals) merely suspend it. Solution: no more bailouts. Let the banks fail, pick-up the pieces, absorb the losses, and the system's health will be better for it. But because they won't allow the market to take corrective action itself, and insist on throwing more money down the dumper, you'd better hold on to what you have, as it's going to be a "very bumpy ride", for the next couple of years.
Around The Garden Center™.
The calls for landscaping, landscape maintenance, mulch and plants are coming-in fast and furious, and it's only mid-March. It's still Winter, fer chrissakes, people; lighten-up! Mother Nature's not finished with us yet, despite the calendar saying that Spring arrived yesterday. In previous years, when we've had such mild Winters, we've been "hammered" pretty good in late March and early April. I'm a little nervous at what's ahead — a major snow or ice storm, probably — considering that I have tender nursery stock in storage, and 8-10 tractor trailers of the same, arriving at the end of March and through the first 2 weeks of April. Okay, okay; it was 61°F on Friday, but that won't last. Trust me on this.
Saturday morning started out nicely-enough, but quickly went to hell. The cats woke me up around 6am (still "0-Dark-Thirty" here) to get watered and fed, and after washing my face etc, I put on my Turkish Bathrobe, stepped into my German Clogs, and started walking to the down stairs, when I felt "something cold and wet" in the left one. Jeeeeeez! One of them had thrown-up in my shoe! #*&%*@$$!!! What a lovely feeling: cat puke at 6am! Hobbling back to the master bath, I washed and dried my foot, and wiped/washed out and dried the clog. A 450 SqFt Master BR, laundry, dressing room & Bath, and one of my cats found the "1 SqFt" where I park the clogs at night! I wanted to kill/skin them both and make earmuffs and a scarf out of them! I was sure my BP was peaking, by then, and I hadn't even had coffee. Nonetheless, I watered/fed them, made coffee and breakfast and cleaned-up another small pile downstairs. Furballs. Yuk. I was off to work by 9am, and stopped at the cleaners to p/u my laundered/starched shirts. "Great start" to the day, huh?
A dozen people were in on Saturday, both looking around and purchasing trees for April installation. I worked in GHs 1 & 4, watering some dry plant material, and fondly remembering the "early days" when I spent uncounted hours in all of them, propagating plants, sowing seeds, dividing/repotting perennials and ornamental grasses, repotting houseplants etc. I enjoyed those days (and many all-nighters) before I had so many others to do the jobs I loved doing. These days, it's rare that I even get out there, let alone get soil under my fingernails and my hands, dirty. I had an amazing tan in the Winter months, from working in the 5 (now 7) GHs and many thought I "went to the islands" for vacation. No such luck; I had to work hard to get ready for Spring. It was just "Me, Myself & I", back in "The Day".
After almost 2 hrs of tossing-and-turning, I just couldn't sleep Saturday night, and was back up at 1:15 am, having a mug of green tea, working on grasping CSS-xHTML on several of the "Journal" templates which my dear friend D•••• had built for me. I'm still able to make only minor changes. How she embraced this so quickly still amazes me; she is one very savvy lady. I really hate to give this up next week, and let her down, but I still feel like I'm getting nowhere with it, and I certainly can't be calling her up every 15-20mins when I'm having "niggling problems". I need to be able to either take these mechanics and run with them, or kick it all to the curb, and go back to HTML. Sure, I'm changing background colors, pics, adding captions, changing typefaces, headlines, subheads, dates, link colors alright, but I can't quite seem to get the mechanics of how she built all the templates. Is that really necessary for me? Is what I'm doing enough, at this point in time? Or is it just an ego thing with wanting to have that much "control" over the process? No, I don't think so. If I'm going to convert www.gdnctr.com to CSS-xHTML, initially with her help, I then need to be able to service any of its "problems" myself, down the road. So many decisions, and so little time. I gave up around 2:30am and no problem sleeping, this time.
