ADORED BY HORDES

2011-10-02T22:46:00.001-07:00

Rilke: Fall Day

Summer in Seattle has grown lackadaisical this past half decade, arriving late after a listless don't-plant-tomatoes Spring, then coming on fast, staying sunnier and hotter than the slugs can stand, then lingering long. It didn't really leave here until this weekend, and that distinctive change of seasons feeling I've long associated with football, and is closely tethered to the sensation of lying down in a muddy or even flooded field and stretching, has arrived like a linebacker diving into a blocking dummy. It's in the joints and the bones, in the muscles and the glands, and these call up consciousness. They call up thoughts of tangy cider made from frost-sweetened apples, and gallons that need to come home.

By assumptive agreement or ancient reflex, or possibly the marital telepathy couples can develop, Lord Wife and I invited friends over for dinner for last night, then went shopping for lamb. It was lichen-fed Icelandic lamb and I got a whole leg of it, something that doesn't happen every day or year. Fit for a Viking feast cooked slow with salt and fennel, served with wine plundered from the south of France. Rilke, master of his craft, wrote about the compelling feeling of seasons lost and impending, and the available translations into English in no way conveyed his power nor maintained his rhyme and cadence. So I gave it a go:

Lord: it is time. The summer's gone, you know.

Send shadows long over the sundials,

and loose thy winds across the meadows.

Let each fruit swell full on tree and vine

and send us yet two more southerly days

for urging consummation, to chase

the last sweet drops into heavy wines.

He who has no house now builds no better.

He who is alone will long stay so,

will sit, and watch, and write long letters,

and in the lanes will pace to and fro,

restless, as the dry leaves blow.

2011-07-01T15:09:00.000-07:00

When Diplomacy Won't Work

There’s a turf war going on in my yard.

Dandelions are crowding out grasses

with their unauthorized settlements

of fat sprawling leaves. They've set

up dictatorships commanding

all subjects to wear yellow turbans.

I am determined on regime change,

having been influenced in favor

of green by pretty catalogs from seed growers

makers of fertilizers and weed killers.

But I am constrained from chemical warfare

by a higher authority--my wife--and her allies

the deer, who are neutral, nibbling equally

on both sides, and the salmon who swim

around in the saltchuck at the end of our street.

The dandelions have learned to keep

their heads down during mower assaults.

I've lowered the blade in retaliation

but the enemy counters by early ripening,

releasing brigades of midget paratroopers

to spread terrorist cells wherever they land.

Collateral damage body count averages

six slugs per skirmish but I say if the little

buggers can't get out of the way

they deserve what they get.

I have a plan.

I will raise the debt ceiling and mobilize

a children's army to dig up the dandelions,

a nickel a pop. It will be a holy war.

When the number of holes

exceeds the number of dandelions,

I will know I am winning.

In the end, I will win.

God is on my side.

2011-06-05T22:06:00.000-07:00

Syria Is Going Up...

And I could go to the chalkboard and write out the geo-calculus, but choose to spare us both. If you think instability and region-wide wars in the Arabian Peninsula or maybe wars spanning the world are bad, then it's bad. Or, if you dislike seeing peaceful demonstrators dispersed with machine gun fire, it's bad that way too. Which is what's on this video, and why Syria shut down their internet to keep the official world from seeing its murderous badness.

I'm working on a post about how the collapse of the global financial system crafted 30-odd years ago is linked to food hyperinflation and the revolt of much of the world's non-rich. Also, Israel and the US are planning to strike Iran's nuclear facilities in July or August. No links, no sources, but the chalkboard has grown a bit full.

Syrian leadership may be forgiven for having a poor understanding of how digital media proliferates around their edicts, but they certainly understand corruption, and seem to know that CNN producers repackage their news from Google searches and have the attention spans of salt and vinegar potato chips. So this may or may not hit the MSM anytime soon.

The Assad Part Deux regime may have 6 months left, give or take, and the "How to Buy Some Time" section of their playbook is now being heavily scrutinized. Torture, machine-gun, placate, and then buy off? Or buy off, placate, re-machine-gun, and then flee? So many children to beat into informing on their parents, so little time. Fortunately, I don't care, because my masters in the Empire have finally given me this:

2011-05-23T22:38:00.000-07:00

Schrodinger's Terrorist

In 1935, Edward Schrodinger conceived a thought experiment to point out the incompleteness of current quantum mechanics. If a live organism was put into a sealed box, and then the principles used to describe subatomic particles were applied to said organism, it would, probablistically speaking, be both alive and dead. You really can't tell until you open the box. For this symbolic paradox, Schrodinger chose a kitty.

The Obama Administration recently declared Osama bin Laden dead, offering mathematical proofs instead of opening the sealed box. For domestic political consumption, assuming a re-election is intended, this is an elegant solution. For military policy, it only has value if victory is declared and intent to pull out is demonstrated with fair rapidity. It surely gives admirable leverage to that end, yet if unused, the value turns vengefully negative.

A handful of Taliban just besieged a naval base in Karachi. They kept it up throughout the night, even destroying US drone aircraft, citing as their motivation the violation of Pakistan's sovereignty in whacking the Cat. With that attack, not to mention others, the cracks in the US-Pakistan alliance have riven into gaps. In the morning, Pakistan announced China is going to turn the commercial port of Gwadar (in Balochistan, 70 kilometers from the border with Iran) into a naval base as part of a "string of pearls" strategy to protect oil imports.

The US badly miscalculated its bin Laden mechanics. With no signals forthcoming as to a draw-down, Pakistan must actively seek allies with better chances of keeping its own domestic pressure cooker from turning into steam and shrapnel. Pakistan needs oil, it needs food, it needs to maintain balance of power versus India, and it will find them from less toxic and far more proximate benefactors.

2011-05-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

Regina Spektor: Blue Lips, Song and Lyrics

He stumbled into faith and thought,
"God, this is all there is?"
The pictures in his mind arose,
and began to breathe.
And all the gods and all the worlds
began colliding

on a backdrop of blue.

Blue lips, blue veins...

He took a step but then felt tired.
He said, "I'll rest a little while."
But when he tried to walk again,
he wasn't a child.
And all the people hurried fast,
Real fast, and no one ever smiled.

Blue lips, blue veins...
Blue, the color of our planet from far far away.

He stumbled into faith and thought,
"God, this is all there is?"
The pictures in his mind arose,
and began to breathe.
And no one saw, and no one heard.
They just followed the lead.
The pictures in his mind arose,
and began to breed.

They started out beneath the knowledge tree.
Then they chopped it down to make white picket fences,
and, marching along the railroad tracks,
they smile real wide for the camera lenses.
They made it past the enemy lines
just to become enslaved in the assembly lines.

2011-05-01T22:42:00.000-07:00

Case-Schiller Housing Price Graph

We like our house and will never flip it unless a nice couple in Paris or Denmark wants to trade.

2011-03-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

The Battle of Chernobyl

Can't seem to write anything about the Fukushima disaster yet. This documentary tells the hair-raising story of Chernobyl.

2011-03-27T22:38:00.000-07:00

Homo Fukushimaensis

You can compartmentalize former lives successfully, balance them down into cool dormancies but the problem is you can't predict why or when they'll heat up which ones or what parts. You only know that they come back in waves and packets of eternal radiation rolling real and ghostly in your wakefulness and dreams.

Japan comes back with clarity. In my first airy hours there, I landed at Haneda, or Wing-Field, and was met by a young guide whose only mission was to get me to headquarters. It was o-hanami, when cherries pop out undeniably into pink blossoms, the Yeats in your heart burgeons on through your blood and only a pagan festival will do. Dawn was breaking too and the Tokyo-bound train passed through a steady succession of coastal rice paddies and hamlets. In its originating night, fog had settled down into a latticed matrix like lozenges of gallium arsenide between over-sized transistors, into flooded rice fields below dikes arraying off into hazy whites. My guide, who had probably woken up at 3 or 4AM local time to come retrieve her cargo, sat in silence, certainly, and what might possibly be described as aggrieved judgement. It was hard to tell. Everything was hard to tell. The Disorient Express.

Travel and you'll see how hemispheres and continents have their own ideas of trees. Even the grasses are different. The rocks, the weeds, the doorknobs. New sceneries, so plush, so manufactured, so old ran along my moistened window north and to my right. An acutely angled sun sidled up behind to jostle the sheltering fog, poking it first then stirring it up sprightly out of beds like pillows being fluffed and shifted one last time over sleepy heads. With my sleeve, I rubbed the grease patches my nose had left off the glass and asked the guide, "How do you say the word for the rice? What's in there? In Japanese?"

To insist on learning something in her language at that ungodly hour was typically inconsiderate. So gaijin, so outside-person. But there's no help for that. Some years later Kyoko would accuse, "you Americans, you always have to ask why." A half-minute later my companion said, "Ko-may. Go-han." By which she meant, "Rice...Food." Those little clicks and exhalations are loaded with a cultural power their translations can't approach. In that land they approximate a term more like "Staff of Life," but even that falls short. I spoke my first words in the language of the rising sun with the rehearsal of intended memory.

As a child, rice had been fair forced into my mouth from Rice-a-Roni boxes, and came with Chinese restaurant food for free. The Japanese, however, have a dissenting proverb: to grow one grain of it, a grandmother had to bend over in a shit-field for an hour. Live there, and you learn the monsoons come every June and reverse the weather's prevailing direction from easterly winds to west. The west wind's are insistent, and they carry, well, one hesitates to say rain. It's an airborne flood robust enough to drench every inch of you if you walk or ride a bike or motorcycle, warm water driven sideways up underneath your mackinaw, to run all icky down or up your neck and back, up your shins and into your ass crack, into your sneakers, your boots or spongy shoes. Most of these will mold up spectacularly, hairier with green than a neglected loaf of Wonder Bread if not well-rubbed with oil or soap on that evening.

The neon lights of Ginza would come sooner, and they made Manhattan's Times Square look antiquated and dirty, dingy and half-hearted. Ginza was 20 years more clever, clean and unyellowed, and its videotronic interweavings had cogently combined to form the world's biggest, most colorful bug zapper. It bathed me in hellacious beauty, stunned my eyes with variegations of ostentatious wealth and styles my pupils' backsides had never yet reflected, much less dwelt upon. Here was a city and a country cavorting in abnegations of a prior and now completely invisible defeat, working to overcome the insecurities of a small but proud island nation with no natural resources, dancing the steps to be richer than the West. Nuclear power made it possible.

There was someone named Karen on the long flight over. Despite being already engaged to a nice Mormon girl, I agreed to meet her under the Ginza clock tower, and did so in what had immediately become a whole different world. Walking hip to hip with someone whose job was simply to be herself, slower than normal while the throttle of one of the world's rarest and most unmuffled cars was blipped, I realized we were keeping pace with two teenage boys in a 1966 Iso Rivolta. Both were driving, after a fashion. 5, 10, 20 blips and they'd jerk forward 20 or 30 feet then come tautly to a halt. There were many others doing versions of likewise.

In a tortured, halting procession down the well-lit strip there came a brand-new chaffeured Rolls Royce, its tuxedoed passengers drinking from champagne glasses, there was a prim and pretty girl on display behind the wheel of a white Jaguar XK 12o wearing a matching angora sweater, there was a plethora of garden-variety Ferraris, Porsches all with their windows open in a circus of consumption with everything but jugglers on horses. There might've been horses there but we didn't notice. There was a lot going on, and but for the closeness of humanity it would've been cold out. It didn't seem cold. We were all of us floating on the deliciously flying fuck of it, blessed and knowing it, unleashed and transmogrified. I feel as privileged as those kids trying to cruise in the Rivolta. More privileged. We were energized, and some white horses would've been perfect.

2011-03-24T16:53:00.000-07:00

21st Century Intelligence Test

This is a multiple-choice word problem. Your government has announced the tap water in your local municipality (of 36 million people) has been poisoned due to a radiation leak at a nearby nuclear power plant. This level is unsafe for infants, and possibly other living organisms which are made from infants. Reporting about the plant has suddenly gotten very quiet. You should:

a) Go buy bottled water;

b) Wait for the Ministry of Denial to raise the safe limit to levels above current contamination;

c) Leave town now before the panic-driven wave of irradiated cannibalism and general mayhem begins.

d) BTFD (Trader acronym for "Buy the Fucking Dip")

2011-03-24T16:35:00.000-07:00

Everything Is Under "Control"

So glad to know that everything is just fine at the Fukushima nuclear reactors, and that I was being a damned fool to go out and get things that block the uptake of radioactive iodine-131, bind with caesium-137 and -134, and to tally the beeps from my Geiger counter keychain. And the 130 gallons of drinking water, the portable garage, the Mac-10, the inflatable roadblock, etc? All unnecessary frivolities of a paranoiac.

So far, so good, just a few extra x-rays for the people in the Pacific Northwest, which the media tells me is actually *great* for your health! Such a relief to know that a bunch of fate-tempting dipshits in engineer suits aren't poisoning my children from halfway around the world, but that they're actually helping them!

2011-03-24T16:18:00.001-07:00

I Was Wrong

There. I finally admitted it. When you're wrong, you're wrong. In the previous post, I said that NATO would invade Libya. That was completely ham-headed.

I should've said the United Nations would first pass a resolution to invade Libya, then demand that the Arabic world invade itself, then hand over operations to NATO after the Arabic world told the UN to fuck off. And I should've said that no one is going to have the foggiest notion about how to get 1.5 million barrels of light sweet crude flowing out of there again, and mentioned that Libya also sits on top of a huge fresh water aquifer. Thus the word "invade."

2011-02-26T15:59:00.000-08:00

The Big Picture: Oil Curtain Meets Domino Theory

We're off on the road to Morocco
This camel is tough on the spine
Where they're going, why we're going, how can we be sure?
I'll lay you 8 to 5 we'll meet Dorothy Lamour

Living under a rock and listening to swing music isn't a bad way to go. Get yourself some root beer, a tall glass and vanilla ice cream, drop in a couple scoops and let it fizz. Put on some WWII-era classics like Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train" or Jimmy McHugh's "Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer." Garand-damn-teed, you'll start feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in no time. It's way more scientific than scientology, more meditative than meditation, and takes even less effort than Methodism. But sometimes a rock just isn't thick enough, or worse, is equipped with a wireless network.

Empires do not sensibly retreat or reduce expenditures, but follow a repeating, well-established pattern of symptoms:

"One symptom is widespread public concern over cultural and economic decay, with its many corollaries. The second is a growing religious fervor, church-state relationship, or crusading insistence. Next comes a rising commitment to faith as opposed to reason and a corollary downplaying of science. Fourth, we often find a considerable popular anticipation of a millenial time frame: an epochal battle, emergence of an antichrist, or belief in an imminent second coming or Armageddon. Last, these empires are prone to a hubris-driven national strategic and military overreach, often pursuing abstract international missions that the nation can no longer afford, economically or politically."

Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy

The West's inflatable, indispensable clown punching bag, Moammar Qaddafi, has fled from Libya. The largest tribes there, ones sitting on petroleum reserves which make their dust storm farm one of the world's 10 largest oil exporters, called for his departure. Said tribal chieftains also threatened to cut off oil exports to whoever was responsible machine-gunning protestors, by which they mean said West. From there it has devolved to civil war, and oil and gas exports from Libya have stopped. Germany, Italy, and China are sending warships. Add this to the 20 or so other South Vietnam-type US-funded regimes that are coming down, and I'm frantically searching the living room for back issues of People magazine. I'm hoping to find one from no later than 1996.

