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« Previous EntriesArticle Summary
- Letter to the Editor: Fortson ‘hasn’t read the First Amendment’ [2010-Aug-18]
- A Message from Noah Kirkman’s Mom [2010-Jun-3]
- Happy Mother’s Day! [2010-May-9]
- The Goldman Non-Debacle [2010-Apr-28]
- Are Attacks on Food Convoys in Haiti Due to WFP Policy of Women-Only Food Aid? [2010-Feb-26]
- All good things come to an end [2010-Jan-13]
- HAPPY NEW YEAR! [2010-Jan-1]
- Merry Christmas to All! [2009-Dec-24]
- A new direction for Novaseeker [2009-Nov-30]
- Thanksgiving 2009 [2009-Nov-28]
- « Previous Articles
Letter to the Editor: Fortson ‘hasn’t read the First Amendment’
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
By Glenn Sacks, Uncategorized [source]
The following letter is in response to the blog post "Tacoma DV Advocate to Face Discipline for Assisting Mother in Children's Abduction."
There's also one other interesting part to this case. Earlier this year, the city paid Kelvin Jackson $29,000 to settle a claim he brought based on Fortson's conduct in his custody case. A judge also last month denied Fortson's separate petition for a protection order against Kelvin Jackson that she, in part, sought because of his complaints to the city about her conduct. So in addition to not reading judge's rulings, apparently she hasn't read the First Amendment, particularly the sections about Freedom of Speech and right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
John, Pueblo, CO
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A Message from Noah Kirkman’s Mom
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
By Glenn Sacks, Uncategorized [source]
Below is a message from Lisa Kirkman written after the ruling by Judge Kip Leonard that, after two years, he's finally releasing 12-year-old Noah to return home to Calgary.
Hello Everyone,
Yesterday, after several hours of courtroom testimony (and two years of torture), the judge finally decided to do the right thing and send Noah home. He did not indicate a timeframe, but informal commentary from DHS indicates that they plan on sending him back to Canada after the school year ends, about mid-June. At that time, he'll be flying back to Canada with my parents and temporarily staying with them until which time he, my parents, myself and the professionals who work with him come to a consensus that it's time to make take that final step home. During this time I will maintain my full parental authority, custody and guardianship as Noah's mother.
While I'm hesitant to fully jump for joy until I actually have my son in my arms, as we've been let down so many times before with similar assurances that there will be a followthrough of the case plan in a reasonable amount of time, I do acknowledge this victory and its profundity.
Endless thanks go out to my lawyers, Ilisa Rooke-Ley & Tony Merchant, for their unending dedication to resolving this crisis, their professionalism, intellect and compassion.
Thank you to the Merchant Foundation, Michael Kapoutstin and the National Council for the Protection of Canadians Abroad for taking up the charge and answering our calls for help with invaluable resources and support.
σας ευχαριστούμε to Mary Damianakis, whose golden heart has shone through the darkest of times and whose insight and advice has proven to be absolutely indispensable; the big Greek sister I never had.
Thank you to Lawrence Oshanek, for being a bastion of courage, compassion and reason. Society is made more sane by your presence.
A very special thank you to group administrators Debbie Fagin (the Thelma to my Louise), Lindsay Dianne and Terri Applebomb (Mata Hari o' my heart) for putting this group together. I am so very, very proud to call you my friends. After struggling on my own for so long, I can't even express what it feels like to know that over 4000 people--most total strangers---are watching out for you and yours. Thank you to every single member of this group, for your kind words of support, astute commentary and tireless phone calling and letter writing.
A special thanks to Jocelyn, who exploited her wonderful artistry to help us raise funds. Proceeds from the beads that weren't sold will go to help Canadian families facing similar international family law cases.
Thank you to the anti-prohibition/cannabis community. It is from you that I draw my fire and strategy in taking on Goliath and who have taught me that there are no fights and no foes too formidable and though the tunnel is immeasurable, you just gotta have faith that there's a light on the other end. Indeed, where there's smoke, there's fire.
