I had another of those birthdays yesterday. My operative approach to getting old is simple and familiar: Every day above ground is a good one, or at least presumably better than the alternative.

The other day it occurred to me what an extraordinary time we’re living in. That was before Barack Obama very predictably was elected president (go back as far as you can count and you’ll find pretty much every time: the better candidate with the better campaign wins. My eyes misted up a bit at John McCain’s concession speech on election night — I figured after all he’s done for the country, he deserves better. But the whole point of an election is somebody wins and somebody loses. Good man, terrible campaign. Bob Dole had the same experience; here’s hoping the Senator from Arizona doesn’t start flogging Cialis Moments anytime soon.)

Heck, I’m getting fed up with Obamamania already and the guy isn’t even sworn in yet. It could be a long four or eight years for the news biz if Obama runs a tight-ship White House that’s anything like his gaffe-deficient campaign. We have whole departments devoted to presidential screw-ups; what if the prez doesn’t supply any? I don’t want to live in such a world (and I doubt I’ll have to).

But back to the extraordinary times. Forget about America finally getting around to electing a black (well, a half-white Harvard-educated millionaire) president. Had to happen sooner or later; Hollywood’s been preparing us for it for at least 15 years. The real deal, historywise, is the Stock Market Crash of ’08. Guess what: we lived through it. I’m pretty sure no bankers jumped from high windows … I’d have given my eyeteeth to write this headline: Ledge-Leaper Survives by Landing on Taxpayer (mind you, I stole this gag from a cartoonist; and I don’t have any eyeteeth).

The thing about the Crash is: hard times prove what people are made of far more efficiently than times of plenty. In good times you go to work every day, do the same seven or eight things the same way you did them 14,736 times before, go home and watch the same number of hours of television and buy the same number of consumer goods. Years get wasted on repetition.

In hard times, you think about hanging around the office a bit more to keep yourself in good standing with the ol’ paymasters. If your business is getting beat up, you think less about the seven or eight old things that used to work and start thinking about the seven or eight new things that need to work. Tried-and-true is toast during tough times.

A lot of people I know lost their jobs before the crash. We’re hanging on for dear life at the paper, and every headline saying the auto industry is in a shambles or that retail sales are off by 20 percent is telling us: the money from whence our paychecks flow is getting scarce. We’re in the midst of a union contract negotiation that seems, well, counterintuitive: the whole point of a union is to pry more cash out of the greedy capitalist’s pocket. Suppose our company’s greedy capitalist owner is in hock up to his receding hairline and all the money in his pockets belongs to some bank back east, with interest? We never gave 13 seconds thought to how many Jaguars or corporate jets our owner might have to do without to keep us off the picket lines. But right now, his problems feel like our problems.

I can’t imagine things getting as bad as the Great Depression. I can imagine people getting a little more thoughtful about pinning their prosperity on borrowed money. I can see some good coming from Wall Street and the hedge fund crowd getting their come-uppance. The good times of the past 15 years had us doing everything under the sun with somebody else’s money. Now the whole country’s in hock up to its receding hairline when it needs to have something set aside to ride out the tough times.

Over the years the whole world developed an abiding interest in Americans going into debt to buy stuff they could do without in a pinch. Well, the pinch has arrived, and the world’s reacting like anybody would after a door slamming shut wakes them from a nice afternoon nap: panic first, watchfulness next, then the realization that the world has not come to an end.

It’s true that the Crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression, World War II, hydrogen bombs, the Cold War and Vietnam, all of which we’d leave off the Tourist Brochure of the 20th Century. But after all those calamities, people got a little smarter, a little more humane (nobody firebombs whole cities, leaving 100,000 dead anymore). Somehow, against all odds, the world emerges a teensy-tiny better place after these horrible episodes.

That’s the track record I’m banking on.