Regimes in Tunisia, Algiers, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Iran are either toppled or teetered by waves of revolt ignited by skyrocketing food prices and no prospects. Bahrain, home of the US 5th Fleet, also looks like it's toast, and I've probably forgotten a few others like Oman. Food protests are now spreading across India and China. (Note: The Federal Reserve Bank is a primary cause of the rampant commodities inflation after a massive and continuing policy of money supply creation. The conversion of this money supply to things of actual value is known as Gresham's Law.) Saudi Arabia's sclerotic sheikhs won't last the summer, and the bin Laden family, the country's largest employer, is poised to serve as kingmaker.

In other news, Obama's State Department seems bumblingly oblivious, and it even continues to insist a CIA assassin caught red-handed in Pakistan should enjoy diplomatic immunity, effectively ending a crucial alliance over one thug's incarceration. Obama's minions appear to be consuming far more powerful anti-depressants than root beer floats, and they grasp neither the simplest repeats in pattern of outcomes, nor the enormity of their scale. This President has instead chosen to frame the collapse of dictators hand-picked by the US, skillful enforcers who have provided decades of brutal stability and oil exports, as healthy "democratic reform." This must be a lot like watching a man being torn to death by pit bulls and hearing him repeat, "I really love dogs! I really love dogs!" Yes, maybe the earth is just going through one big fit of democracy right now. Maybe the new Mid-East governments will only put up a few Twitter feeds and Facebook group pages while we continue to pump out all their remaining oil.

As Vincent commented on the earlier Oil Curtain piece, the Muslim Brotherhood seems well positioned to take over in Egypt and elsewhere. The structures of the current host nations for these mutinies simply don't favor near-term reform by any democratic process, and the global economic system is now rapidly destabilizing. Whereas the Koran was conceived as a road map for social justice, stability, equity, and charity, the precise improvements desired by the protestors. What is more likely to win: parliamentary democracy, or shared authoritarian tradition? While the Muslim Brotherhood isn't driving the bus yet, they and the chimerical "al Qaeda" can position themselves near the steering wheel and ready themselves to provide governing bodies with practical reach, or what I call waste management services. Whoever can keep the streets clear of garbage in these countries will end up running them, and the mosques are already organized by neighborhood. At minimum, religious thought leaders will have powerful seats at the bargaining tables, ones not well disposed to US, UK, or NATO interests as currently configured.

Whatever political spots you choose to sport, I think we can agree that Domino Theory, when applied to the cradle of crude, sounds expensive. My spots are known, and if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, I may ask, "What did the state of Israel have against that tree?" But the problems in these forests and deserts are far bigger than Israel, and even I can't pin 2010's 70+% increase in the price of wheat on one hyper-paranoid enterprise in deviousness. In fact, purely from a stress level perspective, it's a great time to not be an Israeli. (When asked a couple weeks ago what effect the revolts in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt are having on the collective psyche of America's land-based aircraft carrier in the Mid-East, Hassaf, the considerate former citizen of Jerusalem replied immediately, "Hysterical fear.") The UK, and later the US, went to extraordinary pains to arrange Israel and the Mid-East just the way it was circa November 2010. That arrangement is gone.

Sucking vanilla ice cream and root beer up a straw to the tunes of Glenn Miller means you choose not to experience hysterical fear. But it doesn't stop you from pondering the effects of your fellow citizens paying $5 per gallon gasoline this year. That roughly equates to oil at $150/bbl. Every 1 penny increase in the price of gasoline means 1 billion consumer dollars is removed from the US economy. $5 gasoline means a gross domestic product reduced in the neighborhood of 10-15%. At the micro level, many people already have to make choices between getting to work or eating well, or between eating and freezing. At the macro level, $5 gasoline is the sword of hyperinflation and the shield of demand destruction beating each other to smithereens. $5 gasoline may not even be possible, as $125 per barrel oil might take out the whole global economy before that happens. Like it did in 2008. One way or the other, oil is going to be a lot harder to get out of the Mid-East, and I'm frantically searching my living room for copies of People Magazine, hoping to find some from no later than 1996.

Empires don't reduce and they don't retreat borne on reason's wings. Empires collapse. Don Quixote was written by Cervantes many years after the effective fall of the Spanish Empire, one that was based on the most bloodthirsty forms of gold extraction, silver collection, and which was increasingly subject to the dictates of a religion completely disconnected from all semblance of sensible statecraft. In other words, it was just like this one. But at least the Alzheimer's-riddled old Don had some windmills to tilt at. The United States now devotes 54% of its annual budget to paying for current and previous wars. Offer this empire solutions, offer it alternatives, and it declines. It doesn't believe in windmills, it thinks they're only for wooden clog-wearing wusses. It doesn't want solar panels, rather the internal revenue service gives businesses tax breaks for using oil and gas. The empire's government is going to shut down this next month, its credit rating should have been cut in 2008, and public workers are beginning to strike across its states. Federal, state, and municipal debt are at a higher level than when they were singing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me) at the end of 1945.

NATO is going to invade Libya unless someone kills its punching bag clown over the next few days. Once again, that sounds expensive. So here's a rhetorical question, and a serious one, meaning I don't know the answer: what do you think it would take for the US to give up control over Saudi Arabia's oil?

2011-02-17T20:49:00.000-08:00

China Shifting Orientation

Pun intended, and this is important. If you've been watching, the overall impression you get is of a ship listing over because it's turning as fast as it can. There's a frenzy of activity observable above deck, you can see the proverbial fire drill, and hopefully it will hold together for a few more months. China's ship of state is clearly preparing for a heavy impact and is out of fiscal policy maneuver room. Their huge dam of saved foreign exchange dollars is flooding even more quickly into world equities and commodities. I expect its government to announce a currency liberalization soon, now that it's inflating anyway.

China's m oney supply increased 53% over last 2 years.

"The latest numbers show inflation is soaring out of control in China. The CPI is up 4.9% year-over-year, up from 4.6% in December. The PPI clocked in at 6.6% compared with 5.9% last month."

Producer price inflation index crests 6% in China.

China's inflation statistics clouded by data reporting changes.

China a net seller of US Treasury holdings for second straight month.

Must be a coincidence, Mr. Treasury Secretary.

The world's largest gold producer, China, imports as much gold in January 2011 as the first six months of 2010.

China crude oil imports up 27% in January.

The appetite for gold and diesel, physical delivery thereof, has hit the insatiable button. The entrepreneurial elites have either direct or familial memories of the Cultural Revolution, and fear something like it may happen again.

Cotton prices up by 44% so far in January and February of 2011; Chinese textile makers cornering supply, amid 95% cotton price increase since September 2010.

China hoarding grain in response to drought and global supply squeeze, imports running 9x higher than 2010.

Yes, that wheat import number is really 9 times higher. The current drought may have wiped out a third or so of their winter wheat crop, as well as Russia's. Cotton prices have so far averaged up by 1% per day this year.

China hoarding food staples, world food prices continue to rise

They're hoarding corn, wheat and rice supplies. Adverse weather across the globe has already hit grain production, and futures contracts are now on steroids. They like not starving, and they vote (with dollars).

Chinese passenger car sales plunge 10.3% in January.

Automakers who dreamed of selling tens of millions of cars there probably never traveled much in the lesser cities where they play Whack-a-Scooter. General Motors did sell more cars there in 2010 than in the US, but the government has rolled back its previous tax incentives on passenger vehicles.

China-based hackers knock Canadian government agencies offline.

This Digital Journal article does not sensationalize the attack, and explains why it may not be government a.k.a. signals intelligence hackers as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation accused. However, I've been seeing a definite increase in the number and target values of similar attacks, which have recently included successful server hacks on the Pentagon, utilities, and oil exploration companies. Militarily, even simple Denial of Service is an ideal asymmetric weapons, being cheap and effective if well-timed.

China's power output growth slowed dramatically in the latter half of 2010.

The chart from this article is above the title, comparing claimed yearly quarter-on-quarter GDP growth against power demand. In the 4th quarter of 2010, power consumption was only 5.5% higher compared with 2009, a time of relative contraction, while claimed GDP growth remained at a 9.8% growth rate. In other words, the low Q4 demand for power and the overall downward trend makes the growth claim implausible. The power side of this chart looks very much like a double-dip recession. The relaxed power consumption figures would seem to indicate a global structural recession, if not depression or systemic failure. If these power figures are valid it means foreign marketing and design companies cut back on orders to their lowest-cost manufacturer of widgets on the planet.

2011-02-14T12:38:00.000-08:00

Behind the Oil Curtain: Why Egypt is America's Poland

For one so long prepared, and still possessing courage,
as must be so in a prince granted such an estimable city,
steadfastly grip a port-hole now and force yourself to listen,
forswearing any plaintive or coward-wrought entreaties.
Dwell instead on these reveries, dwell on their sweet choruses,
dwell on dazzling tunes borne aloft by strange and fantastic processions.
Dwell mightily, and give proper farewells to the Alexandria you're losing.

It was in center of the shipyards in old Danzig where the Soviet Union first felt its Warsaw Pact herniate. A young trouble-making electrician from Chalin came to work there in the late 1960s and founded the USSR's first and only trade union. The emergent union promptly struck in 1970, just after the government decreed an increase in food prices; their strike was put down in the traditional Soviet manner and 30 of its members were killed.

Suppressing the shipyard union then became the secret police's top priority. Despite a standard arsenal of techniques, they failed to quell Solidarity's membership or expunge its widely circulated underground weekly newsletter. When the next food-price hikes occurred in 1980, the shipyard's strike rippled across Poland, inspiring the government to officially recognize Solidarity and cave to their demands. Moreso, the government soon fell, martial law was declared, and interim rule passed to General Jaruzelski. I and others sent the Poles bars of soap, that being their most common aid request. Lech Walesa, Solidarity's founder, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. He later became Poland's president following its first free elections in 1990.

The regimes in remaining Warsaw Pact nations either experienced revolts or simply sued for divorce, collapsing the Soviet Union. The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan is widely perceived as a primary catalyst of disintegration, but consistently wasteful, inflexible, inequitable and incompetent policies that generated determined internal resistance may well have had much stronger influenced on the demise's timing. Determined internal resistance is hereby mentally noted, as illustrated in the pic above the title.

Egypt's narrative arc may differ from Poland in aspects. Its ongoing revolt can genuinely be argued to spring from generational, technological, ideological, demographic and unemployment angles; but Egypt revolted because of high wheat prices, not the existence of Twitter. It's the same desperate anger that began to blaze under the keystone of Russia's Cold War strategy against the West, Poland, and heat and gravity pulled down the Warsaw Pact like dominoes. They were the Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Rumanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Albanians, and Cossacks who were second- or third-class subjects of the Kremlin, or even its designated enemies. This same exact process of too much heat and gravity on populations, on peoples denuded by predatory centrally planned regimes, who are now contemplating even grimmer futures than they became accustomed to, and whose leaders have long answered to foreign powers giving less than a toilet flush about them, is now resounding throughout Egypt and the rest of the countries shrouded behind the Oil Curtain. Hopefully world history will not remember this time very well, as that will mean it didn't devolve into a major war.

The Oil Curtain. That phrase has been ringing in my head for awhile, soon after Obama inhabited the White House, and it became immediately clear his main goal was not to "change the culture in Washington" but to simply keep the plates spinning and the vomitoreum going. Obviously I'm drawing a comparison between the Soviet Union and the United States some readers or family members may not be comfortable with. Unfortunately, the analogy fits all too well, and it won't take very long to fit even better. In a Part II I'd like to discuss why the US is not likely to intervene directly in Egypt, but will feel forced to nearby.

2011-02-05T17:44:00.000-08:00

Crude Awakenings

A natural gas pipeline to Israel blew up Saturday in Egypt. This would appear to support a possible Oil Shock scenario I floated in my last post, Why Israel May Abandon Zionism. A follow-up post on that theme could also be titled, "Why It Might Not Do Any Good."

http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/50519/icode/

Port workers who keep the Suez Canal running went on strike today:

"Suez Canal Company workers from the cities of Suez, Port Said, and Ismailia began an open-ended sit in today. Disruptions to shipping movements, as well as disasterous econmic losses, are expected if the strike continues. Over 6000 protesters have agreed that they will not go home today once their shift is over and will continue their in front of the company's headquarters until their demands are met. They are protesting against poor wages and deteriorating health and working conditions.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/here-we-go-suez-canal-workers-go-strike

In a bout of synchronicity or purposeful timing, Wikileaks published 4 memos today quoting Sadad al-Husseini, a Saudi oil exec, as stating their reserves in the ground have been overstated by 40%, or 300 billion barrels. He began making these disclosures in 2007. The US Embassy in Riyadh acknowledged the validity of Husseini's statements in a later cable:

"Our mission now questions how much the Saudis can now substantively influence the crude markets over the long term. Clearly they can drive prices up, but we question whether they any longer have the power to drive prices down for a prolonged period."

This is no surprise here at the world headquarters of Adored by Hordes. Back during the oil shocks of the 1970s, the oil export limits of oil-producing member nations were based upon their stated reserves, thus providing powerful incentive to inflate said reserves in order to bank more dollars during the embargoes. The reserve estimates were never subsequently written down by any OPEC member country, and have been treated as state secrets ever since.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/did-wikileaks-confirm-peak-oil-saudi-said-have-overstated-crude-oil-reserves-300-billion-bar

Which is why I've assumed Iran's regime has continued to pursue nuclear energy production despite knowing that Israel or the US would bomb whatever plants they build. To Israel, an Iran with a nuclear power plant is equal to an Iran turning Tel Aviv into fluffy black powder. The Iranian regime sees the pressure readings coming back from their fields, and tailors the cloaks and daggers of their diplomacy with available materiel. Almost all of Iran's revenues come from oil sales, yet they rescinded gasoline subsidies 3 weeks ago in a time of rising prices and a context of unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Sudan. Its oil exports seem to have been shrinking by 10-12% per year since 2007.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/opinion/08iht-edstern.4136795.html

Finally, a regiment or so of Marines are presently being dispatched to Egypt. US warships are already near the Suez Canal. Since the families of high-ranking Marines only got notice of upcoming foreign deployment on Sunday, the grunts will have to be airlifted onto their ships. The stated mission: get US citizens out. Kind of a tall order while parked in the Suez Canal, ey?

http://debka.com/article/20646/

In terms of global trade, the Suez Canal is disruptive, but fairly minor. Next stop? The Straits of Hormuz, where @20% of the world's oil sails through, and it's not too hard to predict that Israel be sorely tempted to seize some big fat oil tankers. Sorry for skipping over last Wednesday's informative meeting with Hassaf the Informative Dissident, but things have been hopping around here.

2011-02-01T11:58:00.000-08:00

Why Israel May Abandon Zionism

"We will not be silenced! Whether you're a Christian, whether you're a Muslim, whether you're an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights, and we will have our rights, one way or the other! We will never be silenced!"
Cairo Protester, January 25th, 2011

Last Wednesday Lord Wife and I went to meet an Israeli dissident for an evening. His name is Hassaf and we know him from our kids' co-op school. The school's annual auction was our reason for being there, having bid on and won "Understanding the Palestine-Israel Conflict." Because a couple of other co-op school parents were there, both of whom had traveled across the region in their youth, in addition to two local peace-active scholars, the main focus of dialogue was the region's history of conflict following Israel's formation.

Hassaf is a deeply thoughtful, fair-minded, and forthcoming man who decided to leave his country rather than run afoul of the Shin Bet (the secret police), so I did my best to shut up and learn something while the others questioned and commented. I failed the first objective and said far more than I intended, but it was hard not to succeed on the second, since Hassaf is the perfect perch on which to have one's thoughts provoked. The elephant in the room, the current tsunami of pan-Arabic civil and economic unrest, waited patiently in the wings, its trunk peeking out occasionally.