Thank you to the press, who have--for the very most part--been very sensitive and compassionate and diligent in reporting our story. I maintain to this day that it was this press coverage that lit the fire under this case and really moved it along toward resolution. Even though they've always maintained their professional objectivity, many have let their personal feelings of support show and for that I am grateful.
Thank you to MPs Rob Anders (Con) and Dan McTeague (Lib) and their assistants, Maria & Glenn, who were the ONLY voices of reason in the Canadian Federal Government during this whole ordeal and who did their jobs by doing their darndest to affect some positive change in the situation. They alone have kept me from losing faith in elected officials altogether.
Thank you to everyone who donated your time, money and resources to helping Noah return. Every dime has been spent on this cause, but please don't forget that there are over 400 other Canadian children stuck abroad, not allowed to return to their own country, so if you can continue your support of these children and their families, I would be forever grateful. I have made it my life's mission to help them in any way I can, so that no family has to go through the torture that my family has been submitted to over the past two years.
And of course, thank you to my family--my mom Phyllis Heltay, my dad Mike Heltay and my sister & brother-in-law Avery & Mike Maxwell, for your love, endless courage and support; for holding my child and reassuring him when I can't. Thank you to my husband for being the best Papa in the world. I love you and can't wait for all of us to be together again, soon.
The best victories are those that are hard won and although I can't truly say this war is over until I hold my son again, I can join you in savouring the joy that comes with crossing the biggest obstacle yet.
I will continue to hold my breath until I can touch Noah, hear his voice and see for myself that he's okay, but I will be sure to let you all know when I finally am able to breathe again.
Kindest regards,
Lisa Kirkman ♥ ♥ ♥
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Happy Mother’s Day!
Sunday, May 9th, 2010
By Glenn Sacks, Uncategorized [source]
It's Mother's Day, so be sure to give Mom a hug and a kiss. If you're too far away to do those things, give her a call. Let her know you love her; let her know you appreciate all the things she's done for you over the years.
Being a parent can be hard and it can be thankless. Without Mom, you wouldn't be here. Without Mom, you wouldn't be who you are. She helped to see you safely through every phase of life. She did everything she could to smoothe out the rough edges, explain the inexplicable, heal the hurt.
Today, let her know you know. Let her know you understand and appreciate. Let her feel your love.
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The Goldman Non-Debacle
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
By Novaseeker, Uncategorized [source]
This was originally posted as a response to Obsidian’s post at his blog, but due to comment posting difficulties there, I am reposting it here.
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The Goldman thing is quite interesting in that it appears to me that Goldman is being made a scapegoat of populist anger against Wall Street in an election year more than anything else. I’ve read the SEC’s complaint against GS, and, to be honest, unless they can show that Fourre actually lied (i.e., that he specifically told the German bank that Paulson was not betting against the synthetic portfolio), I don’t see how GS can be liable for what happened there. In that specific deal, GS created a customized synthetic security, the contents of which were specified and reviewed in detail by the investors (in this case a large German bank, on one side, and a NY hedge fund, on the other). They weren’t so much “selling” it to these investors as they were creating a customized investment package that both sides knew someone on the other side was betting against – that’s the way a credit default swap works. Goldman didn’t take a position in that t specific contract, because it was a customized product with only a small number of highly sophisticated investors – essentially it was a bet between the German bank and the NY hedge fund as to whether the synthetic portfolio would go up or down. And the guy who was betting it would go down won the bet, against a rather sophisticated German bank who appeared to only care about the debt ratings.
