The pictures below were taken during Holi, also called the Festival of Colors, in India. Holi is a popular Hindu spring festival and a celebration of the triumph of good over evil. Celebrants enthusiastically drop their inhibitions, chase each other, and playfully splash colorful paint, powder and water on each other. What a lovely and beautiful holiday.

We get Easter.

The size of other countries stimulus packages…

Might a little global perspective on the notion of the stimulus package and how countries are going big to fend off a deeper recession help calm nerves?  For instance, France’s economic stimulus package is almost 1.3% of their GDP (or 26 billion dollars).  This stimulus government money is then matched by the private sector with most of the stimulus money being thrown at research and technology investment/development.  The Japanese, on their second stimulus package in their fiscal year, involves $135 dollar cash handouts to all its citizens.  China’s stimulus package is a massive 6% of it’s GDP.

Protectionist or not?

The Christian Science Monitor notes that most countries do not include “Buy Local” clauses in their stimulus plans.  But after a meeting of the G20 last Nov. Russia, India, Brazil, and Vietnam all implemented tariffs aimed at protecting industry at home.  The Ukraine has implemented protectionism.  Southeast Asia appears to be committed to free trade.  From this vantage point, it looks like the world is not completely sold on free trade or protectionism in these tough times.  Much to the chagrin of neo-liberal economists.

More information

Where do you go for more information on the world’s economic stimulus activities?  Yes, the obvious answer is the Internet.  Specifically, I find this interactivemap created by the Brooking’s Institute to be particularly useful (click on the link for the interactive version).

Credit default swaps are basically an insurance against the failure of a company that owes you money. You loan ABC corp 2 million and you want to protect against a default of the loan.  You can go to a third party, that for a premium, will insure you to the tune of the 2 million. The ludicrous part is you don’t actually have to loan any money out. You can simply place a wager that a company will go bankrupt for any amount you want. The insanity continues.  The company that sells you the insurance does not have to have any capitol reserves to write new insurance. This means I can go out and write 100 billion dollars of insurance against any company I want with little or nothing to back up the value of the principal I am insuring.  I just collect the premiums and hope for the best. Still more, their is no clearing house for the credit default swap.  No one is keeping track of who buys what insurance against what company.

If I am a large bank (one of the banks that say an investment bank would rely on for loans to operate day to day) and stay solvent, I could theoretically collude with the other big banks, buy huge amounts of credit default swaps against a company and then refuse to loan them money. In this instance, I am placing a wager on a companies failure then could insure that it happens. If I was Bank of America I could go buy billions of dollars worth of credit default swaps against say Lehman brothers, even though I have loaned them no money which means I can make the amount as humongous as I want.  Then, I refuse to loan Lehman Bros. any money, they go bankrupt and Bank of America cashes in. No one could legitimately track that this is occurring because no one is tracking the market.  It is totally unregulated.

I am not saying this has happened.  I am just saying it could. The New York Times has reported that AIG ( a large writer of credit default swaps) was basically a push on the failed investment banks because they bet against them as much as they bet for them. This could still theoretically happen and I am not prepared to trust bankers with this kind of murky condition to operate in.

For instance, a company in St. John, IN is manufacturing solar powered attic fans that dissipate attic heat from a home, saving the homeowner money on air conditioning in the summer months.

Or Shuttleworth, Inc. in Huntington, IN which sells almost 30% of its product line to manufacturers of solar photovoltaic panels. These are tangible examples of how a cap on energy will create jobs, especially in Indiana.  Hats off to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Notwithstanding Keith Olbermann’s “Oh, God…” open mic gaffe, Governor Bobby Jindal’s Republican response to Obama’s speech was one of the funniest moments that prime time television had to offer this week.  Clocking in at twelve minutes and twenty seconds, this trite, lame and predictable piece of piffle was exactly twelve minutes and twenty seconds too long.  If you haven’t endured it yet, you should take a look.

The “theme” of this speech, judging mainly from the frequency of the phrase’s repetition, seems to be “Americans can do anything.”  This catchy little refrain is only mildly childish at first, but quickly proves uncomfortably tiresome and empty as it keeps popping up again and again, before finally whimpering and dying at the speech’s conclusion. 

The speech opens with the governor taking us on a rambling tour of his childhood in Louisiana, where he learned American values simply by taking a trip to the grocery store.  He then emphasized the need for bipartisanship in Washington, noting that in Louisiana, “we don’t care what party you belong to.”  This sounds nice enough, but of course these comments are immediately followed by a clearly partisan attack on the Obama administration’s stimulus plan, and those gosh-darned Washington “bureaucrats.”

Governor Jindal blames these individuals for the destruction of New Orleans, filling the nation’s capitol with unspecified “corruption,” and—in a spectacular straw man argument—even goes so far  as to claim that “Democratic leaders in Washington…place their hope in the federal government.  We [Republicans] place our hope in you, the American people;” noting that “We [Republicans] oppose the national Democratic view that says ‘the way to strengthen our country is to increase dependence on government’.” 

This line of illogic is no different to me than Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” rant in the mid-70’s, whereby unsubstantiated conjecture was presented as fact to undermine American’s faith in the welfare system.  While easy to consume, these warmed-over leftovers of arguments only serve to limit public understanding of an issue, and frame an argument in a way that only guarantees short-term successes.  I will say, however, that at least when Reagan did it, it was at least presented with a certain level of eloquence and style.

The speech was such a disaster that even FOX News condemned it as “amateurish,” and conservative columnist David Brooks characterized the arguments as “stale,” and “a disaster for the Republican party.”      

Nonetheless, I am quite certain Jindal’s twaddle most likely struck a cord with many viewers eager to blame “the government” (some faceless, yet uniformly identifiable body) for trying to resolve problems that are out of the general public’s hands to manage.  I am always amazed at how gleefully willing certain individuals are to blame “the government” for just about everything.  Though, perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised.  After all, Americans can do anything, right?   

Even in dry weather, it is best to avoid contact with urban streams and teach children to stay away.

Yikes.

Also, many of you may have heard of the Snuggie.  Sure, it’s functional and much more stylish than a standard robe, but it’s got nothing on the Lippi Selk Bag.  Just think how much money you can save on your heating bills.  You will also reduce your carbon footprint by leaps and bounds.

And, one last thing.  You all may have seen this already, but I thought it was super fancy.  It’s called gigapan.org“which aims to help us meet our neighbors across the globe, and learn about our planet itself.”  If you check out the Obama Inauguration photo, you can zoom in on the faces of people in the crowd that appear as dots when fully zoomed out.  You can also create your own fancy panoramic pictures.  The technology was developed in part from a collaboration with the NASA Ames Research Center. These people brought us the Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Phoenix Lander.  Very cool stuff.