Obviously what's going on in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and soon to be Syria and Saudi Arabia is huge from Israel's perspective, because it spells d-o-o-m. (Note: a handy Barometer of Badness for the tsunami's strength is the price of oil, which has already crested $100/bbl.) To me, of course, what's happening is expected. The equation is child's play. You take Western client states with decades of stability achieved through brutal repression, a strong and largely homogeneous religion, a young unemployed demographic, then you add rampant inflation in food commodities and top it off with a wheat crop failure in Russia. Take away bread and sugar and this is what you get. Really, what else could you expect?

What's not child's play is the immediate and long-term effects on Israel, aka "US interests in the region." That's what I was brooding on last Wednesday night. It's had time to percolate and its coming out right now despite it being in the middle of my workday, perhaps because we'll be meeting with Hassaf again this Wednesday night. A lot of commentary or causation could be laid out here. But there's no time so here's the deal. Every single day that Mubarak, Egypt's military dictator for the past 30 years, stays on is bad for everybody. Every day he stays, support for the Muslim Brotherhood swells.

Mubarak must be convinced to step down at once, with safe haven assured for his family and the metric tons of gold they got out last week. The longer he attempts to stay, the higher anti-Israel sentiment of succeeding governments will be, as well as its cohesion and duration across them as a group. It's already too late, but fast action in Egypt and ginger diplomacy with the replacement(s) would ameliorate the effects of a possible, and probably a likely, near-term oil shock. Two words nobody in our media is mentioning: Oil Shock. The Happy Chatter I've heard most out of the twittering heads is about democracy breaking out in the Mid-East. Democracy in the Mid-East? Give me a fucking break! Democracy in the Mid-East is about as useful as a refrigerator of ping-pong balls. Nitroglycerin-filled ping-pong balls.

[ed. note: Some very smart analysts see voting democracies as a positive way forward. Whereas I see them as quick paths to majority rule by Islamists. My opinion is formed by having seen my own government taken over by religious radicals, ones who still effectively set its policies, and by having been a young eyewitness to the formation of their plans.]

The Obama Administration is, unfortunately, too locked into its own foreign policy ass and damage control processes to accomplish anything like fast, effective action. Therefore, Israel will find itself in a truly interesting position: having aggressively settled the hell out of Palestine and boxed its bothersome inhabitants into a tiny fraction of the available land mass, generating pan-Arabic enmity, it can now turn around and make concessions, very soothing concessions. Such as would provide the next Western client state successors, such as probably El Baradei in Egypt and the bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia with quick victories and credibility. This means stabbing its own Zionists from the front, and from the back or the side will do just as well. If it can stab them down, Israel can reestablish a semblance of stability.

I see that opening, at least, and will allow myself a wallow or two in my own optimism, even for at least one more sentence. Implementing concessions may not deflect all the existential problems coming for Israel, not least its own neuroses and habits, but giving up its Zionist political strategy (adopted in order to generate immigration) buys more time. More time is a good thing, right? (Wow. That wallow felt really nice.) One must admittedly recognize the solution verges on the politically insufferable, and if so that's too damned bad. Again, the equation is pretty easy here. Over time, a reunified pan-Arabia defeats Israel via mere copulation, and there are already just too many Arabs to kill. The biogenetic weapons Israel has tried to come up with, ones which could selectively attack only Arab populations and spare Jews, haven't materialized. Trouble is, Arabs are every bit as Semitic as ancestral Jews, much moreso than European Jews, having all come from father Abraham.

Pacifying the anger is now a far more fruitful course, since the opposite tack manifestly failed as of Sunday, January 30th, 2011. Now, as a gloomer and doomer, it would be remiss of me to not repeat that it's probably too late. Many things have changed, human nature isn't among them. Peoples do change when they've exhausted other options. Well they're exhausted, baby, and leadership's inattention to and denial of bad fundamentals on the ground went on far too long. It's out of control now and no known countervailing force exists which can contain the Mid-East's grievances. Except maybe, just maybe making a half million or so hostile, entitled, crazy-ass-racist religious radicals move out of settlements built with US foreign aid. Oh and until that happens, as an aside, anyone reading this would be well advised to go buy at least 50 gallons of gasoline...and browse Craigslist for a moped.

2011-01-17T22:55:00.000-08:00

Truths, Realties, and Double Santa Claus Theories

My son, previously dubbed Lord Running Boy (LRB), is now a 6-year old first grader. His teacher asked to speak with Lord Wife and me after school about his behavior one day this past week, an oft-recurring theme this year, and she started off like this:

"Well...there's an incident I need to bring to your attention, and the timing might not be, kind of another shock for you. It's hard to, well, I'm not sure what your belief systems are at home, but..."

Our attention? "Another shock" and "belief systems" along with Mrs. L's ginger, reluctant tone shoved us onto the parental Def-Con 4 footing, a place from whence the mind rushes to worst-case scenarios. Did he start a fight? Is a window broken, or a taboo? Did he tell his classmates America is running out of gasoline and their parents are going to starve? (Some of our household commentary, lacking context, might be embroidered by an eavesdropping child.) I was thinking property damage could be involved, resigned myself to his suspension or a lawsuit and hoped one wouldn't last too long or the other cost too much.

His teacher, a professional and compassionate woman with young children of her own, explained that our boy disrupted the class by suddenly climbing up onto his group desk and proclaiming to a room chock-full of 26 kindergartners and first graders,

"Everybody! I have an important announcement...Santa Claus is not real. Santa Claus is your mom and your dad!"

As she described it, a pregnant pause was followed by one child's plaintive denial and went from there on to general uproar. We could easily picture frowns of doubt and consternation rippling across the room, little faces shooting red, pairs of fists starting to clench. She said one boy's body tensed so rigidly for so long she was afraid he would pass out. There was crying and staring blankly into space. In response to these defenses, our son maintained his position and emphasized it: "No. Research has been done. There is evidence. Santa Claus is DEAD!"

About this time, Mrs. L switched into damage control mode, casting LRB's conspiracy theories into doubt by parsing, as the philosopher Kierkegaard might call it, her monstrous paradox through a public school's handy diversity filters and addressing her charges:

"Class, LRB may think Santa isn't real, but every family believes differently, and what's most important is what your own family believes."

Order was eventually restored by moral relativism and insinuating our son is a crackpot, so have a merry Wiccan/Kundalini/Bacchus Chanukah. Peace out, and fair enough. But she went on to tell us that later in the library, by the aquatic-themed books, two girls she sees as class leaders apparently berated LRB for his outburst. While she didn't hear what was said, after it was said he retreated to cry inconsolably behind a further bookshelf. I had been wondering whether to come clean with her or not, and here was my cue. It wasn't about our belief systems, or our mostly futile attempts to raise something more than a Wanting Machine brainwashed by commercials for labor-arbitraged plastic toys screwed over transistors. No, we had done our level best to preserve the Santa mythos, and he figured it out all on his own.

The previous night I'd read him a bedtime story, "A Grumpy Santa Claus." After we finished, he leveled his gaze at me and said with an air of gravity, "Uhh, Dad...you know I know that Santa's fake, right?" I did know, and had observed his first seeds of doubt and the detective case he opened last Christmas with a rhetorical question: "I can't understand it. Why would Santa forget my Star Wars Lego ship after Grandma wrote it down on the letter?" (Answer: both Lord Wife and I have small businesses and families, with the obligations they entail. By the time we got to Toys R Us, they were sold out.) From there he soon progressed to time-honored logistical doubts. How, after all, is it possible to visit every house, fit down a chimney, or gain access to the disadvantaged families who live in locked condos and apartment buildings? Santa's sleigh must be rocket-powered, reindeer could never fly fast enough. And what are elves, anyway? They look more like dwarves than magic people, and not very productive ones.

I confirmed his assertion, but coolly asked how came to such a radical conclusion. As if addressing a simpleton he said, "Dad, I saw you and Mom wrapping presents on Christmas Eve." Sometimes a Teaching Moment is subtle, and sometimes it beats you on the head like a five-pound salami. I explained that while Santa isn't "real," it's not that simple, either. First, a long time ago in Amsterdam there was a real man named Santa Claus who became famous for giving presents and candy to children, especially to poor children, and who really wore a red coat. Next, his idea, of giving gifts to kids on Christmas, especially to those who were poor and good, was so powerful people wanted to keep it going. So he remains real in a sense, and taking on the role of Santa is fun. Lord Running Boy sought final clarification: "Yeah, but he died, right?"

Some teacher. What I should have told him is truth is volatile, corrosive, people fight over it and it's a lot like nitroglycerin which when mixed carefully with sawdust stabilizes into dynamite so you can nestle lethal carrots of it under where you want to blow something up and activate it with blasting caps. It can be the most beautiful light-bringing thing or be treated as a terrible crime all at the same time. I should have said it's best to practice with small amounts first, use long fuses and take good cover because reality is a currency we must necessarily agree upon every day, and don't tell this to your class tomorrow because everybody has agreed there should be a Santa and children must believe in him until, as Mrs. L informed us, they're in 3rd grade. When truth disagrees with reality and you choose to set them close together you'll get burned by your own blast and you might even die. Furthermore, feudal aristocracies successfully convinced people the earth was flat for a thousand years, when even the Bible clearly said it's round. So think hard about that one if you're going up against Santa.

Despite his emotional injuries and those he inflicted on his classmates, we don't know that it's not for the best. At least he may have learned early what we learned much later, although to be honest we're proud of this son's ability to pursue and can take being known as the parents of the boy who ruined Christmas in easy stride. The principle I wish to delve more into for myself, and to somehow get all my sons thinking about too, is how simply seeing the truth is the easy part. The bigger trump to be pursued lies in the clever art of conflict resolution, of applying just the right myrrh-scented balm to human wounds and desires.

The next night I sent him back with a message for his classmates, that Santa is still real in some ways, and you get more presents from your parents if you believe in him. We all know how there are lies that draw smiles and truths which draw tears. He imparted the message, and I'm not sure what the right thing was to do, but he had a good day and maybe he's on his way to learning how to skillfully manipulate the credulousness of his classmates without taking too much advantage of them.

2011-01-17T17:06:00.000-08:00

Would Martin Luther King Love Him Some Warz?

Today is Martin Luther King Day. Saw this story and was enraged enough to post it. The general counsel for the Department of Defense, Jeh Johnson, speaking at today's Pentagon commemoration of Dr. King, seized the opportunity to enlist his posthumous support (courtesy of Salon):

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.

Johnson goes on to argue that American soldiers play the role of the Biblical Good Samaritan cited by King because they "have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people."

Given that Dr. King privately deplored war, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and publicly gave a speech themed "My Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam" at Manhattan's Riverside Church in 1967, the Pentagon lawyer might just have his tranquilizer dosages set to Bobsled Run.

In that forthright 1967 speech, Dr. King factually defined the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," and defied it for dropping "thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8000 miles from its shores." Some statements he made from that pulpit may well have gotten himself marked for assassination; either way, at a distance of 43 years it rings like prophecy:

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

He went on to call for an immediate cease fire and full US withdrawal from Vietnam. As for Jeh Johnson, David Dayen of FDL put up the full transcript of his remarks, in which he recalls graduating from Morehouse College, getting chummy with MLK III, and traversing the mazes of overt and veiled racism on his way to career success. And, hopefully, not yet all the way to spiritual death.

Dr. King's techniques for persistent and pressing yet non-violent change were but a subset of his far more liberating message, one deeply embedded with a solid understanding of gospel principles. We would do well to review and keep those principles, which easily transcend any creed, uppermost in our minds as we face the challenges of building the church of Earth. In the meantime, give unto the Pentagon that which is the Pentagon's.

2010-12-21T14:35:00.000-08:00

WikiLeaks, A Semi-Alternative Take

To be honest, I haven't followed the Wikileaks situation very closely, but Naj, my friend over at Iran Facts, got out her 3,000 mile long cattle prod and zapped me into writing about it. No doubt she knows more about the particulars, but I'd best not let that stop me. Cattle prods hurt! (As they say, Naj, be careful what you wish for.) First off, on leaks, an old Secretary of State once said something like, "Anybody thinks they can keep a secret in this town is nuts." To which I say, "Anybody thinks they can keep a secret in this internet architecture is nuts."

By thinking its own communications so inviolate, the US government was exposed as being both a loon and its own worst security risk. For this effrontery, the streets must now run with human blood, the open internet must be destroyed, demons are being summoned from their crypts in McLean, Virginia, and diplomacy is...well, I'll stop quoting the current Secretary of State for a minute. Seriously, it's worth noting that the US will now start actively aiding and abetting industry efforts to tame the internet as we've known it, get those peer-to-peer free song downloads done while you can, and we can expect a rapid escalation in censorship policies based around shutting down internet provider servers. Again, those steps won't work very well, but it's the best strategy they've got.

Good spycraft and reportage count on a variety of human urges to leak, particularly on lucky combinations of them. Remember the FBI agent who leaked Watergate details to Woodward and Bernstein? I don't either, but he became charmingly known as Deep Throat, and his primary motivation for leaking was that he was passed over for promotion. He was pretty pissed. His secondary motivation, however, was an offended sensibility which bordered on a good conscience, and it was probably this latter quality that tipped the scales of an embittered man towards action and risk.

There's a reason for dwelling on emotional states and revelation, and I'll preface it by unequivocally stating I'm ecstatic WikiLeaks exists, and think it's greater than Brylcreem and pre-sliced loaves of bread; we are likely entering an age when our sins will increasingly, as Jesus said, be shouted from the housetops; it's great that imitators like OpenLeaks are being spawned; it's great that the MSM has its undies in yet another twist; it's great that mere taxpaying mortals can directly view the often petty, weak-minded drivel they're funding. Also, Julian Assange is one gangsta S.O.B. and it's pathetically obvious the US is trumping up whatever charges it can to detain him. And now, unfortunately, I have some questions about the source(s) of this particular material.

Whoever leaked the Pentagon-State cables was no low-level signals intelligence officer feeling some pangs of guilt and disgust, as was apparently the case with the Iraq papers. I don't have detailed knowledge of Pentagon security procedures, only rudimentary knowledge of general security for online systems, but given the breadth and content of the material, it seems very unlikely this leak was conducted by a single low-ranking, low-cleared individual, and far less likely that it was conducted by multiple leakers acting in concert. Only a high-level administrator or bureaucrat with a lot of knowledge, free access, and time on their hands fits the profile of someone who could pull this off. The Pentagon Papers era is long gone, when one Daniel Ellsburg could simply take a microfiche copy of a classified report and drop it into the lap of The New York Times, or surely when any newspaper published such papers in full without heavy deliberation and editing. Point being, even back then very few people besides Ellsburg had a high enough security clearance to get those papers.

Yes, I'm making the dangerous assumption that the Pentagon and State Department have security procedures and follow them to some extent, but all that money they've gone through has probably been spent on something and paranoia has institutional tendencies. More importantly, any such person or group looking to leak would have to be really, really motivated. Like motivated enough to be executed for violating the State Secrets Act. Motivated enough to face the ongoing scrutiny of a withering internal investigation and polygraph tests. And this in order to merely provide proof of what we in The West already knew with excruciating, repetitive clarity, that many of our emissaries and generals are first-order twits? Sorry, something just isn't adding up for me yet.