Goldman DID take short positions in the mortgage market beginning in 2007, that’s true. They also lost 1.2 billion in long positions in the mortgage market. The difference between Goldman and folks like Bear Stearns and Lehman, however, is that Goldman had at least some people who were urging the firm to change its position on the mortgage market to hedge the firm’s overall risk. Yes, the nature of that hedging means taking short positions so that if things go south, you recover money – that’s how a short works. But for Congress and the media to be bashing Goldman over the head now for actually taking prudent risk management measures when other NY banks were not, and as a result collapsed, is more than ironic – it’s downright nonsensical and hypocritical. You can’t have that one both ways – namely bashing banks for not being more careful about their exposure to the mortgage market, on the one hand, and then bashing the ones who were careful because they were being careful! D’oh.
I also think it’s regrettable that so few people understand how the financial system works that the very concept of a short sends them into an emotional tizzy. A short is simply a contract whereby you agree to sell a security for a certain price at a certain time in the future. It’s typically a bet that the price will go down. So, for example, a short contract will have you agreeing to sell 100 of IBM at 100 (the current price) in two weeks. Over those two weeks, IBM drops to 80, and you go into the market then, buy 100 shares at 80 each, and sell them under your short contract for 100, making 20 a share, or 2000. It’s the mirror of buying a stock and expecting it to go up – a short lets you buy a position that expects the stock to go down. There’s nothing immoral or seedy or unethical about taking a short position on a security. I could go in to my brokerage account today and take short positions on some German bank securities and probably “win”, due to the Greek crisis, and it wouldn’t be unethical for me to do so. Heck I could short the Euro and probably make a killing in the next 5-10 days. Would taking these short positions make life harder for those banks by raising their capital cost and make life harder for all Europeans due to the currency loss? Sure, but that’s how the market works – the market determines the value of their securities or the currency or what have you.
Now some people will say that Goldman acted unethically because it was taking shorts in MBS while it was selling MBS. But that’s quite misleading. Goldman “sells” securities as a market maker. In other words, it’s a wholesaler that keeps an “inventory” of securities on hand in sufficient volume to fill lots and lots of buy and sell orders at the current market prices. It isn’t representing to any buyer or seller that the market prices at which they are buying or selling are reasonable or appropriate – it’s just the market price, not a price that Goldman sets. That market-making wholesaler activity is completely separate from Goldman’s trading book, where its own traders are taking bets on various securities, and it’s required to be kept completely separate under the broker-dealer regulations of the 1934 Act. Basically those are two different businesses that are not permitted to communicate with each other. So, in effect, these two “hands” of Goldman do not know what the other one is doing – by regulatory design. To then step back and say that the fact that Goldman’s trading book was shorting MBS that its marketmakers were selling at market prices is somehow unethical is really nonsensical – Goldman was buying and selling at market prices in one division, and in a completely separate division was taking bets on the market movement with its shareholders’ money. Two different businesses having nothing to do with each other.
Again, if the SEC can prove that Fourre lied, then that’s fraud. But if not, then we have a witch-hunt here, and a scapegoating of a bank that actually made more prudent risk management decisions than the other ones did with respect to the mortgage market. If more NY banks had been as prudent with their risk management around mortgage backed securities as Goldman was, fewer of them would have imploded, yet here we are punishing Goldman because we somehow viscerally dislike it when people make money (or, in this case, mitigate their losses elsewhere) based on something cratering – there’s a psychological barrier there, I think, when it comes to shorts. People get upset when people make money on short sales. I dislike Goldman as much as anyone else does – I worked with them a bit as a young lawyer in NY many years ago and found them very arrogant, even by NYC standards. But they’re good at what they do, and here they did nothing wrong. Tacky emails, to be sure, but unless they lied, I frankly can’t see the case against them.
