Jack Heald

…than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

W.Shakespeare – Hamlet

I am far more Horatio than Hamlet, but my faith in the basic rationality of my world has been shaken this evening. The story:

We are spending the week at my parents’ cabin in Alpine, Colorado. Alpine sits on the side of Mt. Princeton, at an elevation of about 9600 feet above sea level. The cabin was built sometime in the late 1870s to serve as the home of the railroad foreman. The Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad was building a railroad over the Rockies to serve the various mines that were dug into the mountains here. The railroad ran from 1881 to 1910. At one time, during the height of the railroad building boom, Alpine was home to over 10,000 people, but today it has fewer than a dozen year-round residents. The population swells to about 150 during the summer vacation months.

Just across 1st Street from the cabin is Chalk Creek, and then just the other side of Chalk Creek is County Road 162. CR162 follows the old DSP&P railroad line up Chalk Creek Canyon between Mt. Princeton to the north and Mt. Antero to the south.

Tonight, we were sitting out on the deck enjoying a beautiful Colorado summer evening. The moon was almost full – maybe a couple more days till the full moon, and the sky was partly cloudy. The moon was just rising over the peak of Mt. Antero around 9:00 when we first heard the train whistle.

(By “we”, I mean six of us: Caroline, Scott & Juli, Mom, Liam and me. I emphasize the number of witnesses because what I am going to report is – frankly – fantastic. )

The whistle blew several times. We heard the distinctive sound of the steam engine clattering as the giant pistons chugged-chugged between the compression and exhaust strokes. It went on for perhaps 30 seconds as the train moved up the road toward St. Elmo. Normally, you will hear a train fade away over a period of minutes. St. Elmo is about 4 miles above Alpine, so we should have heard a real train for several minutes. But as quickly as the sound began, it simply faded away like a morning mist.

The train tracks were completely torn up by the 1930s. The last train went up those tracks in 1910.

The nearest train track is at Buena Vista, roughly 15 miles from here as the crow flies. There are no steam engines on those tracks.

The six of us sat here listening to this steam engine go up the road just across the creek, chugging and whistling as it went. Then as suddenly as it started, it faded away. If I was going to write a screenplay that depicted the appearance and disappearance of a ghost train, it would have been exactly like this.

My mom said, “there’s the Alpine Ghost Train”. Apparently, everyone in town has heard the train at one time or another and it has become such a common occurrence that she had never even thought to mention it to me. The most frequent time to hear the train has been 9:00pm.

From the deck of the cabin, where I sit as I write this, we cannot see the road, but it is less than a quarter mile from here. What I heard was unmistakably a train, a steam engine train. It faded in, chugged up the canyon for perhaps half a minute, then faded away.

You can be sure that I will be out in the middle of CR162 at 9:00pm every night till we head home next week. If the Alpine Ghost Train makes another appearance, I plan to gather as much info as I can.

…the only regulation that will ever work is failure… Businesses should fail, that’s the way the system was designed.

Rick Santelli in an interview on King World News

Two years ago, Congress had a chance to keep the economy from tanking. All they had to do was let the banks fail. They didn’t do it because the criminal class, a.k.a. Wall Street Bankers and their minions, ([cough] Paulson, Bernanke, Summers & Geithner [cough]), convinced them that if they let the banks fail, the economy would tank. So Congress gave the bankers roughly nine hundred gazillion dollars so that the economy wouldn’t tank. The bankers got big bonuses, and the economy tanked anyway.

Failure is a good thing. It is God’s/Nature’s/The Universe’s way of saying “You’re doing it wrong”.

I have devoured Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan“. The ideas contained in these two books are profound, disturbing and very, very liberating. For some reason, these books occasionally get labeled as “Business” or “Markets” books. They are not. They are works of philosophy that everyone with the slightest inclination to think about life should read. (Josh: take note.) Christians in particular should marinate in these ideas.

I gave up on “Witness to Hope“, the biography of JPII. The first third of the book, which dealt with his pre-pope days, was terrific. The stuff after he was elected read like a diary or a press release. Boring as hell. I can handle a little bit of boring, but the stark contrast between the two sections of the book was more than I could bear. Since it’s 1100 pages, and I wasn’t even halfway through, I was not willing to devote any more time to it. Anyone who wants my copy can have it.

(Does anyone else always have multiple books going at the same time? I realized a couple of weeks ago that I was reading five books at the same time – and that’s just pretty normal for me.)

I just finished J.S.Mill’s essay On Liberty and am now working on his autobiography. Mill was educated at home by his father and lemme tell you, Daddy should be very proud. What an extraordinary mind that man had.

