Named after a passage from a Robert Heinlein novel called Time Enough for Love. The statement was meant as a outline for becoming a human being, it was never to be the complete guide. Just as a pilot license doesn't qualify you to drive the space shuttle. Because you've accomplished everything on the Heinlein list you haven't finished... it means you've just have received your learners permit.
"If you're not shootin', you should be loadin'. If you're not loadin', you should be movin', if you're not movin', someone's gonna cut your head off and put it on a stick." - Clint Smith, Director of Thunder Ranch
Psalm 1 (New International Version)
Psalm 1
BOOK I : Psalms 1-41
1 Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.
2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.
3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.
4 Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
6 For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
"Specialization is for Insects", taken from Heinlein's Time Enough For Love, the full quote is:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
On July 18 1969, he was at a party on the small Massachusetts island of Chappaquiddick with a group, including six women known as the boiler room girls, who had worked in his brother Robert's presidential campaign.
Kennedy left the party, supposedly to drive his brother's former secretary, Mary Jo Kopechne, to catch the last ferry back to the mainland but, instead, the car turned onto a side road and crashed off a bridge into a tidal creek.
Kennedy pulled himself from the upturned car and, after swimming across a narrow creek, returned to his hotel without reporting the accident.
It was the following morning before local fishermen found the sunken car and discovered the body of Mary Jo Kopechne still inside.
Evidence given at the subsequent inquest suggested that she had probably remained alive in an air pocket for several hours and might well have been saved had the alarm been raised at the time.
Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, claiming that he had been in shock, and was given a two-month suspended jail sentence.
Cheat, Cheater, Drunk, Doper, a traitor to his religion, murderer .....
Lawyers.com, Geico, Proctor & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, Sargento, Men's Wearhouse, Con Agra, Roche, Sanofi-Aventis and Radio Shack have all decided to pull there advertising from the Glenn Beck TV show on Fox news.
That is their Right, it is still a free country for now, no thanks to them and they can spend their money anyplace they want. SO CAN I......
Lawyers.com Who needs um, besides the founder and spokes person claim to fame is he got a man off of a double murder charge... can you say OJ
Geico..... HAD my motorcycle insurance... not anymore.
Sargento..... will now be Kraft
Mens Warehouse.... is now Syms
Radio Shack.... MCM
The point is that all of these companies have many competitors and my CASH can now go to them. Remember it still a Free country, for now.....................
Really, how hard is it to find a job? Was June's horrid numbers, in which 467,000 people lost their jobs compared to 345,000 in May, a one-time fluke? Or does it mean that all those Wall Street economists who believe the economic recovery is starting are dead wrong?
Not to scare you, but the situation is actually worse than it seems. Over the years, the government has changed the way it counts the unemployed. An example of this is the criticized Birth-Death Model which was added in 2000. The model is designed to account for the birth and death of businesses and the resultant lag in survey data. Unfortunately, the model doesn't work that well during economic contractions (like we have now) and consistently overstates the number of jobs being created each month.
John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics specializes in removing these questionable tweaks to the government's statistical data to better align current numbers with the methodology used to gather historical data. After reviewing the data, Williams believes that "the June jobs loss likely exceeded 700,000." David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff notes that the fall in the number of hours worked in June (to a record low of 33 per week) is equivalent to a loss of more than 800,000 jobs.
There are similar issues with the way the unemployment rate is measured. The headline rate only jumped from 9.4% to 9.5% because of a drop in the number of people in the workforce. The more inclusive "U-6" measure of unemployment, which includes discouraged workers, jumped from 16.4% to 16.5%. But even this doesn't adequately capture the situation on the ground: Back in the Clinton Administration, the definition of discouraged worker was changed to only include those that had given up looking for work because there were no jobs to be had within the last year.
By adding these folks back in, William's SGS-Alternate Unemployment Measure rose to a jaw-dropping 20.6%. Separately, the Center for Labor Market Studies in Boston puts U.S. unemployment at 18.2%. Any way you cut the numbers, the situation is very bad. According to David Rosenberg, one-in-three among the unemployed have been looking for a job for more than six months and still can't find one.
This brings us to another issue: expiring unemployment benefits. Continuing unemployment claims fell 53,000 to 6.7 million last week, but Deutsche Bank's chief U.S. economist Joseph LaVorgna wonders how much of this decline is due people exhausting their standard 26-week benefit. He says: "We are concerned about what will happen when a significant share of out-of-work individuals' benefits completely expire, because this could lead consumer spending to re-weaken, hence jeopardizing a fragile recovery."
Unless the economy starts getting traction here in the third quarter, we could face a situation where people find that they have no job and no unemployment benefits. For these people, 2009 will feel an awful lot like 1932. As a result, spending cuts will be deep and dramatic.
My positions
The ongoing job losses will continue to weigh on the retail sector -- which was one of the best performing groups coming out of the March low. I've added short positions in Target (TGT), Macy's (M), and Office Depot (ODP) to my portfolio. Besides penny-pinching consumers, retailers face a federal minimum wage increase as well as a tough back-to-school and holiday shopping season.
Disclosure: The author does not own or control a position in any of the funds or companies mentioned.