There's no doubt the US government is conducting a cyberwar against WikiLeaks, no matter how Man of La Mancha, hypocritical, and technically ignorant that may be. It's a predictable response that will rain repercussions like canned hams down on us all in terms of constrained liberties and commerce. But maybe this really wasn't a leak at all. It lacks the classic, targeted earmarks of a leak and looks more like a well-planned intelligence operation intended to embarrass the West. This looks like the famously dreaded Fuck You Flourish. Penetration could have been gained via patient internal sleeper personnel or a back door, possibly with the former activating the latter. It may have been nothing more than a neat crime of opportunity, but along with the polygraph tests, the Pentagon might want to carefully review its list of network vendors.

So much for Obama's harping on the Chinese about greater transparency. This is like being at a formal dinner in the South, listening to your hosts happily extol the benefits of racial equality after the Civil Rights Act and how thankful they are those bad old days are finally behind them. Then a group of young kids straight out of To Kill A Mockingbird run inside yelling that Tom Robinson just raped Mayella Ewell, the Klan is rounding up to lynch him, and your host grabs a long white robe out of a closet and bolts out of the the house. You can perceive a real democracy by how it welcomes the currency of clear information. This is not that.

2010-12-17T17:19:00.000-08:00

Does The Republic Still Stand? Part Three: Not Really

If by "Republic," you mean Goldman Sachs, then yes it's doing really really well, so well that "still standing" is more like "surveying the world in a towering, thrustingly Brobdingnagian manner." Patient and perceptive Phil over at Perils of Caffeine in the Evening asked in the comments section of Part Two of this series, seems about a month ago (it is), "Does this mean I should buy Goldman's new 50-year bonds?" That's a great question, Phil. Let's share a virtual martini before I advise you to sell out your entire Berkshire Hathaways position.

Goldman's first $1.3 Bill bond issue, originally priced at 6.25%, was so oversubscribed that the final yield went down to 6.125% and the instruments sold out in about 5 minutes. So for practical purposes the question now becomes, will Goldman issue more? Either way, it's important to supplicate the Beast, one bond issue being neither here nor there, so I recommend setting up a large and handsome altar in your front yard, erecting an imposing and permanent Buddha statue not less than 8 feet high with burning incense and shiny flags sticking out at trapezoidally proper angles, and a laminated picture of patron saint Hank Paulson's face lovingly hung over Buddha's. If that's too much for you, a stopgap for the holiday season would be flashing lights that say "WELCOME, GOLDMAN! SACHS TOO!" hung in your front window instead of the outmoded "MERRY CHRISTMAS."

Now that we've had that virtually refreshing pause, I am about to channel the Ghosts of Stock Markets Past in trading floor lingua fracas, circa 1989. One of my mentors, or more accurately a guide through hell, happened to be a 32nd-degree Master Mahan of Fuck-Speak, a true virtuoso and the only person I've met who used "infuckitively" as a word. Forgive me in advance, though I'll censor out the dirty stuff:

"Phil-Phil! I hear you wanna buy those big swingin' Goldmans! C'mon, though, a measly 50 year term? You *%(#*#@ kiddin' me? If Goldman Sucks wanted to really tell the other banks to go $#$^ their grandmothers, those pompinos woulda gone with 100-year bonds straight outta the *&^# and paid, I dunno, let's say 6.66%. HahahaHAAA!! {Grand Master playfully punches you in left shoulder, making you nearly fall down.}Well I say *%(# 'em, buncha friggin finocchies playin' widdemselves, only sold, what, like rat shit, $1.3 bill last month? Whaddathey, *%(#^*&@^ Germany? *%(#^*%&* Switzerland? Goddammit, this is America! My Aunt Mary coulda made more than that blowin' sailors! Ya never know, maybe the *&$(%&(#%^s find the #^*&^s to ante up, so me personally, I'm gonna hold out for those big 100-year marangas and go in-fucking-finite. {Grand Master holds two cupped hands up and well out in front of his chest, indicating sign language for gigantic firm female breasts, and makes corresponding antic gestures.} But with that ass-raping 5-year call on the 50s? They can %*(% the $%(* outta my @##*&@^&$%^& @#%$^&$#!"

Emerson once wrote, "A man must be clothed in society, or he shall feel a certain bareness and poverty." One must naturally incline to agree whilst endeavoring to be more than a mere collection of personal vices, but on a trading floor everyone, your friends most of all, attempts to rip that social clothing off and lay you bare. Reasons for doing so are the usual boredom, depravity and sadism, of course, but it's also because the sharp point of a market is a deeply cynical place, and your only real purpose for being there is to make money. A market is a collection of arguments over value, and real fistfights are apt to break out at any time. I've seen them, and once saw a grown man fake a heart attack to avoid being physically attacked. I've also seen a real heart attack, sex in the bathroom, suspiciously white nostrils, a famous trader taken from the floor in handcuffs by Giuliani's goons, and a close-up video of a female broker giving birth played from every TV on the floor. The last one made everybody stop what they were doing and more than one man in my presence had to wipe tears from his face, and another said "Dat's da most byootiful ting I eva seen!" Markets are like Geiger counters for emotion.

A big reason for all the undressing is that the most dangerous and expensive commodity in a market is bullshit so credible it makes you lose all your money. Most of the people working the floor around me grew up on the corners of Bedlam and Squalor and heaped derision and scorn much like a patellar reflex because it correlated with financial survival. They would never have failed to take notice that Goldman Sachs has started acting like a sovereign nation, and my real mentor, the last independent floor trader on either exchange at the time, would easily have seen the intention behind these Goldman Longs, as well as significance and likely consequences. On the surface, a bond yielding 6.125% over 50 years looks pretty damned attractive, sorta like Nicolette Sheridan did in that red bikini top and sarong in which she played The Sure Thing. Hubba hubba! But when I first read about these 50s they're dipping a toe into the water with, I asked myself, "Why would they borrow money for 6% per year when they can get it for free from the Window, and already drew upwards of $600 Bill last year?"

That's on top of getting completely bailed out on $160 Bill of bad AIG bets. And wouldn't the ability to front-run every Fed bond auction be enough for even Gordon Gecko? Issuing these mid-range vehicles begs immediate you-and-me-sense, and it may be unprecedented unless your bankers happen to be Hoares (the world's oldest surviving investment bank, and pun intended). Come to think of it, the 484 rolls of toilet paper I've already stacked in the Zombie Bunker are unprecedented too; I figure we might be down there for awhile, and what if we ran out? One thing is sure. Goldman felt October was time to test the market for these long bonds, and that was right when they were hearing, ahead of everyone else, what the Fed's plans were for Quantitative Easing Two. (The bar chart above shows Treasury holdings in November 2010, when the Fed became the largest owner of US debt.)

To roll with a metaphor in the previous paragraph, this 50-year issue is the equivalent of Goldman getting up in the middle of a movie and loudly announcing it has to drain its main vein. It proceeds out past the exit sign, sets the garbage can ablaze then leans back in and starts screaming FIRE! Just as any modern investment banking MBAs will do when they feel well positioned, their incentives are aligned and pointing straight at that next Christmas bonus. Goldman Banksters have been paying close attention and correctly and finally responded to global retail investor desire for yields between where so much scared money flew down to, (i.e., out of retail equity and mutual funds and into Treasuries paying well below real inflation), and to where so much hedge fund money flew up into (to corporate junk bond packages yielding between 7 and 13 percent, where there hasn't been enough product to satisfy appetite). The Banksters saw the blips going into commodities, which have made moonshots as the monetary base went pure vertical. They saw the housing sector resume its slide, banks hoarding cash and not making loans, and they saw a municipal bond market obviously about to go bidless sometime this Fall or Winter. They drew a few conclusions: Treasuries Will Tank. We Can Become As Gods. And Rule Humanity From Our Ranches In Costa Rica.

There was a yawning yield vacuum, and Goldman, having effectively taken over the US government's fiscal and monetary policies two years ago along with its Treasury and central bank, can step in to fill it with vast, practically infinite amounts of free capital and serve as the pricing benchmark for a whole new market in mid-yield bonds. Current investor sentiment will price Goldman's debt more favorably than almost any other country's (whoops, Freudian slip). Goldman is kinda like a doctor who admits himself into the Emergency Room with a broken leg in order to take over the entire hospital. At its sole discretion, it took over $600 Bill of the first $3.3 Trill in 2008 bail-out electrons. It has taken more since then and given an accounting of where it's put the money to nobody. 6.125% per year on $1.3 Bill over 50 years is indeed rat shit to them. So what's the point? Is there a deeper agenda? You can count on me to think so.

Goldman has become far more than just an investment bank in a globally securitized world. They are the First Bank of the New World Order. The geniuses Goldman employs out of the finest MBA schools and physics departments, the thousand-yard-stare boys willing to work 90 hour weeks to play grab-ass with each other, have determined that sovereign interest rates must go way above 6 or 7 percent, bailouts be damned. Fortunately it took them a couple years for this play to completely dawn on their cocaine-starched white collars and minds, because long-term bond plays are very dangerous investments. Fortunately my mantra position of huddling under the office desk with my AK, loaded banana clips going snik-snik-click as I check them in turn while watching It's A Wonderful Life as I munch away on Costco-sized bags of Cheetos pulled from long-term food storage no longer seems entirely paranoid. At least to me. Inflation could easily send long-term bond yields up by 3%. Or 5%. Or 15%. Pick a number.

Here's the one thing markets really suck at: properly discounting adverse long-term risk. The less recent volatility, the more presumption of stability. Just because aliens haven't landed on the White House lawn to meet with President Obama doesn't mean they're not going to. Or that they haven't had more private consultation. But even under more imaginable scenarios, such as a mere 3% increase in long-term yields due to a mild inflationary frisson (and the 10-year Treasury yield has already risen from 2.3% to over 3% in just the past two months despite the Fed's cunning plans to keep it low), then the face value of those pristine Goldman 50-year bets would fall by about 33%. How's that for capital preservation?

Ah, volatility. She whom age cannot wither nor custom stale. The European Union is imploding (more on that next time) and markets have already priced various sovereign debenture yields up over 10%. An alleged European Central Bank and the IM-effing-F are riding in to save bondholders with taxpayer money, and to unleash austerity programs which have about as much chance of succeeding as my plans to own Magritte's "Use of Language" (I've built a backlit frame!). Put simply: Goldman Sachs is betting on dollar hyperinflation, a plethora of imitators have lined up to dangle bait, and that's how market vacuums get filled, often with nasty stuff sucked up loose from floors.

There is every reason to think this new class of bonds is why the Fed is having so much trouble selling its 10-year Treasuries. Mexico has just issued dollar-denominated 100-year bonds. Venezuela and Brazil are issuing similar instruments. Investors are gobbling up recent 50-year issues from Norfolk Southern, the Netherland's Rabobank, GDF Suez and, umm, I'm having a little trouble typing this last one out, I t a l y (aaagggg, swallowing my tongue... the seizures hit again...hey, those Mexican Centominos are starting to look pretty good!). This long bond gravy train is on motion lotion and it's got biscuits for wheels.

If you think the dollar is going to hyperinflate, it makes perfect sense for you to sell as much debt as you can and convert it into something of real value. Then you pay off with cheap-o dollars in the future. This is a really great time for anyone besides the US Treasury to be issuing bonds, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. It's also a great time to take credit card companies up on those 0% for 15 month offers and buy RonCo products. US Treasuries aren't priced anywhere close to reflecting their true default risk. So the Fed has become that chap so sought-after by Wall Street professionals, the Fool in the Market, and its Chairman is too stupid to even have seen the vacuum much less recognize it as his own creation. Treasuries are someday, maybe in 2011, going to look a lot like the average American Muni bond: gangrenous. Anyhow, a violent market argument has started and it's not too hard to see who's going to get the beat-down. The US will next attempt to force various countries to buy its Treasury bonds at the barrel of a gun, or its sudden absence. There's no other way to keep selling them for long.

What are the chances the sovereign states of Goldman Sachs, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil are going to stick around for the next lifetime and pay off? Doesn't matter, not relevant. The new market has been created, is swelling, and the music blaring in it is rock and roll, so you don't have to wait for salvation. It's right here. I recognize my future masters, and I want in. After all, you can still buy really neat stuff with dollars and my bonds will be backed with high-grade toilet paper and Cheetos, and they will yield 6.3%. 6.5% if you get in right now. When Goldman Sachs buys Nebraska and people are fighting each other to become indentured servants on its farms, it'll be even more obvious who's running this country. So to finally answer the question, Phil, I would wait for the inflation wave to crest, wipe out the face values of the extra-long bonds, and then step in and buy a basket of some that aren't defaulting.

2010-11-17T16:28:00.000-08:00

Does the Republic Stand? Part Two: How It Has, and for How Long...

Other than my mental super-powers, the ones I struggle with every day to keep them in peaceful check, the United States is the only military power with true force projection capability. Without next-generation weaponry like mine, the government must rely on oodles of obsolescent hardware, I mean stuff that needs actual people to work it and isn't on SkyNet artificial intelligence yet, to bully its friends and enemies. The US has 11 complete aircraft carrier strike groups (CSGs or CBGs, formerly CVBGs in Pentagon parlance, pre-formerly CARBATGRU). These are the only 11 CSGs in existence. Britain, France, Russia, and Italy had a few but all decommissioned theirs, saying, "Why bother? We'll develop mental super-powers!" Thailand and Brazil do have one vanity carrier each, but sadly lack the fleet and orbital patrol capabilities required to protect huge floating things full of juicy jet fuel, and to attack over any distance, they'd have to deploy sails.

Auric Goldfinger and Dr. Julius No would hold lively debates on the wisdom of building aircraft carriers, each of which are approximately as expensive as an average country. (Bond villain Interviewer: "To best achieve world domination, is it better to: A) rob Fort Knox; B) threaten to nuke London; C) build a death ray on a remote island, or; D) build Carrier Battle Groups? Discuss.") Return on Investment (ROI) aside, the purpose of a real carrier battle group is to send a coked-up maritime Warren Zevon sort of Werewolves of London message:

"You better stay away from him...he'll rip your lungs out Jim! But oo-woo--I'd like to meet his tailor."

The real thing even comes with lawyers, guns, and money to deal with the predictable fallout that rains down in its ports of calls, otherwise known as Drunken Puking Disease Pits (DPDPs).

For context, merely one (1) of these floaty assemblages embodies sufficient force projection and firepower advantages to defeat all the fleets that ever existed. At the same time. If the US parked any one of its strike groups within range of Ireland and the UK right now, it could blow the holy shits out of them despite the combined maximal efforts of both countries to the contrary. Our military capabilities so far outclass those of any competitors, in fact of all others put together, that conventional resistance is Not an Option (NO). While it's true that India and China have announced plans to outfit militarily viable CSGs, and have each increased military spending commensurately over the last decade, what they fail to explain is that their fleets will be comprised of weaponized Jet Skis and Sea-Doos commanded by Jacques Cousteau's kids, because at least they have some experience with oceans.

That India and China would even think of building aircraft carriers was foreseen in the mid-1980s by Mssrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld, two brilliantly evil agents of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. These Blofeld agents managed to take over the US government from the inside, then generated a CIA study that examined with surprising competence the likely future economic growth rates of those countries; the study predicted the expanding military powers of both and assumed the imperial extension of either or both, particularly westwards to Iraq and the Caspian Basin to seize the necessary hydrocarbon resources to fuel further growth.