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As for the similarity with the sexual market, I don’t really see it. The case of Goldman is that they were probably the only investment bank with people smart enough to at least begin to act to hedge their exposure early enough to save themselves, while the other banks just collapsed. In the sexual market, it’s not the case that only one big alpha is left standing and the rest of the alphas have been devastated by some market correction. That’s because the sexual market has no way of correcting itself. As we discussed a while ago on Chuck’s blog, the issue with the sexual market is that it is a natural monopoly. In the sexual market, women are the sellers and men are the buyers – pretty much ALWAYS, with the very minor exception of the true silverback alpha male who can be a sexual “seller”. And it’s a truism that in the sex market, male “demand” for casual sex exceeds the female “supply” of casual sex, such that the price is bid up. The only men who can pay that price are the men who are alpha, in an unregulated sex market. In a different market, such an inequality of supply and demand would be met by increased supply, coming into the market to fill that excess demand … but of course in the sex market, that doesn’t happen. You don’t have more girls coming into the sex market to fill the excess demand by the boys, but rather you have a fixed amount of girls in the market – such that the price always stays high in an unregulated market. The sex market is more like the market for a utility or something like that – a market which, if left alone, tends to be a quasi-monopoly or an outright one, due to the limited ability to increase supply in such a way that will stabilize (and lower) price. That’s why the only way to get the sex market to function properly is with some degree of regulation of female behavior, because females are the quasi-monopolists in the sex market, the ones with the ultimate pricing power and the ones who will, without controls, price quite high when they are in the most demand – high enough that the market itself gets quite distorted.
The securities markets are very different. There are hundreds of thousands of issuers, different kinds of securities, different ways to invest, to bet, to speculate. The market is quick to react to price imbalances and so on. What we had with the sub-prime MBS debacle was the failure of the government to regulate derivatives as securities – something that is not new, and which we were actually discussing back in the early 90s when I worked in NY. Being completely unregulated, the derivatives market went haywire – which is understandable, because a completely unregulated market can lead to distortions. But the securities market in general is not like the sexual market – there are a ton of folks who are making quite a bit of money in the market right now who do not work for Goldman Sachs – including guys in their pajamas in front a laptop. That isn’t possible in the sexual market.
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Are Attacks on Food Convoys in Haiti Due to WFP Policy of Women-Only Food Aid?
Friday, February 26th, 2010
By Glenn Sacks, Uncategorized [source]
Not long ago, I wrote about the policy of the World Food Program that is coordinating food distribution in Haiti. The WFP's announced policy is to distribute coupons redeemable for food aid only to women and to men who can in some way prove that they are heads of households, i.e. they're single or don't have a living wife or mother. How men are expected to prove such a thing remains a mystery, particularly amid the post-earthquake chaos that reigns in the island nation.
Despite United States embassy statements to the contrary, it appears that, some six weeks after the quake, distribution of aid is proving to be haphazard at best. For example, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that some 3 million Haitians are in need of aid, and of those, about 2 million need regular food aid. But of those, about half have little or no access to food. Haitians have reported that much food has remained in dockside warehouses so long it's become rotten and unfit for consumption.
Obviously, the task of aiding the needy in Haiti, whose basic infrastructure was never very good and is now barely there at all, is daunting. Aid organizations and workers should be commended for their efforts under the most trying of circumstances.
But on January 30, a food convoy was attacked by men and had to be beaten back by the Haitian military personnel. On February 3 there was a food protest in Petionville which is a suburb of Port-au-Prince. And last Monday, Haitian men armed with machetes again attacked a convoy, this time making off with bags of rice.
Here's an article about the January 30 incident (Yahoo, 2/2/10).
Here's an article about the February 3 demonstration (Associated Press, 2/3/10).
And here's an article about the February 22 attack (The Star, 2/24/10).
Is there a connection between the attacks and the WFP's refusal to distribute food to men in need? I asked my contacts at the World Food Program, but they have declined to respond. Clearly, the plight of Haitians is dire. During the march in Petionville, people held signs reading "Help Us, We're Starving." I have no reason to think that that applies only to men. But those who are attacking food convoys are men, suggesting a level of desperation not experienced by women. And the policy of not distributing food to men is still in place. Maybe there's no connection between the WFP policy and the attacks, but my guess is that it's a factor in the overall desperation and discontent in Haiti.
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All good things come to an end
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
By Novaseeker, Uncategorized [source]
Yes, it’s come to that time. The time to officially shutter this blog.