It was a rainy, cold Palm Sunday in the York area, and I thought about getting up early and going to any nearby Church, but I didn't. Next Sunday is Easter, and March 23rd is the earliest it's been celebrated since 1939. "The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak". Instead, I slept-in and went food shopping, and then down to my Office for a few hours, before going to Mom & Dad's at 1pm, for our Traditional St Patty's Day Dinner of *corned beef, cabbage & potatoes* and black raspberry ice cream; no green beer, though. Traffic was heavy, especially around the large malls. Later that afternoon, I went back to working on www.gdnctr.com's revisions — in just plain HTML — and watched a pretty good thriller movie on FX-CATV: "Enemy Of The State". It's nice to both work on my super-fast RAID 0+1 machine, and watch TV, too.
Monday was a cool, sunny 49°F, perhaps close to a "taste of Spring", and I had 5 employees in working on various projects on the property. There are scores of projects needing attention, before we can bring anything out of the 6 GHs, or we can accept scheduled tractor-trailer loads of arriving nursery stock from wholesale growers around the nation. I met with most of my GC&N Key Staff in the morning to put a 7-page "to do list" together for them to work on around the Complex, handled over two dozen calls for mulch deliveries, minor landscape estimates, people looking for jobs and even managed to finish-up a pending LSCP estimate. Nonday was also St Patty's Day, and I wondered what a pint of Guinness Stout would taste like, after these past several months. Nah.
Tuesday was almost a mirror image of Monday: busy and getting busier. Instead of bothering my LSCP Designer with going on every phone call's site visit, I've decided to let him concentrate on the medium-to-large jobs, and I'll go out on the small stuff, and once again have some fun with it. Maybe it's just that I'm getting itchy about Spring getting here, or perhaps I have more energy after realizing that we're going to need a 30-50% increase in retail business to prosper and offset the recession, this year. Last year, it was The Unending Drought From Hell; now it's the tanking economy. More calls from nursery brokers about upcoming deliveries, beginning next Monday. We're prepping the Complex, for the laid-over stock to come out of the 6 GHs, and for the newly-arriving stock. It's a huge job, and will take everyone's physical effort for 2-3 weeks, non-stop. (Maybe I should have built a smaller place?)
After getting into work early on Wednesday morning, I got a call from the Unemployment Office in Lancaster, saying that "they were having problems with some of the 2006 salary numbers" for two of my employees, in determining 2007 eligibility payments. They were reading an extra digit into one man's numbers, which took his earnings from $10k to $110k! And another went from $22k to $220k. Yikes. And the state employees entered the wrong numbers, over-paying him, instead of calling us and verifying the simple numbers which the affirmative action morons — Shameeka, Tamika, Vanessa etc — couldn't clearly read! Un-fricking-believeable! Now one of the employees is going to be penalized for Harrisburg's and Lancaster's 1980s (x286s), non-networked systems, requiring faxes and courier-delivered copies, instead of having everything online. Idiots!
It rained most all day Wednesday — we got the tail-end of this system — and the few employees I had in to work on projects, went home when the rains got really heavy, around 11:30am. Dad left around 2:30pm, and I stayed until about 5, working on getting a "Hacktool.Keyfinder" malware file out of the three GC&N IntraNet machines. After running full-system scans, multiple-times, on all machines, it was finally located and removed. IMO, all virus writers/hackers/crackers should be mercilessly tracked-down and summarily head-shot with a .45cal; preferably mine!
My Weather Channel Alarm in my home computer's tray, went-off at 10:15pm, warning me of a line of thunderstorms w/ hail and 50mph winds approaching the York (PA) are, around 11pm. 65°F. I watched it come directly at my East York location, thunder & lightning all over the place, pea-sized hail, horizontal rain, lights flickering, power off & on, APC Power Back-Up working as it should, cats running for cover under the bed. The rain on the condo skylights sounds like two trains coming through the front door. The T&L was over quickly, but the rain continued on and on.