The Blofeld Study was evangelized to thought leaders and policy makers, the more dimwitted legions of whom promptly be-shat themselves. The dimwit panic was the impetus for a so-called Neo-Con movement, which was neither nearly as neo nor as con as my Aunt Sophie, with its most cynically be-shat members organizing and formalizing themselves into something they called PNAC (Paranoid Narcissistic Asshole Chickenhawks). This group eventually caused or allowed a falsely flagged causus belli to occur. Hence GWOT ensued, which sounds a lot more menacing than SPECTRE, and is. 50 years from now people won't know what the acronym stood for, but its mere sound will signify. Of course that's assuming people will still use the alphabet.

This movement envisaged the need for a Jupiter-like military that could beam lasers from Mars onto skateboarders, also sagely foreseen as the Enemy. After 30 years of massive investment, they've just about achieved the Operation Exploding Heads from Space goals, and have quite a lethal bag of new tricks, including tanks that can microwave cattle right on the hoof! Believe me, I'm too freaked out to lie to you and am writing this while hunched under a book-reinforced desk. In this world of mad and brutal men, the misery humans suffer and visit upon each other is most unleashed by those who love others more than themselves and only want that love to be recognized and returned. When you don't or can't comply, then that is precisely why they must kill you.

Any hapless fool who wishes to actively disagree with PNAC policy goals must resort to so-called asymmetrical warfare, which primarily involves becoming an adept at hiding in plain sight so as not to have your head exploded by space weapons. As in, "No, no, I'm not about to blast your sweaty hyper-aggressive grunts to kingdom come with my cell phone speed-dial hooked up to trigger the fuse on a 40 year-old artillery shell. See, I'm smiling, we're all friends...and I'm just peeing in this ditch right here."

The practical need for such superiority arose from the US defeat in Vietnam, wherein it failed to kill every single Vietnamese person. This wasn't allowed to happen because the American public, consisting of hippies, Jewish intellectuals on welfare, militant blacks and Walter Cronkite (who was on LSD at the time) stormed the Pentagon with Molotov cocktails. Yes, I realize this never occurred. But tell that to the Pentagon, which codified these vital lessons into a military doctrine known as American People = Vietnamese (AP=V).

Since the US was bankrupted by its failure to kill Vietnamese people, Dick "No, Mister Bond, You're Going to Die!" Nixon simply foreswore the gold standard at Bretton Woods in 1971. The finance ministers of Germany and France complained that without gold backing it, the US dollar would only be worth the cotton it used to be printed on, to which Nixon coolly replied, "What part about the bombing of Dresden did you NOT understand? I think someone might need another lesson in high finance."

Nixon made a deal with Saudi Arabia to price its oil exclusively in dollars in exchange for perpetual protection by CBGs, for not letting an oil embargo get in the way of friends, and for getting richer than Croesus. Thus has the dollar been backed by oil ever since. The dollar's purchasing power, and the US ability to nakedly issue debt and then pay it off in imaginary money, and to generate full faith and credit for that imaginary money, is correlated 1:1 with the ability to blow things up real good. Sure, China has bought some fat oil field rights in Iraq, hydrocarbon and rare earth mineral rights in Africa, but if the Iraqs or Africans choose to renege, what could China do? They could build one ACG in 10 years, or they could truck a few million troops to the border of Tajikistan, drop them off and tell them to "march east for a few months, and make sure to make a left turn after you pass Tehran."

Since going off the Gold Standard, the US has increasingly enforced its currency regime in hard-power fashion, a fact not lost on Little Foreign People. Remember what happened to Saddam Hussein? The Big People know he went off the dollar and started selling his oil for Euros in early 2001, the ultimate no-no, shortly before Iraq was invaded by sheer coincidence. Just like Iran started selling its oil for Euros later and then was invaded by sheer coincidence. Yes, I know Iran wasn't really invaded. But tell them that. And tell Afghanistan, Africa, Indonesia, Paraguay, most of South America, Pakistan, and northern Florida that, too or anywhere else has erected hundreds of new military bases so far this century. All this has been flip-out expensive, with the real US military budget (including the NSA, NASA, Homeland Security, CIA, DEA, the Capo di Tutti Capi, et al) now tipping in at well over $1.xtrill.

Harsh is the desert that quickly leaches bones. This is how it has gone, and this is how it will be done. Here are the bones, here is the heat of the sun, here is how white they will leach: in September and October, merely anticipating the Fed's QE2, dollar-denominated cotton prices rose by 54%, corn by 29%, soybeans by 22%, orange juice by 17%, sugar by 51%, wheat by 36%. How's that for stimulus, Alice? It'll take 6-9 months for those new price increases to pass out into products and services. Yes, Virginia, there is a Hyper Inflation.

It hurts to watch Old America sink like this, like a ship still under power but taking water on evenly, steadily faster, coming in from all sides, heading to the deep where God's voice ceaselessly resounds. At this moment Goldman and Sachs has chosen to strike. Their torpedoes are 50-year bonds yielding 6.25% interest, these will sell like Madoff Farms Municipal Bonds and will serve as the pricing benchmark in an entirely new market, one in which Goldman & Sachs is the Last Bank Standing.

It already controls the fiscal and monetary policy of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank. It will soon control the International Monetary Fund. And the best part is, they're doing it with money they got for free and their idea is to make our children pay. The money is virtual, the consequences won't be. I think hell is about to meet heaven, and vice versa. I don't know all of what will happen, but I know where the gunpowder is stacked, I see the wick, and I see how it just lit. Will be back when I can. Until then I'll be smiling for the cameras and peeing in the ditch.

2010-11-05T15:03:00.000-07:00

Does the Republic Still Stand? Hmmm...

It's a good question, especially for me, since on Tuesday night I learned from Lord Wife that there was an election or something, which she construed as some kind of disaster having to do with Republicans and corporate carpet-baggers. To which I said, "Wait, the Republicans won?? That's fantastic! Now Baby Hugo will get his concealed carry permit and we can send him to day care with the 38 Special. It's about damned ti---"

Next thing I knew, a dream was fading away, one in which I was discussing speech impediments with a young, nubile Barbara Walters; she had been explaining to me in delightful detail how she finally conquered the letter R. Gradually, Lord Wife's concerned face began to come into focus out of a gauzy, LED-like haze. She was holding a sturdy Calphalon pot by its handle, looking down at me lying on the kitchen floor and screaming, "No, no, go back! Go towards the light, you mental pygmy! TOWARDS the light!" Don't get me wrong, women's suffrage was a wonderful thing, as was the Great Depression which soon followed, not to mention...well I'll just let it go at that and start humming "We Shall Overcome."

The Pugs may sell us down the Cuyahoga slightly faster than the Dims. Or not. All I can tell, there's a tremendous puckering tension in this country between people who want to make it better via government and those convinced that will make it worse. Government? What government?? With all due respect, sir, I see no government here. What I've been paying my spare attention to makes elections, schmelections look like the pathetic little speed bumps they've installed around my neighborhood to try and get me to slow down (I know it was you who complained Louie, don't even try to deny it), and which I continue to proceed over at a sporty 45 mph. Now, if it were the basis of a Reality TV show, the object of my attention might well be titled "When Icebergs Attack" and might even intro with unintelligible gibberish such as this:

To provide operational flexibility and to ensure that it is able to purchase the most attractive securities on a relative-value basis, the Desk is temporarily relaxing the 35 percent per-issue limit on SOMA holdings under which it has been operating. However, SOMA holdings of an individual security will be allowed to rise above the 35 percent threshold only in modest increments.

Whuuh? Didn't understand that? You're lucky. Because chances are pretty good you won't be hunted down, tied to a stake, and burned by an angry mob in, oh, about 2 years give or take. The important take-aways from the bankerly blather above, issued after Wednesday's Federal Open Market Committee meeting, are:

1) yes, they are actually calling government debt instruments by the name of a sacred ritual drink from the Indo-Iranian Rigvedas.

2) even better, Soma was the drug Aldous Huxley wrote about in Brave New World, his futurist vision of what happens when the Federal Reserve enslaves everything, passes out the SOMA like farmers grow corn syrup and make everybody high as fucking kites until they must be killed for the good of society, i.e., before they have to be paid any of their promised Social Security benefits.

3) the post-modern English translation of the SOMA pronouncement is, "All rules are out the window now, we're just making this up as we go along anyway. What we ARE going to do is monetize the US government debt right in front of your face while mumbling incantations not even we understand anymore, only we're going to do it a lot faster than before, wearing our most reassuring suits and smiles. Resistance? Hahahahaaa! You'll beg us for quick death. Now drink your SOMA and get back to hallucinating, you mental pygmies!"

4) SOMA stands for System Open Market Account holdings, or what debt the Fed has amassed. It's over $2.xtrill now, and with yesterday's announcement we can expect it to grow another $1.xtrill by early next year. The Fed is about to pass China as the single largest holder of Treasury bonds, and I fully admit that "1.xtrill" is not even a real number. Which is exactly my point. Total yearly global GDP is said to be @$55.xtrill, not including the Vatican, so whatever the Fed is planning on spinning out of its fiscal/monetary rabbit vortex-hat next, it'll be LARGE.

There's a lot more of this obfuscatory exercise in concentration camp euphemism than just two sentences, there are reams. Reams and reams, with a whole lot of reaming going on. A curious person might ask: how long, realistically, can the Triad keep getting away with this? The Fed gives 0% loans to banks, the banks buy stocks to keep the stock market trending up, they buy Treasuries half-heartedly and pocket a 2.7% difference above their 0% loans, obviating the need to actually lend. By continuing to service each other's yields on Magic-Backed Securities (MBS), the international banking system (IBS) often exudes a curiously life-like appearance of continuing to function (CTF).

When it fails to function, starts puking and drooling and its diaper overflows, the Fed buys whatever Treasuries and unwanted mortgage-ish bonds don't sell, loans money to Iceland so it can buy ads for sex tourist campaigns, then J.P. Morgan's secretly embalmed Hand of Glory is waved and it's pronounced "stimulus." This is why I'm constructing a hidden bunker in my basement, or more accurately, underneath my neighbor's house.

For more able, stable bloggers than I get into decoding stuff like Reverse Repo Counterparties, Settled Holdings, Maiden Lane Transactions (tell me more, baby) and explain why negative Treasury yields (don't ask) are now occurring. My global finance learning-perch was street-side at The Curb, so the vividly profane, mayonnaise-stained trading language of my tutelage springs effortlessly to mind. One might call that learning experience many things, but boring isn't one. You'd hear the following sort of thing there on an hourly basis:

Intro, scene, Fed metaphor: you're minding your own business, going to a neighborhood farmer's market. On the other side of the street you see they're throwing a big party in the parking lot; the mayor, city council, and chamber of commerce sit on a raised podium, all roaring off-their-asses drunk. The lot is cordoned by cops in riot gear, ringing the banners, confetti, cheerleaders and high school band. A banner in front of the podium reads The American Way of Life; under it a bunch of men are dancing. Something looks odd about the dancing from a distance, and as you draw nearer, a gap in the crowd opens and you realize the performers are from the insane asylum and they're doing a giant circle jerk. They're jumping in rhythm and howling "Stim! You! Late! Stim! You! Late!"

I could relate other financial metaphors, but they're too dirty. In the annals of sovereign finance, what these dubious, dogmatic currency assassins are doing is Feast of the Mau-Maus bad. Hieronymus Bosch painting bad. Aleister Crowley summoning Satan to eat a May Queen's soul bad. It's ghastlier, grislier, and on a far grander scale than any swindle that's ever been run. At least the Tulip Craze was just about flowers. The South Sea Bubble took down two kingdoms, and that was just over a few far-off islands that wiped out some speculators who were already rich.

What we have on our hands now is about the homes we live in and the land underneath. The banks claimed ownership of them, leveraged their values by two orders of magnitude, then couldn't pay their investors off. Meanwhile, the speculators aren't being wiped out, they're the ones being given free money. To a simpleton clouded by news cycles, illicit substances and fiat currencies, this means everything's going to be just fine and I'm a raving lunatic. Which reminds me, we're going to need a second 12-gauge shotgun to back up the electric fence.

Orwell feared nations that banned books, Huxley feared a society in which nobody wanted to read them, and it looks like we're going to get the worst of both. Books or no, you catch on that Empires can get away with a lot because, well, they're frigging Empires. So in that context you could reasonably answer the little question posed above with "Quite a while." In following posts I'll lay out some consequences of monetizing debt, explain why Goldman Sachs is about to eat the Fed's lunch (meaning ours) and in all probability will rebut myself. Pun intended.

2010-11-02T17:13:00.000-07:00

Next Year's Halloween Post

Above is the unofficial winner of our slack Halloween costume contest, a zombie offering up slices of his brain. He wins every year, of course. I had hoped to post the old H.P. Lovecraft heebie-jeebie well before the party Saturday night, then before bringing the kiddles out trick-or-treating Sunday night and bringing them back loaded to the pumpkin tops (Cousin Brady: "This is too heavy! Help, Daddy, I can't carry it any further! Cousin Daddy: "It's your candy, you took it from those people, and you can either carry it home or you can leave it here." Silence...then the sound of a plastic pumpkin bottom scraping and bumping across sidewalk.) Anyhow, here goes Lovecraft's 'Halloween in a Suburb:'

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
And the harpies of upper air,
That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread
Never shone in the sunset's gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
Where the rivers of madness stream
Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

A chill wind weaves through the rows of sheaves
In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral power
Spreads sleep o'er the cosmic throne,
And looses the vast unknown.

So here again stretch the vale and plain
That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
Sprung out of the tomb's black maw
To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
Shall some day be with the rest,
And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
Of horror and death are penned,
For the hounds of Time to rend.

2010-10-26T16:39:00.001-07:00

Politics, Porn, And A Monstrous Silence

Hey, it's only been 9 months since my last post. That's only a few weeks in dormant-blog years. Now, I could spin out a tale of being kidnapped by a drug cartel in Juarez, or maybe holding off foreclosure agency thugs while dodging the claws and fangs of their relentless scud-launching attack-kittens. (That very last part, unfortunately, is pretty accurate, attack-kittens being what they are.) The truth is, there's just been a lot of duct tape in my life, most of it involving children and new relatives, and most of it good. Full disclosure is inadvisable, and would be too long.

Shorter and sweeter, our littlest one is about to turn 2, and he's probably my last opportunity to wallow in the sheer animal affections of a living being who is completely yours, and, when not being impish and trying to maim or kill other living beings, purely innocent. So I took him up on the offer, and compared to what's been happening in the world (the recorded and loud-spoken phrase "Mind The Gap" is playing in my head right now, in an ominous Oxford accent), the choice seems wise enough. Of course, my toddler master is confident I'm his personal property, and there are exigencies accompanying that status, such as being pinned to the bed, ridden like a horse, and otherwise not being allowed to move. I've missed writing as an outlet, blogging particularly, and now, there's something for the blurting of which can't wait.

I really hate politics. (That's not the blurting thing, exactly, I'm winding up for something more specific.) To me, watching politics is an annoyingly great deal like watching porn. They're both highly repetitive, the acting is nail-across-chalkboards bad, all the basest possible human behaviors are nakedly celebrated and displayed whether you want to see them or not, and here's the worst part: they fully expect you to watch, enjoy and praise what they're doing. My kiddie affection break has been great, but politics are, apparently, a necessary part of the human condition, and have in the past 9 months predictably devolved to a yet more obscene state of baseness; I've been as vigilant and knowing as a metaphorical Berlin hausfrau tracking the Red Army's progress through Poland circa Spring, 1945 as my country's armies declare strategic victory with each debacle and renewed attack to the rear. A ring is about to close around the city, and a decision to either leave or bury the valuables has arrived.