I’ve said most of what I have to say, I think, and honestly don’t have much time for blogging any longer due to real life things. I’ve enjoyed the experience very much, and have liked getting to know some of my readers as well, but rather than have a semi-dormant blog creeping along like a husk, I thought it better to officially close the shop.
I’ll still be around — you’ll see me at The Spearhead from time to time, and at various other blogs on my link list. But maintaining this blog at this point is not something I have the time or energy to do, unfortunately.
I wish you all well, and thank all of my readers for their support. It’s been a good journey, and I hope to cross paths with you elsewhere in virtuality.
Nova
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HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Friday, January 1st, 2010
By Glenn Sacks, Uncategorized [source]
It looks like 2010 shows promise of being a great year for men's and fathers' rights. Our organizations are stronger and more effective than ever. The overwhelming weight of social science continues to run in favor of fathers and their children. Slowly but inexorably, our issues and our viewpoints are seeping into the mainstream media. As usual, the last to know are the politicians, but we will be doing a lot to educate them about the value of fathers to children and the multitude of issues that affect their relationships.
So raise a glass (of seltzer?) to 2010! Our voices are stronger and are starting to be heard.
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Merry Christmas to All!
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
By Glenn Sacks, Uncategorized [source]
And always remember to love your neighbor.
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A new direction for Novaseeker
Monday, November 30th, 2009
By Novaseeker, Uncategorized [source]
As most of my readers know, I haven’t really had all that much time to focus on this blog for quite some time now. I do not expect that this will change much in the months ahead, as work and other life responsibilities are leaving less time for blogging in general.
I will still be posting entries here, and the blog isn’t going away, but I think in the period ahead the focus will be somewhat different from what it has been in the past. I think that with the advent of many quite good men’s-oriented blogs — many of which are located in my link list to the right — as well as the rise of The Spearhead into a true clearinghouse of sorts for men’s issues, an opportunity presents itself to focus on this blog on other sorts of issues that interest me from time to time. I suspect that, in practical terms, this means more articles on some of the other things described in my masthead (philosophy, politics, theology and so on) and less on men’s issues at least on this blog.
I will have to see exactly how this pans out, because of my lower posting availability these days, but in any case it’s likely that you’ll continue to see this blog shift a bit directionally in terms of the kinds of posts it contains.
As always, thanks for reading and commenting.
Nova
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Thanksgiving 2009
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
By Novaseeker, Uncategorized [source]
It’s been a busy few days around Thanksgiving this year. I hope that all of my readers in the United States had a fantastic Thanksgiving, and for those readers outside the United States, I hope that you all have much in your lives to be thankful for as we approach the end of 2009.
Belatedly, I’d like to share a Thanksgiving prayer by Fr. Alexander Schmemann:
Thank You, O Lord!
(by Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann)
Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy.
Thank You, O Lord, for having accepted this Eucharist, which we offered to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and which filled our hearts with the joy, peace and righteousness of the Holy Spirit.
Thank You, O Lord, for having revealed Yourself unto us and given us the foretaste of Your Kingdom.
Thank You, O Lord, for having united us to one another in serving You and Your Holy Church.
Thank You, O Lord, for having helped us to overcome all difficulties, tensions, passions, temptations and restored peace, mutual love and joy in sharing the communion of the Holy Spirit.
Thank You, O Lord, for the sufferings You bestowed upon us, for they are purifying us from selfishness and reminding us of the “one thing needed”: Your eternal Kingdom.
Thank You, O Lord, for having given us this country where we are free to Worship You.
Thank You, O Lord, for this school, where the name of God is proclaimed.
Thank You, O Lord, for our families: husbands, wives and, especially, children who teach us how to celebrate Your holy Name in joy, movement and holy noise.
Thank You, O Lord, for everyone and everything.
Great are You, O Lord, and marvelous are Your deeds, and no word is sufficient to celebrate Your miracles.
Lord, it is good to be here! Amen.
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