Right after I moved to California, I bought a sliver of the Vanguard Growth Index Fund for $33.66 a share and invested it for “the long haul” in a 401(k) rollover account. If stocks had returned their alleged 7 percent a year, shares of the fund should be trading for about $60 a share (compounded). Today, nine years and a couple weeks later, VIGRX closed at $23.20, well under half of what it “should” have earned and, most painfully for yours truly, 31 percent below what I paid for it.

I reshuffled after the tech stock crash and had a little bit of luck: after the worst week in Wall Street history, my fund balance in that 401(k) rollover is only down 19 percent — after nine years. In 2004 I launched a cautious, sensible plan to dollar-cost average that account back to health. The credit bubble that energized the most recent bull move got me back to even last fall; even after moving a third of my stake to cash last fall, I lost all the gains of four patient, sensible, diversified years in six weeks. I tried buying back into my stock funds when there was blood on the streets; in seven days the market dived another 20 percent (making half of it back on Monday, fortunately).

Of course it’s unfair to gripe about stocks’ returns after a panic sell-off of epic proportions. Everybody’s portfolio stinks at times like these; it’ll sweeten when the fear turns to greed, as it inevitably does.

What gripes me is that I never did anything greedy; I never bought individual stocks on margin, I never dived into options or futures or currencies, I stayed with sensible mutual funds from a sensible fund family. Buying and holding a single fund, as illustrated above, would have cost me a third of my stake; reshuffling cut my losses to a fifth.

I guess I should be grateful: I’ve lived through two market crashes in eight years and I’m still sitting on 80 cents on the dollar. Many have been wiped out.

Melissa and I call experiences like this “tuition”: the cost of learning how the world works. Over the years I’ve gotten richer in experience, but I’d like to be getting richer in the ol’ rollover account.

One thing I have figured out for absolute certain: The only way to make your account balance rise is to put more into it than you take out. Everything else is casino winnings.

The radio show “This American Life” profiles what’s happening on Wall Street with “Another Frightening Episode About the Economy.”

This is must listening for figuring out what’s behind the current stock market sell-off. It describes the workings of “credit default swaps,” which financiers used originally to insure their investments in corporate bonds and make sure they were covered in case the bonds ever defaulted.

Because corporations are highly motivated not to default on their bonds — their bond ratings determine whether they can borrow money to keep their doors open and the lights on — buying insurance against bond default seemed like taking out fire insurance on something that had no reasonable expectation of ever burning down. You know, risk-free.

It works like this: The bonds exist in a world of their own and anybody can buy CDS (credit default swap) as an insurance policy against these bonds never being repaid. In the regulated insurance business, the only person who can insure your house is you. Now imagine if it were possible for all your neighbors to buy fire insurance on your house as well: this is how the unregulated CDS market works.

Why on earth would your neighbors want to buy fire insurance on your house that allowed them to be paid the house’s value if it burned down? Well, say your next-door neighbor saw your toddler playing with fire in the backyard and all the sudden he knows there’s a firebug living on the premises and the fire risk is much higher than anybody else believes. He’d love to go to your insurance agent and say “I’ll pay you a thousand bucks right now if you write me a fire insurance policy so I get paid if the house burns down.”

Your insurance agent knows nothing about the firebug toddler and figures this is the easiest thousand bucks he’ll ever make. It’s so easy that he might sell the premium to somebody else down the line and pocket a commission, or just to make sure he doesn’t get burned, he buys an insurance policy from another agent agreeing to pay him if your house burns down.

This set-up would work fine — all your neighbors and their insurance agents could take out policies on the homes in your neighborhood based on their perceptions of how likely it is that your house will burn down. But imagine what happens if your home actually burns down: now all these insurance agents who’ve taken their easy thousand bucks owe all the neighbors the full value of your home. (Won’t your neighbors cash in big time? Not necessarily: they were buying and selling policies on other homes and now that a house has actually burned, nobody know what those investments are worth anymore).