Politics are beasts with two backs. The beasts are almost here, and by now you surely know some of them by reputation. It will be of utmost importance to know their leaders intimately, since a raw and brutal ideology, no matter how demonstrably wrong, deeply cynical, or misguided it may be is about to be administered to the full. One leader's name is Goldman, the other goes by Sachs.

2010-01-20T13:53:00.000-08:00

Ode To An Old Ford Truck

Recent politics make an unwilling participant pine for the good old days. Many of mine fortunately comprised a smooth bench seat, flimsy lap-belts, and a sightly lass crowding me in a Ford truck. This Craigslist ad for a '65 F-100 transcends its genre by a far piece, so far it's told with a sigh, ages and ages hence, with fitting humor and honesty. Pics of a vehicle less traveled:

(Hat tip to Blunt Jackson)

FOR SALE: 1965 FORD F-100 PICKUP. RUNS.

The late Dick Helmold, of Helmold Ford in Raleigh, told me that in 1965 the Ford Motor Company began to use inferior steel in their truck bodies. Weakened the stock, he said. I'm pretty sure he was correct.

More rust than paint, dry-rotten tires, one missing and three mismatched hubcaps, a gas pedal that sticks and brakes that fail (DOT-3 is my co-pilot), no radio, interior lights, or heat, but with a three-on-the-tree gearshift and an amusing horn, this heart-breaking truck is difficult to give up, or even to give away. The driver's door opens only from the inside, so you must enter the vehicle through the passenger side door. Fortunately, the bench seat makes it a breeze to slide across. You may exit via the driver's door, but please don't slam the door shut, or the window will fall down the well and I'll have to take the door panel off to pull it back up and re-engage it with the window knob linkage thingy.

I have owned this dysfunctional vehicle around 18 years. I promise it starts; you'll just have to be patient. The application of jumper cables is a given, so you will need another vehicle for that, and a little cleaning solvent sprayed in the carburetor helps, as long as you don't overdo it, because then flames will shoot out of the engine compartment when it kicks over. If it finally does start, on the 14th attempt, the neighborhood children usually stop what they're doing, because they know that as I crawl up the street in first gear, I'll be laying heavy on the "ahh-OOOGG-ahh" horn and embarrassing their parents who should by now be inured to this spectacle.

This truck can only live in Carrboro. I can't remember the last time it went to Chapel Hill. It is so not Meadowmont. If it showed up in the Oaks and leaked fluid on the golf course, someone would call 911. If it tried to drive up and down the hills of Lake Forest, it would get sick and throw up.

When you see it on the street, though, this rattling deathtrap is a quite the head-turner, even as it tends to slip out of first gear with a loud bang, as if the non-committal transmission is in active rebellion against any rules of engagement, and must be coaxed gently back in as soon as the gears stop whining and grinding and throwing their little tantrum. This is most likely to happen at noon in heavy traffic, in the middle of a left turn at a traffic signal, downtown. I'm not proud of it, but I admit that I bear some personal responsibility for many of the multiple-light-cycle delays in Carrboro since 1991. When the bed of the truck is overflowing with three cubic yards of mulch or groaning under the weight of the rocks from a dismantled farmhouse chimney, I can swear that the leaf spring suspension is literally cracking in two beneath my bench seat as I motor slowly along the two-lane road while the other drivers line up behind me, waiting for their chance to pass. Some of them give me a happy thumbs-up gesture, or roll down their windows and shout "I love your truck". The others, I assume, are silently wondering what kind of jerk would over-compensate for his shortcomings by foisting this ersatz mockery of a truck upon the rest of the driving public. Honestly, though, am I really so different from the farmers who used to drive their tractors into town for a haircut at the Friendly Barber Shop? Well—yes, I am. I grew up in suburban New Jersey for starters, and have a couple of college degrees, so I don't exactly have my rural bona fides. Luckily, to date, nobody has actually yelled at me, "I hate your truck".

I first suspected something was strange about this truck twelve years ago, when it decided to sit in our yard on Maple Avenue for the entire month of December, dressed effeminately, draped in foliage and refusing to do any work whatsoever. This truck loved Christmas; it truly lived for the holiday. It would get all giddy around Thanksgiving, pulling old boxes of its grandmother's Christmas lights out of the attic. At first, I was embarrassed—what would the neighbors think, and all that stuff that tells you more about my own fears than anything else. I must have thought it was just a phase, but in retrospect, of course, I was in complete denial. And even if it was the truck's idea, I was definitely an enabler. My wife said, "Let it do what it wants to do. It's not hurting anyone." And in time, I realized that I still loved it, that being different was okay, and who was I to tell it not to follow the internal combustion engine at its heart?

But the truth was that over time, the truck had become increasingly unreliable. Like Lindsay Lohan, this baby is one hot mess.

For the past two years, I've kept my increasingly unstable truck in a kind of halfway house, sort of a "Club Chevy Nova". I've left it parked on a lot I own along the hill on South Greensboro St, below the road grade. The only way out is a steep incline to the street. You know what they say: out of sight, out of mind. It wasn't invited to my stepdaughter's garden wedding at our house in May—it just sat and sulked, full of bent-up metal poles, a discarded lawn mower and cans of old paint. I won't even try to take it out without getting a spotter to halt traffic in both directions while I burn out the clutch climbing up the driveway. The last person to perform this duty was a wide-eyed impoverished sculptor (you know the Carrboreal archetype) who claimed to love the truck just as it is, and likely only agreed because he wanted to buy it from me, but I don't think I dislike this young artist enough to do inflict any more suffering upon him. Maybe if he wants to just plant it in his yard and nurture it...

So over the last 18 years, this truck has consistently passed, albeit with a D-minus, every test I have devised for him. And now, as much as any under-performing teenager with a mohawk, eyeliner, and a bull ring in his nose, he needs to leave home and find his place in the world. I have turned his plates in, I'm no longer paying his insurance, and he is technically no longer my dependent. I will either donate him to Durham Tech or to the local high school, where I hope he will at least take some shop classes, maybe get his GED, or learn a useful skill. He says he wants to design sport roadsters in Italy. If so, wonderful. For all I know, maybe he'll end up opening a tattoo and piercing body shop on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh and hanging out at Sadlack's, and I'll be okay with that. I'll still love him. But for now, I think he's spinning his wheels drinking coffee at the Open Eye, buying American Spirits at TJ's, and hooping at the Weave on Thursdays. He just needs a little push, is all.

2010-01-14T15:17:00.001-08:00

De-Regulation, Illustrated

Here we have video of a nice contemplative day of ice fishing Russian-style, with male bonding and the sheer joy that springs from communing with nature and harvesting its bounty. The fisherman starts beating the fish, soon to freeze like popsicles, to death with a shovel at about the 1:35 mark.

2009-12-26T16:49:00.000-08:00

The Best Parts

Come when you've got everything squared away. It has probably been more or less so for main winter festivities since we used mammoth tusks for tent poles. Squared away, as in a presentable abode and comestibles arrayed an hour or hopefully more before a brood of family and friends arrive for a party. In our case for Christmas Eve, and as the duck said in the movie 'Babe,' Christmas means carnage.

However achieved, the best parts come when you find yourself relaxing and reflecting on good fortune. There's that point where you think, "It is done. Ready. Chaos lurks, but let not perfection be the enemy of the good. Disapprove of the downstairs bathroom disarray as you will. Screaming children, all you crazed little wanting machines and rug-rats, come and do your worst."

Foods are best simple, easily wolfed down. The freshest finest bagels available can serve as vehicles for a commanding centerpiece of fat and salt, for example cream cheese Grandma mixed with Grandpa's toothsome smoked salmon. Chips of both kinds (potato and tortilla), salsas and dips, veggies crackers basic wines and beers fill out a conveniently accessed table. Prime rib is fine, but nobody really expects or requires more than peasantries, those foods which first tend to dance in the imagination if cruel circumstance ever conspires to make us prisoners. Speaking of which, guests unaccustomed to hard liquors need not be entrapped nor enticed. Good people and the smell of oranges and cloves suffice.

After the kids are in bed and the presents are all done up (or after the UPS truck delivered them pre-wrapped), there's another of those moments, the closest thing to ritual remaining to most of us religion-free types. The evergreens, the mistletoe and lights are ancient symbols of coming Spring and eternal life; an Egyptian from 3,000 years ago would recognize a Christmas tree's purpose instantly.

Yes, there is pervasive commercialism just this side of mind control, the distracted drivers running stoplights, the twisted and counter-twisted wires, facile vengeance of Chinese slave labor, maddeningly secure toys to cardboards. There are tiny screws, assemblies, plastics, packaging, disposal of same. There was having the house clean a grand total of 4 hours. But there is at least as much solstice as there is Santa, and there is having to wait until next year.

2009-12-02T04:25:00.000-08:00

Obama's West Point Speech and Karl Rove's Congratulations

I am the government's unwilling mule hit with IRS kicks and satrap whips as they drive me up through one last 13,000 foot high pass sucking the biting air in through my helpfully slit nostrils and the atrophied ass of my imagination. I bring strapped to my back explosives down at dawn into another hidden valley to the people hibernating there who when they cry out as loud as human throats can throw sounds of pain and mourning will be muffled in our angels' hierarchies.

When phosphorus bombs were raining down on Tokyo in the Good War to start a firestorm the rice farmer said to the shopkeeper don't worry friend it's only politics. Our man-designate went to West Point again this week in blackface to sing and dance the golden oldies of Al Jolson crooning my Mammy because even the great-hearted become small-minded when faced with the prospect of wild Indians all smart enough to press plastic buttons duct-taped to wires rigged to hypothetical nukes. Myths are far more potent than realities and somewhere there are people who still remember if Zeus slew Uranus or Uranus slew Zeus and super-sized are the fears that gnaw on our comfortably guilty imperial innards.

The War is homeowner's insurance for Uncle Sam and of course it's not meant to be won. The enemies don't even qualify as enemies just as tragically paid extras in gruesome comedies and when all this is gone they'll still be there and victories over cockroaches aren't possible nor do they matter. It's the victories over concepts which are key thus the wars must continue and flow into each other and death to reality as molten ores flow into the forms of shining cities on hills. The thirst for retribution remains and bring me the head of Osama bin Laden speaking of myths may he rest in peace and attentions turn to the next object of collective ire.

The speech was the past and no different speech could be given. Our way of corporation which is to say profit and self-embodiment depends upon the gray pulverized dust of the Hindu Kush so invasion is withdrawal a puppet is a nation and self-determination is occupation. As hierarchies crumble they rely increasingly on lies ably abetted by cupidity base stupidity and meanness but this is simply how it must be done and look look pay attention to the stagecraft and flourish. There's recognition behind the blackface that it can't keep going although it must keep going it will keep we are the noble experiment anointed by the hand of god. Now give us more money and if not just remember how found our embodiment is of saying well if they all hate us anyhow let's drop the big one now. Boom goes London. Boom Paree. More room for you and more room for me.

I am a little toiling mule not invited to parties by the only important party called the Property Party which has politely devolved into arms dealers drug lords and jailors. Its parliament of whores and two right wings plan to keep the poor the black the anti-imperialists and malcontents like me divided and entertained with videos of cats flushing toilets. When you're born into this world you get a ticket to the freak show just like George Carlin said and when you're born in America you get a front-row seat. A brittle democracy's lost moral imperative may occur to us at any time our burritos are on the line and the war is on all as Bismarck said it's business by other means.

I catch artisanal bread and my wife can get us backstage to the Cirque de Soleil. I feel the ship of state's skin stretching and buckling hear John Wayne's rivets popping bulkheads bitching Elvis is gyrating history is ending and I remember when Rome was the biggest game in town and it went down because they hollowed it from the center and reneged on their veterans' pay. The Senators took their mistresses to their villas and families waiting in Spain and the south of France. They think we're easier to be played on than a pipe and their plan will work until it doesn't and when it doesn't it's going to not work in a very big way.

2009-11-26T11:03:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving

Some nice, calming footage of The Other Dark Meat strolling around unsuspectingly on their organic farm.

2009-11-16T13:39:00.000-08:00

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, Priced Per Ounce of Gold

The fascinating chart above provides a thought-provoking alternative scope for viewing US economic history as its its assets became more publicly traded.

The Great Crash of 1929 looks like a minor bobble in a steeplechase. The broad-based post-WWII economic expansion capped by the Go-G0 '60s began to falter congruently with US fortunes in Vietnam, then was followed by a steep crash brought on by the conflict's huge debt overhang. As the US went off the gold standard at Bretton Woods II and printed money to pay those debts, the Dow/gold ratio touched its century-long low in the late '70s as the Fed raised interest rates to century-long highs in order to stanch hyperinflation.

Finally, the Dow-gold multiple scaled a cliff wall in the '90s as simultaneous housing and dot-com bubbles rapidly filled in the mid-'90s, with a decade-long decline which shows no technical or fundamental sign of abating, and which at @10:1 is still at least twice the previous century's non-bubble baseline. Physical gold and other industrial metals are compelling portfolio investments in that context.

2009-11-11T13:53:00.000-08:00

On the 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month, the Guns Fell Silent

Am commemorating Veteran's Day by waiting in an internet cafe at the airport, aware that many have been sacrificed for the privilege of my doing so. The above Black Adder clip, while comedic, might as well be a real transcript of low-level British commanders steeling themselves with black humour before embarking on a suicidal attack in the Great War. Here's Hugh Laurie of "House M.D." fame playing the Leftenant who greets a glum Captain Darling, sent down by a general to join the deadly fanfaronnade:

Laurie: "Well this is splendid comradely news! Together we'll fight for king and country and we'll be sucking down sausages in Berlin by tea-time!"

Darling: "...rather hoped I'd get through the whole show. Go back to work at Pratt & Sons...keep wicket for the Croydon Gentlemen...marry Dorothy. Made a note in my diary on the way here...it simply says, 'Bugger.'"

(Credits to "WTF is it now?")

2009-11-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

Afghanistan Updates

Abdullah Abdullah, presidential challenger to Hamid Karzai, announced that he was quitting the runoff election. In a choked-up voice he cited concerns about increased violence in Afghanistan and outrage at the fraudulent election process. The election was canceled and Karzai was declared president.

More U.S. troops died in Afghanistan in October than in any month since that war began eight years ago. A suicide bombing by Taliban militants killed six U.N. staff, and Major General Mike Flynn, director of intelligence for General Stanley McChrystal's headquarters in Kabul, warned that the number of insurgents in Afghanistan (many of whom were from other countries) was now between 19,000 and 27,000, a ten-fold increase since 2004. "I wouldn't say it's out of control right now," Flynn explained, "but this is a California wildfire and we're having to bring in firemen from New York." President Barack Obama caved to pressure from Congress and military contractors and passed a $680,000,000,000 defense bill.

Nuristan, a province on the Pakistani border, essentially fell to the Taliban after the U.S. withdrew its forces from four key bases. Similarly in Khost, another eastern province bordering Pakistan where U.S. forces once registered much-publicized gains (and which Richard Holbrooke, now President Obama's special envoy to the region, termed "an American success story"), the Taliban is largely in control. It is, according to Yochi Dreazen and Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal, now "one of the most dangerous provinces" in the country. Similarly, the Taliban insurgency, once largely restricted to the Pashtun south, has recently spread fiercely to the west and north. At the same time, neighboring Pakistan is an increasingly destabilized country amid war in its tribal borderlands, a terror campaign spreading throughout the country, escalating American drone attacks, and increasingly testy relations between American officials and the Pakistani government and military.

