A Salute To Dean Ericksen

By Pablo Fanque, Mona Goldwater, and Jack Brummet

One of our favorite contributors to All This Is That is having a birthday today.  Dean is one of our most active tipsters, and often leads us to new and fertile meadows of starting points, content, warped stories, and strange and wonderful images.  And, to top it off, he is funny, handsome, and facile at crossing the generational divide.  He has fans from the octogenarians down to the one-year olds.  Happy Birthday, Dean Ericksen!

Click here to view Mona's photo retrospective of Dean. 

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We have to put the screws to someone. Don't we?

By Mona Goldwater
Amateur Economics Correspondent





What do we do?  If this was a real business--and it seems like we need to treat it like that once again--wouldn't we nick our employees and, especially, our vendors and buyers; we'd lower wages and raise prices (taxes) and hope we could find a middle ground on which to survive.  Despite all the moaning and groaning, hasn't the TARP money done what it was supposed to do?  In fact, haven't many/most of those "investments" been paid back, even with a little vigorish?  Yeah, we ran up deficits dealing with the late 2000's financial meltdown, but isn't it approximately time to put a cork in that?

The U.S. ran up budget deficits for nearly 30 years--from 1970 through 1997.  Bill Clinton was president in 1998, when the government finally achieved a surplus--a surplus created through bi-partisan cooperation.  And we racked up further surpluses in 1999, 2000 and in 2001.  2001 was the final year of a Clinton-managed budget.

George W. Bush succeeded Clinton in 2001, and--surprise--we had a budget deficit in 2002 that has continued every year since then.  The deficit is projected to increase massively and exponentially this year under President Barack Obama.

This isn't an editorial opinion.  I have no idea how to roll back the clock to 1998.  What do the smart people say?  What would you do? What's three trillion between friends?  Do we need to crank up the presses at The Mint?  Or sell, say, a 25% equity stake in the U.S. to The People's Republic of China?  If the numbers I see are right, we have now borrowed around $1.4 trillion from China, or, $1,000 from every one of the PRC's 1.3 billion citizens.   Where do we go from here?  How do we fix this?

And one last question?  How much gold do we actually have in Fort Knox?  I know that virtually all the gold we own there was purchased at $35 an ounce or less, and most of it was accumulated when the price was far lower than that (when we were still on the gold standard).  Why don't we break that gold out and sell it, now that it retails for around $1,500 an ounce--while all the knuckleheads are buying gold, shotguns, and canned goods like madmen?

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Painting: Map 26

Painting  by Jack Brummet
[watercolor and pen on d'Arches paper 22"x30"]

click to enlarge

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This photographer stole Richard M. Nixon's soul. . .

By Pablo Fanque
National Affairs Editor

This is a rare photograph of President Richard M. Nixon—one of the few I've ever seen (and I've seen many) that captures his heart and soul:

Several recent ATIT articles on President Nixon:

Visiting Richard Nixon

Fun with Richard Nixon's Ghost

Nixon's Back Pocket speech in case of a space disaster

RMN's Comedy of Errors

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Painting: Tell A Sad Story (from a hobo sign)

by Jack Brummet

click to enlarge

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iPhone photos from The Methow

The North Cascades still had large amounts of snow...a couple of days before July

Dusk on the Methow River

The Hills surrounding The Methow Valley

The Hills

The Methow River at 9 pm.

The Curran-Brummet-Ford-Sanchez-Querfurth-Ericksen-Stewart Youth (and Eric holding Olivia)

The electric insulator gazebo at Newhalem

A field along Wolf Creek Road

Golden Hills

Snow along The North Cascades Highway

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Faces No. 224 - six sketches

By Jack Brummet

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Methow Margarita Meltdown: family reunion video

By Jack Brummet
Family Life Editor

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Photos from Winthrop/Wolf Ridge

by Jack Brummet
Family Life Editor

A few random shots from the Pete Curran family reunion, which happens every year with 35 people attending, give or take one or two who can't make it.  Head shots of all of them will appear tomorrow.

Eric and Otis Sanchez were among the early arrivals to Seattle

Just some hills/rangeland I like

The Methow River at 9PM

The Methow River at 10PM

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Mutant Tales No. 14

click to enlarge

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Faces No. 223 - nine sketches by Jack Brummet

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Poem: Kent, Washington

Kent, Washington
By Jack Brummet

1
The truck farms
Are still there,

Buried a layer down now
beneath tilt-up warehouses.

2
Fin, fur, flesh, and feather
Maintain a faint presence—

A robin waltzes in 3/4 time
Around a stranded nightcrawler;

The pale moon hangs low,
Almost humming overhead
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The President's Head Explodes During Press Conference [six years ago today on All This Is That]

click to enlarge

[By Jack Brummet and Pablo Fanque, All This Is That Wire 6/28/2005 Cleveland, OH]

The President's head spontaneously exploded this afternoon as he formulated an answer to a three-part question from Heywood Jablomy of the Cheyenne Intelligencer. Seconds after the question was posed, the Presidents skull began glowing with a bright pink light and pieces of the skull seemed to break off and hover in the air.

Witnesses reported a deep ringing sound, followed by a loud bang and an overpowering smell of ozone. The whereabouts and medical condition of the President are not known at this time.

Pending further developments, the Vice-President invoked the 25th amendment to The Constitution and was sworn into office at 4:30 EDT today.
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NASA's New Solar System (not quite—this image was assembled before Pluto was de-caffeinated)

By Jack Brummet
NASA Editor & Unexplained Phenomena Editor

click to enlarge

I love browsing and plundering the NASA archives.  And the photographs are free to use anywhere.  We, the taxpayers own them!

The original caption for this montage (remember this was before the International Astronomical Union dethroned Pluto and decided there were only eight planets [1]).  "This solar-system montage of the nine planets and 4 large moons of Jupiter in our solar system are set against a false-color view of the Rosette Nebula. The light emitted from the Rosette Nebula results from the presence of hydrogen (red), oxygen (green) and sulfur (blue). Most of the planetary images in this montage were obtained by NASA's planetary missions, which have dramatically changed our understanding of the solar system in the past 30 years."

[1] The I.A.U. decided that planets need to have 3 things:

• they need to orbit the Sun
• they need to have enough gravity to pull themselves into a ball
• they need to have cleared out all other objects from their orbit

"Earth is more than 1 million times more massive than all the other material in its orbit combined, while Pluto is just a tiny fraction of the rest of the icy material around it."
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Poem: Chasing Ghosts by Jack Brummet

Chasing Ghosts
by Jack Brummet


1
The scenery whirls by
In a drunken Gaussian Blur
Until I slow it down
And watch it unravel
In a multi-colored, quadrophonic
Parade of flora and fauna
Spinning Venn Diagrams
Around each other.

2
I quit chasing ghosts,
But once in a while
I look over my shoulder
And find a face in the crowd,
With a sad smile and a halo.
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