After last nights t-storms and cold front roared through, temps dropped 25°F+ and began to feel like Winter, once again. With everything digital blinking "RESET", I overslept on Thursday morning, and enjoyed the hell out of it. I made it into work by 10am, with about 2 mins to spare, and Arthur was already at work, spreading ½" crushed gravel on the Retail Nursery Display areas, filling-in low spots. I had to get a LSCP design and estimate mailed, and needed some bubble-padded mailing paks, so I headed over to Wal-Mart, since all the Staples stores are well north of the GC&N Complex. I found some great lightweight, "Faded Glory" summer shirts, and grabbed them, as well. More and more calls are coming in for work needing to be done.
Daffodils are showing more color in their buds; tulips are barely up 4-5" and still green in bud; forsythia is just now breaking bud with the past warm, sunny days, and the many varieties of cherry trees are still in tight bud. Spring arrived Thursday, and the usual enviro-wacko morons are calling it "too early" and "top 10 warmest", without the benefit of rational, sentient thought. Total BS.
It seems that only The Weather Channel has enough brains and resources to track average precipitation and temperature; the local idiots sure can't handle it. And the morons in Harrisburg can't even find their own butts with both hands, let alone compile such data. You'd think they woulde be smart enough to *link to it*, but noooooooo. Yet, even they don't give running totals; just prior months and years.
Despite crude oil prices dropping to below $100/bbl today, gas prices are holding steady in the York (PA) area. Unleaded Regular (87oct) is still at $3.25/gal, Unleaded Premium (89oct) is at $3.35/gal, and Unleaded Super Premium (92oct) is still $3.55/gal —, but that's only because supply is finally outstripping demand. We're driving less and paying more. Isn't that fun?
As an aside; remember my pathetic cave-in on CSS-xHTML, a short week ago? Well, I've changed my mind. (Do I sound like a liberal librarian?) I'm PO'd at myself for giving-up on it, and am back on it, with a vengence. In the interim, a few things have changed and have helped to "demystify" some of that coding, but not all of it. I have a long way to go. I'm back!
Things Which Make Your Head Explode™
President Bush spun the odometer this week, and the corrupt, criminal, treasonous US Senate passed the first $3,000,000,000,000 (that's a TRILLION DOLLARS!) Fiscal Budget for 2009. How much is a trillion dollars? If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills! One trillion dollar bills would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun. It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills. Got it?
Barry Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong™
Hey, Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong: yo lowlife mammy was a white trash whore bitch, porch-monkey, muslim filth, scumbag nigga. Filthy skank mama did the "tube steak boogie" with every sambo she could, and a half-breed mulatto scumbag like you, is the pathetic left-wing Marxist result.
And your grand-mammy, Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong, is a stinking lying nigga bitch. First she says she's a lowlife, dirtbag piece-of-pigshit muslim filth/shit/trash; now the old hag-bag claims she's a Good Christian. She's a lying whore, sambo! Just like you. Which is it, Obama-Osama scumbag?
And your skank bitch, affirmative action-enabled wife, Michelle Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong, who couldn't get into a lousy Grade B Movie with her shitty grades, yet got into Whitey's Princeton and Harvard, is a paranoid, mentally-ill, delusional racist, pig-fucking bitch whore piece-of-nigga-shitfilth, sambette! Wha'cha tink bout dat, porch-monkey Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong? Yo bitch is a ho-dog, sambo! Betta tell dat ho to go iron her hair so mo! Everything about that stinking, lowlife skank whore is right here.
And your nigga pastor, the irrev Jerry "I Hate Amerikkka" Wright, has a nasty big racist hate-filled mouth, which James Earl Ray could easily "fix". Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ is a racist, bigoted shithole, full of hate-filled, lowlife, dirtbag niggas. Go back to Africa, sambos, if America's too much for you scumbags! You're a liar, Barry-Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong: you love his spew, don't you, half-breed, porch monkey?