Meanwhile, the U.S. command in Afghanistan is considering a strategy that involves pulling back from the countryside and focusing on protecting more heavily populated areas (which might be called, with the first U.S. Afghan War of the 1980s in mind, the Soviet strategy). The underpopulated parts of the countryside would then undoubtedly be left to Hellfire missile-armed American drone aircraft. In the last week, three U.S. helicopters -- the only practical way to get around a mountainous country with a crude, heavily mined system of roads -- went down under questionable circumstances (another potential sign of an impending Soviet-style disaster). Across the country, Taliban attacks are up; deadly roadside bombs or IEDs are fast on the rise (a 350% jump since 2007); U.S. deaths are at a record high and the numbers of wounded are rising rapidly; European allies are ever less willing to send more troops; and Taliban raids in the capital, Kabul, are on the increase. All this despite a theoretical 12-1 edge U.S., NATO, and Afghan troops have over the Taliban insurgents and their allies.

Finally, the New York Times revealed that the President's alleged drug-kingpin brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, whom American officials regularly and piously denounce, is, in fact, a long-term paid agent of the CIA and its literal landlord in the southern city of Kandahar. If you were a Taliban propagandist, you couldn't make this stuff up.

(Adapted from Harper's and TomDispatch news updates.)

2009-11-01T11:29:00.000-08:00

White House Moderates Position On Protected News Sources

Call it the Judith Miller Law, but here's a first tangible move toward re-charging a First Amendment effectively trashed by perpetual Fake War footing and the threat of reporters going to jail while protecting confidential sources. The impending compromise gives more discretion to individual judges in deciding when it is in the public's interest to protect source identity.

It doesn't take a genius to predict that a flurry of appealed Supreme Court-bound cases will surely ensue, but the implications for increased transparency are positive. Whistle-blowers won't have to risk as much, so the flow of information to reporters will open up a bit. Not to expect Edward R. Murrow to resurrect or anything, but it's the first bright spot for traditional news reporting in a long time. It could even have commercial benefits--the news media seldom ruminate on how we The People might be buying less because they're putting out crappy, weakly-reported product.

The White House had been holding the hard-line status quo, and President "Make Me" Obama deserves an attaboy for giving some ground:

“We expect this proposal to move forward with bipartisan support, and the president looks forward to signing it into law,” said Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, who noted that the Obama administration was “the first administration in history to support media shield legislation.”

The protection would apply not only against subpoenas for reporters’ testimony or information but also against investigative efforts to obtain phone and Internet records to find out who had been talking with them.

Under the agreement, the scope of protection for reporters seeking to shield the identities of confidential sources would vary according to the nature of the case: civil, criminal or national security.

In civil cases, the litigants seeking to force reporters to testify would first have to exhaust all other means of obtaining the information. Even then, the judge would apply a “balancing test,” and the burden would be on the information seekers to show by a “preponderance of the evidence” why their need for the testimony outweighed the public’s interest in news gathering.

Full article at the New York Times.

2009-10-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

South Carolina Legislature Rethinks Socialism, Taps Stimulus $$

The state legislature in South Carolina acted Wednesday to send millions of dollars in benefits to the unemployed, reports Yvonne Wenger of the Post and Courier. The state legislature acted to correct an "oversight" that prevented the use of stimulus funds, Wenger reports, extending benefits for five months. About 113,000 residents have exhausted their benefits so far this year.

2009-10-27T15:05:00.001-07:00

Dispatch from the Unserious Empire

On the White House's chess game with the military, I've really got to hand it to them. Their "credible partner" position is a well-constructed ruse for buying some time.

Upside, the position calls out the elephant in the room, i.e., Hamid Karzai's highly in-credible government. It waits to see the outcome of the predicted-here November run-off election between him and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. Does anyone seriously think Karzai, having fixed 30% of the votes in the prior election, isn't going to run the same play again? When he wins, the White House can pen the Pentagon and coup d'etat Republicans in by saying, "Look, you've got a fine plan for nation-building there, but you yourselves have said it requires a credible partner to work. Which we unfortunately don't have. What's military theory say have to say about this new situation?"

Downside is, the White House's position is a lawlerly, even pharisaical ploy unlikely to achieve much else. It was just a political punt, and puts off the hard decisions of reallocation. Or as history will call it, withdrawal, defeat, ignomy. Worse, if the challenger is somehow elected, Afghanistan will remain a country with a puppet government everyone hates, one which will continue to generate a major insurgency. Unlikely as it may be, the military could point to an Abdullah Outcome and say, "Look, here's your credible partner. Ante up."

Wheels within wheels, but the net-net is we're still left with a war and an exceptionalist mindset which are together responsible for not having universal health care domestically, for an increasingly patronage-based economy, and for generating motivation for well-deserved vengeance on US civilians across much of the world.

For a more professional take, check out Frontline’s interview with former Col. Andrew Bacevich, author of the bestseller 'The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.' The interviewer and Bacevich discuss the short tours of duty Marines have in Afghanistan and how that's contrary to basic principles of counterinsurgency doctrine. They have this exchange:

Bacevich: “A serious imperial country is a country that is willing to send its young men, and now young women, to these far-off places and leave them there indefinitely. That's not what I would hope we would do. But if indeed you're serious about fixing a place like Afghanistan, that's the level of commitment that probably would be required.”

Interviewer: “We're a reluctant empire?”

Bacevich: “We're not a reluctant empire. We're an unserious empire."

For all their sins, China, Russia, Holland, Spain, England, these weren't fly-by-night operations. America has been, turning on its partners as soon as the price in Rome got right. As T. Boone Pickens bitterly complained, the Iraqis are going to let Chinese companies drill in the most desirable oil fields left on earth; I remain fervently against the Iraq invasion and detest oil companies, that's sheer lunacy. Every person killed and maimed in the effort to bring Iraq and its resources into the United States' orbit is mocked.

Bacevich points out in his book that the failure is systemic, and can't simply be hung on the NeoCons, who are far from the only Americans who believe in preemptively managing history with illusion. Military service, once civic function, has transformed into an economic enterprise, one directly and indirectly employing a large fraction of Americans. I and my partners were once again asked to be in the pay of that effort today, times have been tough, and it has given us reason for personal pause.

2009-10-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

Psyche's News Roundup

14 Americans Killed In 2 Afghan Helicopter Crashes
Fareed Zakaria - Zakaria: Obama should weigh troop level carefully - washingtonpost.com -Think Before Surge
The 'benefit' of Somalia's pirates - Channel 4 News Now | the fishermen are able to catch up to £200 worth of fish per day in an area where the average daily earnings are less than £5

Saudi journalist, Rozanna al-Yami, faces lash over sex talk | The Australian A Saudi court has sentenced a journalist to 60 lashes after she was charged with involvement in a TV show in which a Saudi man talked about sex.
BBC NEWS | Europe | German on trial for Muslim murder
Iraq Ministries Targeted in Car Bombings; Over 130 Dead - NYTimes.com

Reid: "The Public Option With An Opt-Out Is The One That's Fair" (let the South opt-out; Rhobama not thrilled with public option but will go along)
Schumer: We Prevailed On White House That Public Option Was The Way To Go | TPMDC (Obama favored Queen Olympia Snowe's plan?)
Scott Berman - Health care reform is moral battle for the soul of a nation -- themorningcall.com

Healthcare system wastes up to $800 billion a year | U.S. | Reuters ("For one example, a paper-based system that discourages sharing of medical records accounts for 6 percent of annual overspending")
Dems push for benefits to start by 2010 - Carrie Budoff Brown - politico.com
Obama's Pointless Pursuit of Olympia Snowe | Newsweek Voices - Howard Fineman | Newsweek.com Obama's pointless bipartisanship (a lightbulb grows in Fineman)

Calculated Risk: SF Fed: Recent Developments in Mortgage Finance
Trying to Rein In ‘Too Big to Fail’ Institutions - NYTimes.com
How the U.S. Blew Trillion-Dollar Trade of Century: Mark Fisher - Bloomberg.com (print the money)

McDonald’s Closes in Iceland as Crisis Makes Chain Unprofitable - Bloomberg.com
We attacked the bankers, but took our eyes off the whole rotten system | Gary Younge | Comment is free | The Guardian
Detroit house auction flops for urban wasteland | Special Coverage | Reuters

Forget the rush on that H1N1 swine flu vaccine; 62% of Americans have no intention of getting it anyway | Top of the Ticket | Los Angeles Times
Asteroids should be next small step for man in space, panel tells President Barack Obama - Telegraph
Beliefs - Changes in Religion All Over the Map, Report Shows - NYTimes.com 6 out of 10 Americans pray one or more times each day; high percentages report feeling close to God, experiencing God’s presence or guidance on most days

Don't Feed the Animals: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Sexual Biology (Couples Edition)
Emily Howell, the virtual composer making waves in the computer world - Times Online
Circulation drops at U.S. newspapers as readers turn to online news sources -- latimes.com
Internet set for change with non-English addresses

Hasta la Vista, baby: Ars reviews Windows 7 - Ars Technica
Every Windows 7 Keyboard Shortcut You'll Ever Need - Windows 7 shortcuts - Gizmodo

2009-10-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

Texas, the Eyes of Justice Are Upon You

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

On October 13, we lost a resolute champion of the law, a man who left his impact the lives of untold numbers of Americans.

His very name made his life's work almost inevitable, a matter of destiny. William Wayne Justice was a Federal judge for the Eastern District of Texas. That's right,he was "Justice Justice." And he spent a distinguished legal career making sure that everyone - no matter their color or income or class - got a fair shake. As a former Texas lieutenant governor put it last week, "Judge Justice dragged Texas into the 20th century, God bless him."

Dragged it kicking and screaming, for it was Justice who ordered Texas to integrate its public schools in 1971 - 17 years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision made separate schools for blacks and whites unconstitutional. Texas resisted doing the right thing for as long as it could. Many of its segregated schools for African-American children were so poor they still had outhouses instead of indoor plumbing.

This small town lawyer appointed to the federal bench by President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered Texas to open its public housing to everyone, regardless of their skin color. He looked at the state's "truly shocking conditions" in its juvenile detention system and said, repair it. He struck down state law that permitted public schools to charge as much as a thousand dollars tuition for the children of illegal immigrants.

And Justice demanded a top-to-bottom overhaul of Texas prisons, some of the most brutal and corrupt in the nation. He even held the state in contempt of court when he thought it was dragging its feet cleaning up a system where thousands of inmates slept on the dirty bare floors of their cellblocks and often went without medical care. The late, great Molly Ivins said, "He brought the United States Constitution to Texas."

Some say that justice stings. William Wayne Justice certainly did - and his detractors stung back with death threats and hate mail. Carpenters refused to repair his house, beauty parlors denied service to his wife. There were cross burnings and constant calls for his impeachment.

After he desegregated the schools he was offered armed guards for protection. He turned them down and instead took lessons in self-defense.

The rest here.

2009-10-20T14:55:00.000-07:00

Has The US Housing Market Bottomed?

Lord Wife and I drove back yesterday AM from dropping Running Boy (age 5-1/2) and Mr. Grunt-n-Grab (age 11 months) at their respective stations. We were listening to National Public Radio since it was finally being safe to go back. NPR recently directed its longest-ever local fund drive, ending it only after resorting to stories like "How My Cello Wound Up in Poland."

While we crossed under the freeway, a young reporter quoted a disappointing housing starts report from September. She then invited a Subject Matter Expert from Columbia University onto her segment, and it went like this:

NPR Reporter asks the Expert questions, he fluently rattles off data, we draw closer to home. Reporter asks another question, Expert begins to deliver a matter-of-fact, dismal interpretation of housing market prospects. NPR Reporter suddenly interrupts to say, "I'm sorry--I have to cut you off now."

Lord Wife and I looked at each other with arched brows. Rookie reporter surprised by a vet producer, and-or a "Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella" reporting policy becoming painfully obvious? Not 100% sure, but in context it seemed like an openly Pravda Moment on NPR.

The Main Stream Media has by consensus already called the bottom on the real estate market, often citing a stabilization or drop in the rate of foreclosures. On the surface, that's very comforting data. As a homeowner, I certainly don't want to see more of my remaining equity go up in smoke. But...I also have to face facts, which involves objectively thinking about whether there is cause for being perky, and if so, what it is. This in turn means remembering how bankers think, which is to say, they greatly prefer not to.

In short, at some point banks stop foreclosing on properties in hard-hit locales, so I strongly suspect a lowering foreclosure rate is a false-positive indicator. This local tendency may have become a national reality. Either way, aggregate stabilization is being impacted by banks not wanting to take on properties that won't find buyers quickly. Apart from further driving down a bank's on-hand portfolio value, foreclosure costs and hassle factors are high. From the lender's perspective, a property must re-sell in a reasonable time. It must be appealing enough that someone will bid significant cash for it at a sheriff's auction.

There's an unspoken truth here that banks and real estate professionals are keenly aware of: houses do not go up in value. Unless maintained and updated, their value goes down. This is far more true for a McMansion 5 miles from Microsoft than for a grimy hovel in Detroit: if the McMansion sits unoccupied for two years without regular (and to the bank, bothersome) maintenance, its value plummets. The Detroit hovel is a walk-away, and for the attractive McMansion, everything hinges on how fast it can be re-sold. The bulk of properties are in between those extremes, but they're still subject to the same pressures. The more properties that sit empty, the more reluctant banks are to take on more.

A much stronger indicator for measuring "the bottom" would be to track the number of foreclosure filings compared to the number later sold at auction, observing percentage, time to sale, and foreclosure/auction price ratios. But that data isn't tracked officially. Even that data would fail to measure when someone walks away and the bank simply doesn't bother to file foreclosure. Walk-aways by both borrower and lender have already become common in some of the most depressed markets, as described in this local article from Dayton, Ohio:

In some instances, lenders don’t even bother to file a foreclosure. Figures by RealtyTrac released this week show foreclosure filings in the greater Dayton area are down almost 21 percent.
John Carter, housing inspector with the city of Dayton, finds the decline in foreclosures “very scary,” because houses are continuing to go vacant.
For every 100 houses that he orders boarded up, he said, 40 to 50 properties have a mortgage but no foreclosure filed. When he contacts the banks, they sometimes tell him they have no plans to foreclose.
“That makes it look like the foreclosure numbers are going down, but in actuality the banks are not even starting foreclosure,” Carter said. “So there’s no number to track now.”

I'm not trying to stop anyone from buying or selling a home, rather have pointed out basic problems with the Party Line's reasoning. At best, there are wide blind spots in the metrics being used by top prognosticators, the market really has bottomed, and we got lucky. Yet it seems more likely it has not, and officials are trying to talk the market up while looking through their binoculars backwards. These are mostly the same folks who told everybody you can't get hurt buying a home.

Calling the bottom is generally less important than having cash to put on a porch rail. Just as with previous Recession/Depressions, there are major opportunities for people willing to convert paper into property, and it's hard to think of a safer long-term investment in this environment than free and clear ownership of real estate.

2009-10-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

Unaware Of Their Own Irony

I'll sneak in one more drive-by post.

In the first government analysis of the Stimulus Bill, the Southern states, after throwing partisan shit-fits against it, are receiving the majority of its benefits. This is ironic, but typical, and has been the case since FDR's New Deal. They're all bluster and bombast, full of hortatory pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps sermons in the front of the building, then they're constant crybabies in the alley out back. Maybe we should look at it as war reparations.

2009-10-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

Money Well Spent?

The health care sector has spent $263 million this year lobbying Congress for changes to reform plans, a government watchdog group estimates.