If you would permit me one quote that I found quite relevant:

The third, and most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government, is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government. If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employés of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.

I think Mill would look at the state of the modern west and say, “I toldja so…”

I finished The Sovereign Individual just before finishing Mill. Highly recommended.

On deck is Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. This comes very highly recommended and I am eager to get started. Also  The Gods of Athiesm by Vincent P. Maseli, S.J. (Apparently, the Jesuits pay attention to these things.)

I am also doing my annual re-reading of Lewis’ Mere Christianity. I started reading Lewis when I was maybe 10 or 11 with The Chronicles of Narnia. I’ve read almost everything he ever published – in most cases, multiple times – and as I was going through MC again this past week, was struck with wonder at how much his thinking has influenced mine. Virtually every significant belief I have about God, the world and myself can likely be traced back to something I read somewhere in Lewis. Not that we don’t have our disagreements, but it is safe to say he is the single most influential thinker in my life.

Here’s a quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a new addition to my “favorite authors”:

What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity, generosity ) as individuals.

I have long sensed that institutions are fundamentally corrupting, but Taleb identifies why – institutions are incapable of human virtue.

If you haven’t read his Fooled By Randomness or The Black Swan, you are missing two intellectual treats.

…from Nassim Taleb.

Well worth the time.

It sates itself on the life-blood
of fated men,
paints red the powers’ homes
with crimson gore.
Black become the sun’s beams
in the summers that follow,
weathers all treacherous.
Do you still seek to know? And what?
Brothers will fight
and kill each other,
sisters’ children
will defile kinship.
It is harsh in the world,
whoredom rife
—an axe age, a sword age (and the sun rises)
—shields are riven—
a wind age, a wolf age—
before the world goes headlong.
No man will have
mercy on another

Völuspá

This made me laugh out loud.

First, Bear Stearns made a bunch of stupid bets on sub-prime mortgages, and you – the American Taxpayer -  bailed them out to the tune of $29 billion in guarantees to JPMorgan, (who bought Bear Stearns only on the condition that the government assume that debt.)

Then, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac made a bunch of stupid bets on subprime mortgages and you – the American Taxpayer – bailed them out to the tune of $800 billion.

The Lehman Brothers went belly up, which forced AIG to pay billions of dollars in claims on credit default swaps – claims they were unable to pay, so you – the American Taxpayer – bailed out AIG to the tune of $145 billion.

Then the Big Wall Street Banks went kablooie, because they made stupid bets and you – The American Taxpayer – bailed them out with $800 billion in loans. (No, you will not see any return on that “investment”, other than the comfort of watching Goldman Sachs give out $14 billion in bonuses last year.)

Then, Chrysler and GM both came to Washington with their hands out because they made stupid agreements with the UAW and stupid inverstment decisions, and you – the American Taxpayer – bailed them out with “only” about $20 billion.

What have you – the American Taxpayer – received for all this largess doled into the laps of these idiot gamblers? You have the worst economy since the great depression. You have over 22% of the population “under-employed”. You have plummeting home values. You have more tax. You have known tax cheats heading Treasury and the IRS.

Now Greece is going to go bankrupt, and guess who is going to bailout that government? The IMF gives money to Greece. 20% of the IMF’s funding comes from the US Taxpayer, so you – the American Taxpayer – are now sending $7 billion to the Greek government so it can pay its bills.

Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, France and the UK are in line for the same thing.

What can you do about it?

You could start by re-reading the US Declaration of Independence and contemplating this phrase:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

When the colonists determined that the government of Great Britain – their government – had become destructive to the very people it was supposed to protect, they moved to “alter or abolish” that government and establish a new one that would be most likely to secure their life, liberty and happiness.

Earth Day. Bleh.

I’m convinced Earth Day was conceived by tea-sipping western European elites who live in mild climates where nature is a devoted, loving and fertile servant to man. I know better. I spent my childhood in Oklahoma and half my adult life in Texas.

Oklahoma springtime meant tornadoes, thunderstorms, wicked unexpected heatwaves, late snowstorms and crop-crushing hail storms. Summer brought drought, searing heat, blowing dust and energy-sapping humidity. Fall was an explosion of allergens to make up for the relatively mild weather. Winter was tree-crushing ice storms. The ground was 90% limestone, so growing anything required dedication, hard work, sweat, perseverance and more than a bit of luck. We had poisonous snakes and venomous and/or biting bugs. In one 18 month stretch, my hometown of 35000 people suffered a devastating direct hit by a tornado and two “100 Year” floods. In other words, “Mother Nature” was mean, nasty, ill-tempered and downright murderous most all the time.