And YOU'RE A STINKING LIAR, Nigga! You heard and agree with every word that Nigga piece-of-shit lowlife racist bigot Wright said, didn't you, Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong asshole! You're not fit to even clean toilets at The White House.
Look at these empty-headed, pathetic pieces of white & black-trash-shitscum filth, fawning-drooling-crying-wetting themselves all over that racist, bigoted muslim garbage. Un-fucking-believable, lowlife liberal subhuman filth, aren't they?
Barak & Michelle Obama are citizens of the world. They attribute international hostilities to overheated nationalism, an obsolete political solution to cultural conflicts. Barak Obama also attributes the cause of warfare among nations in great measure to the arrogance and global ignorance of the United States of America. That is who they are and what they believe. They are not patriotic, but they do not see themselves as ungrateful or disloyal. The see themselves as having gratitude for the political institutions and civil rights legislation that made possible their own rise from humble beginnings to a full realization of their own human potential. They see themselves as owing loyalty to their personal ethos, and the larger and higher ideals of internationalism. They are first allied with their ethnic heritage and family ties, second with their socialism, and third with the benevolent global family of humanity. They are what they are. It is a form of integrity that prevents them from what they consider jingoistic flag waving, lapel pins, anthems, pledges and the like–they answer to a higher purpose. The Obamas and their like-minded "Christo-Leninists" are The Enemy Within™, and if they're not politically and socially destroyed, they will destroy America.
Net net: the Obamas, their so-called "pastor" Wright, are lowlife NIGGERS, not Blacks and certainly not Americans. Obamas and Wright are subhuman filth/shit/trash/junk/crap/garbage/racist bigots. It's in their best interest to keep Blacks and Whites at each others' throats, through racial division and unrest. Without that contrived unrest, all 3 would be out of jobs and living in shacks, where they belong. They're race-baiters of the lowest kind. They thrive on the politics of the past, reminding Blacks of the distant slavery and never, never telling them how to get out of the "liberal-demokkkRAT plantation" of dependence and poverty. For the past 60 years, their lib-dem "masters" have kept them oppressed and beholden to the "gov't cheese" — welfare and the weekly checks — which have kept them enslaved, instead of allowing them to take advantage of all that America has to offer to anyone who wants to work hard and get ahead.
When that loudmouthed, white-trash-assed shithead, Imus was in trouble for saying "nappy-headed hos", ol' porch-monkey, tar-baby, jungle-bunny, piece-of-shit, Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong was calling for his firing? Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong is a fucking, racist Nigga porch-monkey!
And his Nigga buddy, mentor, spiritual advisor, lowlife Nigga pastor, racist bigot, Jerry "I Hate AmeriKKKa!" Wright, hates Jews, too! Hell, he might as well be a subhuman muslim-islamist-arab, for all the hatred he harbors!
Hey, guess what? Ol' piece-of-shit, Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong is endorsed by the racist, murderous hate-filled Nigga filth, New Black Panther Party, and homo-sodomite shit-for-brains, Malik Zulu Shabbazz, hisownself, on sambo's website. Nice going, Nigga!
Election 2008™.
Given what I know about the sociopathic, lying leftist socialist bitch, Hitlery Rotten Klintoon (CRIMINAL-NY) and the America-hating, racist, half-breed bigot, muslim-islamist trash, Barry Hussein-Obama-Osama-Lama-Ding-Dong (NIGGA-IL), I'd have to vote for the liberal GOP-RINO, John "No Brain" McCain (TRAITOR-AZ). Sad to say it, but I would do almost anything to keep those two other subhuman filth out of The White House. McCain turns my stomach, but I'd still pull the lever for him, given the choice.
Global Warming BS™
Have you seen this video: "BBC: The Great Global Warming Swindle"? It was outright-banned from leftist, hate-filled, dirtbag lowlife scumbags, Google.com's and YouTube.com's websites, by the mentally-ill, left-wing, global warming idiot wackos, but I've preserved it, for posterity, aka you, me and *ours*. Watch, be informed and download it for others to see. It's on my corporate server, and will stay there, BTW.