Remember when Lehman Brothers, the giant investment bank, failed a few weeks back? Well, its bonds were insured by something like $400 billion worth of credit default swaps. When Lehman went bankrupt, its bonds went into default. And now, all the big banks on Wall Street and a bunch of big hedge funds are on the hook for most of that $400 billion, and that’s why they’re not lending to anybody: they’re hoarding cash because they own CDS contracts obliging them to pay anybody who bought insurance on Lehman bonds. An auction will be set up later this week to figure out who gets paid.

Later this month, another auction will settle CDS contracts on Washington Mutual’s defaulted bonds.

How did all these Wall Street wizards get themselves into this jam? Well, they wanted to hedge their risk: if they had one CDS contract requiring them to pay a million dollars if a bond defaulted, they made sure they had another CDS contract paying them the same amount if a default happened. All the Wall Street CDS players traded these CDS contracts back and forth and earned a profit or booked a loss depending on what the market thought the CDS contracts were worth.

Everybody partied like mad till the unthinkable happened: actual defaults on actual bonds. Then it was game over because all these CDS contracts were connected in a chain no stronger than its weakest link. A small number of defaults set off a chain reaction that is spreading havoc on Wall Street as people confront the obligations they’ve taken on in these CDS contracts. If you owe billions you don’t have — and can’t raise — you are insolvent.

It’s going to be a messy few months while all this gets sorted out. Hopefully there won’t be any more massive bank failures to pour gasoline on the blaze before the Fed throws enough money at the financial system to put the fire out.

So, how good is your cat?

I suppose I could beat the cat at chess.

Lots of cool, creative types gathered in San Mateo over the weekend for Maker Faire, a celebration of human adaptability.

My photos are here.

My take on global warming is intuitive rather than scientific, based on information readily available from my brain. It goes like this:

A) There is a fixed amount of carbon on the planet.

B) Burning stored, high-carbon materials releases carbon into the atmosphere.

C) Petroleum is basically the world’s carbon bank — compressed biomatter from jungles that existed on earth hundreds of millions of years ago.

D) In the past 100 years, a very large percentage of all the petroleum that our planet has ever produced has been burned, and ALL that carbon has been released into the atmosphere.

E) Release of that much carbon into the atmosphere has to be unprecedented in at least the last several million years.

F) It’s simply counterintuitive to believe that 100 years of heavy industrial production based on the burning of petroleum would not affect the behavior of the earth’s atmosphere.

G) The way things are going, we will easily burn up every last drop of oil on the planet in the next century or two. In the next century or three after that, historians will call us the most selfish, short-sighted humans in the planet’s history because we were borrowing all that oil from future generations — with no prospect, no plan, no earthly idea of paying it back.

H) We can adapt to life with different weather, but adapting to a world without petroleum will be the far greater challenge.

I) Given all these considerations, the mandate to save petroleum by not burning it all wastefully yields the same result: less carbon in the atmosphere and reduced global warming, and more petro-chemicals for future generations, giving us more time to develop more sustainable energy sources.

Conclusions:

• Billions of humans burning highly concentrated, carbon-based materials are bound to screw with the weather when all that carbon is released into the atmosphere.
• Petroleum is the most powerful, practical component of industrial society. It is, literally, the grease on the wheels. Without it, industry stops. We don’t want that.
• As a matter of moral principle, each of us should reduce our petroleum consumption to ensure there will be some oil left for our great-great-great-grandchildren and their great-great-great grandchildren.

Al Gore overstates the extent to which the Earth is in the Balance. If anything, Earth is looking forward to the day when we foolishly burn all the oil and resort to massive warfare and bioterror and whatever else it takes to cleanse our species from the planet’s surface. Earth gets back into balance when we’re not mucking up the place anymore.

We’re flying through resources under the mass delusion that we have a say in how things turn out, when the best we can hope for is learning to play by the planet’s rules. Cheaters get to sleep with the dinosaurs.