Texas was like Oklahoma only more so. Literally everything in nature was trying to kill you. The weather was tornadoes, hailstorms, thunderstorms, lightning storms, floods, droughts, high winds, searing heat, deadly cold, wicked temperature changes, (I clearly remember a day that had an early afternoon high in the 80s and a late afternoon reading in the 30s), and suffocating humidity. The ground was either caliche clay, which is impossible to till, or rocks. The array of venomous reptiles and bugs, dangerous animals and poisonous plants was exceeded only by the variety of airborne allergens. Literally everything about Mother Nature in Texas was hostile to human life. She was not man’s willing servant; she was a rabid, foam-mouthed, blood-toothed, sharp-clawed maniacal destroyer.

I lived in London for 15 months in 2001-2002. No bugs to speak of. No venomous critters. No poisonous plants. Mild weather year-round, (with a few exceptions). The ground is so fertile it is ridiculous. You could spit a watermelon seed out the back door and be harvesting watermelons 2 months later. Mother Nature, in SW England, was a compliant, willing and fecund servant to mankind. I understand most of France is the same way or better.

I came away from my sojourn in England convinced that the “Save the Earth” people had never lived in Texas or Oklahoma. I knew from experience that Mother Earth didn’t need to be cared for; she needed to be tamed, broken, collared and caged. She is a saber-toothed tiger, eager to shed man’s blood and blissfully indifferent to the consequences of her actions.

I’m nearly certain that the “Earth-First-ers” never spent weeks on end digging ton after ton of limestone from their vegetable garden. I’m pretty sure they never cowered in a “fraidy hole” hoping the tornado blowing over didn’t kill them. I’ll bet they never spent miserable weeks covered in Calomine lotion because they got a rash from poison oak, poison ivy or poison sumac all up and down their arms, legs, trunk and face. I’ll bet they never itched a night away because they were covered in chigger bites or fire ant bites from walking through the grass. I’ll bet they never had a pasture ruined and livestock killed by an invasion of fire ants. I’ll bet they never suffered through a drought that was broken by a flood, or an unrelenting rainy season broken by a drought. I’ll bet they never sat in the emergency room with a friend whose four-year-old son suffered a rattlesnake bite and prayed he wouldn’t lose his leg. I’ll bet they never dreaded fall and spring knowing that the effluvium from all the budding Texas junipers was going to make them sick for weeks. I’ll bet they never struggled season after season to get something – anything – besides weeds to grow in the dreadful soil. I’ll bet they never worried being bitten by a water moccassin while swimming in a local pond. I’ll bet they never chopped their beloved prize pecan trees into firewood because an ice storm had sheared off it’s 100-year-old limbs. I’ll bet they never tried to scrub the iron stains from their clothes – iron stains that came from the red dirt which wouldn’t grow anything useful.

From the time I started school until I was in college, Time Magazine ran cover story after cover story warning the world of an impending Global Ice Age. “The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst a building alarm about the dangers of a new ice age.” All the scientists agreed; it was coming and it was going to be bad. Then sometime in the 80′s “they” decided that Global Warming was the threat du jour. Recently, that has been changed yet again to “Global Climate Change”, (does that phrase have any meaning at all?) In my lifetime, the experts have wrongly predicted every sort of change possible to the environment. Forgive me for being skeptical now.

The “global warming/climate change” scientists have proven to be liars and frauds. Most so-called green technology actually consumes as much fossil fuel and/or creates as much pollution as the technology it is supposed to replace. Recycling waste is an expensive fools’ errand.

My experience is that nature is a rampaging killer, beating on the barricaded doors, jiggling the latches of the windows and probing every crack and crevice of the walls we have built to keep her out and keep us safe. The bulk of my life has been spent battling nature, not caring for it. The logical, natural extension of the philosophy espoused by the “Save the Earth” crowd is that man is a blight on nature and the best thing we could do for Mother Earth is to commit mass suicide.

Earth Day is a sad, sick, stupid joke played on the gullible, the forgetful and the guilt-ravaged. It helps nothing, it wastes time and it diverts our attention from real, solvable problems – like artificial turf and the designated hitter rule. (I contend that the world started going to hell with the advent of both.)

Back in November 2009 I made the decision to stop trading. I had been working at it for over 2 years, and had managed to lose a boatload over that time period. It was time to stop, time to regroup, time to rethink. It was a painful decision because trading – in so many ways – is a perfect “job” for me. It fits me in a thousand vital ways. But it wasn’t fitting me in one very important way – making a living.

I stayed away as long as I could – over 3 months. But I have decided it is time to get back on that pony. This time, I am a lot wiser. I learned a lot in those first two years, but the main thing I learned is that I was not being a professional trader. So what am I going to do differently this time?

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