Singing in the bathtub
Happy once again
Watching all my troubles
Go swinging down the drain

Singing through the soap suds
Life is full of hope
You can sing with feeling
While feeling for the soap.

“Singing in the Bathtub”

It’s New Year’s; this is when we are supposed to look over the past and think about the future. With the USA the situation is pretty simple: a large percentage of Americans are batshit crazy and the state itself is in tatters.

Simple concept, but how it might play out could get complicated.

Does Dodd-Frank's requirement that TBTF banks submit "funeral plans" open the door to dismantling the banks?

This morning I listened to the interview on Bloomberg of Jason Cave, head of the FDIC's new Office of Complex Financial Institutions. The jist of it was that the Fed and FDIC now have authority to delve into the complex structures of TBTF banks (others like Insurance,etc., to be named) and that the institutions must provide "Resolution Plans" to show how they would be broken up in the event they were judged to be in default or in imminent danger of defaulting.

The term Narcissism got a bad rap from the beginning when Freud published his classical paper on the subject in 1915.

And so another Christmas has passed.  The twenty-sixth of December.  Just another day.  Yet the New Year approaches.  Time to look back on the year that was, make the lists and debate over the most memorable moments, the greatest achievements, the best movies, the worst commercials.  A seemingly collective effort not to forget, to ensure some shared memory of what has actually passed, and which is now fading like a dream, is somehow captured, made permanent and enduring.  A time, too, of looking forward, to ponder one’s resolution for the new year, the one thing not to drag along into the f

Christmas and the whole holiday season stretching back into my teens has not always been exactly my favorite time of the year.  This is neither the time nor the place to go into all the reasons for this.  I would say this has something to do with the fact that I am not religious, and spiritual only through a lifetime of struggle to rise above the militant atheism of my youth.   I can remember one particular moment when this affliction born of a teen’s anger toward God began to finally melt.

 Santa Claus was only one of the characters in the regular group of customers at my father’s tavern. This was a secret, however, that was kept from me. I knew him as Lemoyne Doucette, a house painter and a Frenchman of large girth and a robust laugh. His father had worked winters as a lumberjack in the northwoods and in one of the many sawmills in town during the summers. The lumbering boom had long since gone bust, and so Lemoyne had inherited little more from his father than a boyish sense of humor as well as a taste for good brandy.

This is not my holiday, but it is hard to miss the signs that it is one celebrated by many others in this country, though Bill O'Reilly and his colleagues think otherwise. Oddly, by mystical coincidence, Shabbat and Christmas coincide this year. To many confused people, Chanukah is a supposed equivalent holiday to Christmas, but it's not. Shabbat, on the other hand, means Jews and Christians will be praying at roughly the same time.

The rich inner experience of Christmas is coated with a sweet nutty blend of pop culture. Features for the holiday range from angels to elves, from wise men to talking snowmen, from Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to Rudolph, Prancer, and Vixen. Believers bask in the starry wonderment of Christ’s rustic birth while decking the night with merriments as bright as Las Vegas.

Howdy Babe!