Doctor King mastered the art of using non-violence as a weapon to get what he wanted (and, more critically, what our country needed). A more conventional weapon killed him in Memphis 40 years ago today. It wasn’t the rifle, or the slug, or even the presumably racist motivation of the man who shot him dead on that motel walkway, that cost King’s life.

I think it was the truth — a truth self-evident and yet fundamentally counterintuitive to human nature. Which was: violence is unnecessary and even counterproductive. We’re so captive of our violent nature that the idea of being willfully non-violent — particularly for political means — doesn’t compute.

King wasn’t the first to come up with this idea: Gandhi used it to kick the British out of India; today Indian companies are buying up British carmakers. Gandhi was murdered, too, which might’ve been on King’s mind when he said he’d seen the promised land but didn’t think he’d make it there with his people.

The genius of King and Gandhi was to use non-violent civil disobedience to provoke the inner violence of so-called civilized people. It worked because it created a “shooting an unarmed man” image that exposed how unjust these supposedly just people could be.

I’ve often wondered if the Palestinians would’ve had better luck following King’s model. Can’t say because it’s never been tried (at least not explicitly), but it sure seems to me that every act of Palestinian violence against Israel convinces the Israelis they’re justified in continuing to make life miserable for the Palestinians. Strikes me that if the Palestinians tweaked the conscience of the Israeli nation without killing and maiming its children, they might have a shot at ending the oppression (though that would render the fire-eating fanatics who run things irrelevant, and who wants to be irrelevant?)

Imagine what would’ve happened to King’s followers in Alabama and Mississippi if they’d have fought back at the bigots with baseball bats and firebombs. The lynchings would probably still be going on to this day.

King’s truth exposed the lie that America was a free country in the middle of the 20th century, when skin tone determined which schools people could send their kids to, which fountains they could get a drink from.

The truth got King killed, but he breathed life into an ideal that made America a more truthful country. We all owe him a thank-you for that.

Life is what happened when the planet was busy making other plans. I’m not sure anybody knows exactly how or why non-living bits of matter became self-replicating bits of living organisms that eventually evolved into us. Whatever it was, we’re grateful.

One thing I’ve figured out since I started spending more time outdoors: we’re just one more species on a planet teeming with them. Earth has no regard for our minor hopes and petty ambitions. It’ll live on long after we’re gone.

A lot of humans fret over the damage we’re inflicting on the planet. I have a hard time getting totally worked up over our trivial contributions — it’s not like we can move continents, create mountain ranges, sprout volcanoes. The planet’s always tearing one part down and building another part up. Most of California was ocean bed a few million years ago. There were no activist organizations to protect aquatic species royally screwed by the collision of tectonic plates that created our lovely coastline and left dry land where the ocean used to be.

There’s only one problem with the “stop worrying, the planet’ll be fine” approach: Greedy short-sighted buck chasers use it as an excuse to do nothing about disappearing forests, rivers, lakes and living things that, frankly, the Earth can adapt to losing. Some kind of life will pretty much always live this planet.

The species that really needs clean water, abundant forests and thriving wild ecosystems is us. Wild places store our best hope for survival. Ruining them ruins us.

Blasting the tops off mountains to protect mining jobs or chopping down ancient redwoods to provide a few logging jobs might be good for one generation, but it’s stealing resources our grandkids and great-great grandkids and they’re great-great grandkids are going to need.

There’s no such thing as saving the environment. There’s only saving ourselves.

From this morning’s AP:

BAKERSFIELD – While authorities in two states searched for a young boy they thought had been abducted, 9-year-old Zane Newton was buried under an accidental collapse of dirt near his home. His body was found “completely covered” in dirt in a lot hours after the reported kidnapping, police said.

Newton’s playmate told police that the 9-year-old was abducted midmorning Wednesday as the two were playing outside. A masked man pulled up in a black car and opened fire on them, the boy said, adding Newton might have been wounded before the man took him.

In reality, police said, the boys were playing in a lot when Newton fell into a hole and was buried when it collapsed around him.

I guess it just made a better story.