Lowlife, Subhuman Filth™
Well, NY State gets rid of the mentally-ill criminal and serial adulterer, Eliot Spitzer (CRIMINAL-NY), and gets a blind, Whitey-hating Nigga Lt Gov, Davey "I Hate Whitey Muthafucka" Paterson (RACIST-NY), to replace him. Dumbass New Yorkers: you should have called for a "special election" and rid yourselves of that porch monkey, sambo asshole. Ooooops, too late; he's your worst nightmare now, you dumb assholes!
Nice going, Sir Paul! You're paying $50m to an untalented, ugly, one-legged skank whorebag bitch slut, Heather Mills, for a divorce settlement? She's a loudmouthed, ignorant, ugly-as-shit, dirtbag bitch. She's also a mentally-ill, LIAR! You're a bigger dumbass than most of us thought! Did you have fun "humping that stump", Paulie? Was it worth $50 million-fucking-dollars, you moronic Limey shit-for-brains idiot?
For those who don't remember, during WWII, Howard "Commie Scum" Metzenbaum (TRAITOR-OH) was an lowlife dirtbag lawyer representing the Communist Party in the USA. Now, he's dead. Good riddance and rot in hell, Metzenbaun, you treasonous son-of-a-bitch muthafucka!
islam Is A Criminal Organization™.
Wake-up, Mr Bush: islam is murderous pigshit filth, you dumbassed moron! islam is stinking dogshit! It needs to be wiped from the asshole of the earth, IMO.
Awwww, poor widdle muslim-islamics just can't take the truth about their fucked-up, pigshit-riddled political system — it's a system to total and complete control over its mindless followers — so they are considering "legal means against defamation"? Can't handle THE TRUTH, muzzie filthies? FUCK iSLAM!
Heeeeey, Osama bin fuckin' piggies is releasing a new "message", although the homo-sodomite filth has been dead since Dec '01, at Tora Bora. Hey, cowartly muslim-islamist-arab filthies: FUCK YOU, CAMEL MOLESTORS!
Some People Just Need Killing™
It's not my intention to be judge here — that God's "job" — but rather to "hasten the meeting" so that He can send the following subhuman filth to the Fires of Hell, River or Lake of Sulphur, or whatever. I'd volunteer, at no cost to any Hard-Working Taxpayer, to headshoot these murderous, lowlife dirtbags and rid American Society's innocents (children, the elderly) of them, once and for all. And yes, I'd rather see one innocent man convicted and executed, than 10 guilty freed, to rob, rape and murder again.
I call for the immediate charging, round-up, arrest, trial and summary execution of all treasonous, seditious subhuman filth in CodePink, International ANSWER and Global Exchange. Find them and kill them all, IMO.
Lowlife dirtbag, piece-of-shit, Robert Alan Soloway, 29, called "the spam king" needs to go to prison, for 20 years, be gang-raped and beaten nightly, and slowly murdered, IMO. Soloway's responsible for most of that shit-crap in your and my email boxes, and needs killing for it!
Kiddie Records Weekly.
Before PlayStations, kids indulged in alternative media formats, like listening to albums. The mid-40s to early '50s marked the golden age of children's records and saw releases such as "Hopalong Cassidy" and "Bugs Bunny in Storyland," which provided media companies with early cross-platform entertainment franchises while delighting youngsters. The collection of transferred 78s includes "Baby Snooks," played by famed comedienne Fanny Brice, and the controversial "Tales of Uncle Remus." Many of the records were meant to accompany picture books, which you'll also find here. Kiddie Records posts a new album each week, so don't forget to check back for such classics as "Woody Woodpecker and His Talent Show" and "Bozo Under the Sea." (That can't be good for hair.)