That works out to roughly $500,000 per Congressman and Senator just this year, quite a bit higher for many key committee members and none for people like Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, Marcy Kaptur, Ron Paul, et al. (Hopefully et al.)

2009-10-16T13:23:00.000-07:00

If You Don't Know Where You're Going, You Might Not Get There

A week or so back a story came out in the WSJ reporting the president had just finished reading Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam.

The book's narrative arc concerns a White House "being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead," urged on by a hyperbolic Pentagon that saw commies under coffee tables while committing unbelievably basic mistakes on the ground. As the story goes, Tom Donilon (a long-time Biden ally), the deputy national security advisor, gave Rahm Emanuel a copy of 'Lessons,' then Rahm went to pass it on the prez but learned he was already reading it, so he loaned it to David Axelrod. Obama passed his own copy on to Biden, whereupon it became required reading for all of Washington and sold out of bookstores. It still must be back-ordered on Amazon.

The Pentagon, now hyperventilating about islamo-fascists under coffee tables, prefers a different narrative arc, one conveyed in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. This work has the US military finally figuring out how to apply COIN principles and win, which it was manifestly starting to do by 1971-72, only to have its plug pulled after 8 previous years of patient learning and sacrifice, all wasted by a White House too focused on political gain. Various generals have been pressing the book on their subordinate chains of command since 2005, the WSJ article relates, and it is currently sold out at Amazon.

The broad lines of debate are exposed. Regular readers (Jon in particular) might expect me to dump on the military's choice of exemplar, but not in this case. Creighton Abrams took over Vietnam's command from William Westmoreland in 1968 and promptly switched the strategic focus to protecting villages from incursion and training a truly effective indigenous army (ARVN). Abrams was one of the best military minds in the 20th century in both combat and command, and given a couple more years' head start and 500,000 men, he probably would have succeeded in at least partitioning Vietnam's narrow isthmus. The book is an excellent choice on which to base an argument of COIN and see-it-through.

The White House's book is similarly well-chosen, in that its focus is on McGeorge Bundy, one of the so-called "best and brightest" or "wise men" in the Kennedy Administration, in which he served as National Security Advisor. Having been born to one of Boston's elite families and pledging as member #322 of the Skull and Bones society while at Yale, he was tapped at age 30 to serve on the Council of Foreign Relations while the Marshall Plan was being implemented in Europe as an anti-communist firewall. From there he went to serve as Harvard's youngest ever Dean of Faculty. In the Kennedy Administration, he was an outspoken hawk for escalation, but was first of the early hawks to change his mind and advocate cutting the losses. Like the current think-tankers paid to wind up generals, airwaves and representatives, Bundy knew nothing about war's conduct. He had never studied it.

The arcs don't apply particularly well because Afghanistan is far larger, less stable, more permeable, hostile, and diverse than Vietnam. Afghanistan is a failed state starting from a point of near-zero cohesion, whereas Vietnam had two systems of governance, each entertaining useful thralls of competing ideologies, each on the cusp of establishing a post-Colonial national identity. In Kabul, no one collects the garbage, the Karzai government huddles behind sandbags collecting drug money while it piles higher, and every time the author of a strategic plan relieves themselves on a toilet in the US embassy and flushes, they literally shit on the city's residents. The city's sewage system is its streets.

The Obama Administration's only strategic goal in Afghanistan is to simply contain al-Qaeda, which has already been accomplished. They're re-fighting Vietnam while al-Qaeda openly blossoms orange and red in Pakistan, and it seems that Vietnam is aiming too high.

2009-10-15T14:50:00.000-07:00

"You Can't Take The High Horse, And Then Claim The Low Road"

Ohh, but yes, you can. Just for old time's sake and some perspective after the first Nobel Prize ever given to a US President for merely restoring dignity and respect for protocol, I looked up some old Dubya bloopers. The main problem was choice overload, of course, but the compilation above is a good selection. The clip below is instructive, too, because Bush's pre-recorded speech to an international audience is being fed through his earpiece at a volume high enough to be picked up by his podium's microphones. His answers to the reporters' pre-submitted questions are all pre-recorded as well, and are fed through the Telepreznit's magic earpiece. Maybe Obama deserves the Prize after all.

2009-10-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

A Bright Shining Showdown

Give the picture above a close look; it's the first time the President of the US and the commander of his ground forces in Afghanistan met 1-1. Today is the Year Eight of the war they're conferring over, and their body language is telling. Obama's posture is patient, explanatory, verging on remonstrative; Stanley McChrystal's is taut, defensive, and tilting to one side. The general looks like he might be struggling to maintain his composure while thinking, "I could spatter his head like a bug."

Obama's intellectual training was primarily by Socratic method, which emphasizes dialectical questions designed to get one party in a debate to tellingly contradict themselves, strengthening the inquirer's point. I have been very critical of the President for asking for a report he knew would, in a word, suck. In his defense, maybe he didn't know it would suck this badly, and didn't expect it to collapse so easily upon an amateur's inquiries. For example, BHO may have asked self-contradicting questions like these:

"Are you telling me that 40,000 more troops are enough to decisively defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, once and for all?"

"How will these new troops limit al-Qaeda's continuing growth in Pakistan, where we know it's becoming a deadlier domestic and international threat?"

Stanley A. McChrystal is a Crusader, a third-gen Military Industrial Complex product deeply in the pocket of the NeoCons, and Fred Kagan, who authored the bribe-the-Sunni-insurgents-and-leave plan known as The Surge in Iraq, is his strategy advisor. He has gone on 60 minutes to tout his plan. He has given a speech to an international crowd in London. His allies, one would hope not his own office, leaked his classified troop request report to the press. His disdain for Obama, his commander-in-chief, is visible, quotable, and wholly insubordinate. Obama is likely too smart to fire him, and McChrystal is probably too dumb to resign. I suspect McC's superior, Gen. David Petraeus, has masterfully set up a good soldier to take a fall for him.

When it comes to making war or anything else, Fred Kagan and the NeoCons are turds in a picnic cooler. One must assume the questions, simple questions above were put to their report, and no good answers were blurted. Obama today announced, as expected, that there will be no withdrawal. That sounds bland and depressing enough, but he also set no timeline on a decision for escalation, no numbers on additional troops at all. In other words, it is the omission which speaks loudest, and he's breaking the news to the NeoCons softly. Refer again to the body language in the picture above.

In D.C. Newspeak, Obama's announcement today signifies No Buildup. There may be a token compromise (a.k.a. Operation Kevlar Chandelier), but bottom line, this is an infuriating hog-tying for the NeoCons and their Generals, and they're off in basements and bars this evening uttering vile oaths, making pacts and desperately sharpening knives. Having been brilliantly stalemated, the best they can do is cry, "leisurely," and "too deliberate!" For once since his election, I stand in admiration and applaud: Barack Hussein Obama didn't give them the satisfaction of a clear "No."

2009-10-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

California Screamin'

I'm heading towards Hollywood and Vine to close down an un-airconditioned office a few stories above the walk of fame for a client. I'm waiting out tough times underneath a palm tree, waiting for the stop light and economic shoots to turn green as a cunningly bleached blonde sits up high in an onyx Porsche Cayenne Turbo SUV. She crosses our path in front and dawdles to turn left while a little white dog nestles on her breast looking down at me and nervously at the cars, the kind of dog that's not good for much but luxuriating or tossing up in the air to punt over a fence.

The girl's wearing goggle-sized sunglasses and maybe she'll turn 20 years old while she waits for oncoming traffic to clear and my friend, an L.A. resident, who has been fielding my questions about the Governator's budget crisis follows up with, "They just announced they're cutting summer school and child care programs for migrant workers." "Oh, yeah," I sigh. "Now that makes a hell of a lot of sense. That's really cutting the fat out of a budget! Bold leadership. Political courage!"

To my right, a sun-baked caucasian man, fiftyish, drags down the sidewalk like a grimy, dessicated crustacean with about an hour to live, trailing a torn t-shirt devoid of color, dust in his hair sticking up in the air ike free beauty parlor product, greasy gray jeans hanging off him obscenely. No one at the bus stop sees him, he's magic, he's an invisible man. So I'm sitting there thinking, look pal, it's right here, the future is being spelled out in front of your face on a big mind-reading neon sign just like with Steve Martin in LA Story. Stop for a minute and read.

California's got it all. It's the #1 Death Factory and it's the #1 Dream Factory in the US and the world. Tops in arms production and entertainment. 8th biggest economy on the planet, huge wine producer, agribusiness, no slouch in the ganja department. Companies like Apple, Google, Disney, Miramax, and YoYodyne are all in California. It is the most fungible entity imaginable.

Yet it's bankrupt, its bonds are junk, it is now paying state worker in scrip and its population is shrinking for the first time since the conquistadores brought the plague. Now, I'm thinking at the stoplight, we must be suffering from a philosophical conundrum. A triumph or failure of Reaganomics, of scientology, of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, trickle down Wysocki, trickle down. If you can keep your income inequality when all around you are losing theirs then you will be a man my son.

America has never viewed its working classes through the sentimental fug of an Edwardian music hall, but when treated well one time they promptly payed back with the greatest explosion of prosperity and technology in known history. But that's a bygone era, constantly memorialized and milked for every last drop of hope in repeating a Greatest Generation. California, particularly its coastal southern cities, provides a juxtaposition of glittering got-it-made success and violent squalor, with pernicious polarizing influences and taxes that keep regressing. It's the Big vs. the Little Lebowskis, and it's actually hard to tell who's winning--half the time the plot's entertaining, half the time it's frightening, and half the time it's disastrous. Because it's California, the halves add up.

But uh-oh. Cali's attached. It's kind of attached to the US like a skull, in fact. Am I looking at the future of my entire country? Well, it was America's bellwether state of the 20th century, so yes, it would seem so. Reading Will California become America's first failed state?, a competently researched and interviewed article in the Guardian, triggered the above memory of a recent trip to L.A., and the upshot of it is that public services will be shut down to reduce the budget gap, that's not going to be enough, and people will think of something because Californians are innovative.

Metaphorically, to take California's lead, the United States has a case of brain cancer, and it's not ready to start dealing with it in any serious way. Delusion is the order of the day. The recession is over, I'm sure you've heard. Tide's still up, sky's still blue and the myth of the California Dream is going to die hard, like a butthole surfer screaming "whooaaa, duuuude," as he bashes up repeatedly against the stony crags of Monterey.

To end on a glass half full, as required, California dreamers hang it out innately, they don't know any different, which means America's problems tend to crop up first and most prevalently in that state. Presumably, so will solutions.

2009-10-03T12:42:00.001-07:00

Finally An Attack Democrat For Health Care Reform

Here's how it's done. Rep Alan Grayson (D-FL) goes on the offensive with guns blazing at precisely the right time. Grayson stood up in Congress and said that the Republicans are a bunch of Neanderthals who don't even have a health care plan: "What their plan amounts to is, 'Don't get sick, of if you do--die quickly." You can imagine the swinging that ensued on the monkey bars after that one, to which Grayson replied, in paraphrase: "Tough shit. I meant exactly what I said. You losers have no plan."

Here's some nice dining room talking point ammo he shoots in the above interview:

122 Americans die every single day because they don't have health care

Simple. Clean. If anybody wants to argue with that statement, they expose themselves as either not very interested in the benefits of being an American citizen or just mouthing someone else's shit-stirring.

Everybody from people who are happy with their Medicare to somebody looking for another cardboard box to sleep in knows that the medical industry is in need of a proper beating and has generally stopped making sense. The far left and far right should at least be able to agree on that.

2009-09-29T17:27:00.000-07:00

Saying No To The Long War For One Brief Week

Let's see, now...what unfortunate coincidence befell the last sitting President who said "No" to the Pentagon? Hmm. Wish I had a better memory. Anyhow, Obama's annoying re-consideration of his decision this Spring to expand troop levels in Afghanistan, which I had discussed in a recent prescriptive post (A Solution for Afghanistan: Changing the Mission to Observe and Contain) was sure to generate swift repercussions from the military industrial complex crowd. And they came, mild openers such as these:

1) Republicans are telling Congressional Democrats that if B.O. withdraws, they'll personally be blamed for slaughtered virgins raining from Afghanistan's skies;

2) General Stan McChrystal has preemptively threatened to resign if he doesn't get his 40,000 more troops;

3) Impetus is gathering for congressional hearings about O's mishandling of the Afghanistan war, with a parade of generals and policy analysts. Mutiny, in other words, is afoot;

4) The Defense Secretary, Bob Gates, went on CNN Sunday and appeared to contradict his boss, saying an exit strategy would be a "strategic mistake;"

5) General David Petraeus, more on him later, again denied that he's thinking about a presidential run in 2012.

These wails aren't keening over nuke-bearing Russkies and these breasts aren't being beaten over invading Chinese hordes, but over the prospect of disillusioned donut salesmen trying to figure out how to mix acetone and peroxide together and hurt other people as well. The Complex will turn up the heat on a recalcitrant White House, and the most likely political response will be re-emphasizing al-Qaeda and de-emphasizing the Taliban.

This switch of framework can be easily packaged for public consumption by explaining that al-Qaeda is offensive in nature and the Taliban is defensive, therefore a troop buildup to chase the Taliban in Afghanistan doesn't make sense--but, for the sake of the populace in the areas we've made promises, withdrawal must be very gradual and we Will Not Abandon Them. This political solution will please few other than politicians, is almost as bad operationally as a build-up, and will probably result in a creeping expansion anyway. In the spirit of the times, I hereby take the liberty of christening it Operation Kevlar Chandelier.

While it's possible B.O. will have the political courage to put his head on the line and withdraw from his Dumb War in accord with what we already do against aQ on the cheap in places like the Sudan, it's a much longer shot than any Mr. Oswald took from the Book Depository. Thankfully, a commenter named VietnamVet on Sic Semper Tyrannis (link on right) repeats myself for me:

"The Long War is a losing proposition; it will break the bank and break the force.”

I have long been a proponent of containment. The only force that works to pacify an insurrection is a native police. If an empire is going to occupy a foreign country it has to work the ethnic divisions and build a native state that can police itself. This worked more or less until WWII. However, the AK-47, IED, cell phones, internet, and excess oil money make it impossible for a Jewish or a Christian country to occupy and pacify the Muslim people.

Containment and Energy Independence are the only strategy that will work for Western Civilization. These are the only schemes that won’t bankrupt the Middle Class. Unfortunately for America’s future, all the government Stakeholders have a game to play and wedge politics has neutered the Middle Class voter.

The infuriating fact that we're certain to lose doesn't matter. Rory Stewart, who knows the area better than any talk show analyst, recently put it so:

"...basically the policy decision is made. What they would like is a little advice on some small bit. I mean, the analogy that one of my colleagues used recently is this: “We’re planning to drive our car off a cliff. Do we wear a seatbelt or not?” And we say, “Don’t drive your car off the cliff.” And they say, “No, no, no. That decision’s already made. The question is should we wear our seatbelts?” And you say, “Why by all means wear a seatbelt.” And they say, “Okay, we consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart."

Post-Kennedy US foreign policy starts coming together once you realize the United States Middle Class is viewed in certain circles as an accident which should never have happened. Any straps extending underneath that class are now introduced as entitlements. Geopolitics were once games of chance to the inbred hemophiliac royals who had their private parties and scorecards and something like it is happening again. Senseless wastes and gambles begin making sense against that backdrop and the drama of tawdry and conveniently far-off places works as well as Western movies. The Apaches are out there, planting IEDs.

Thus we play the fools with time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us. But there is still an ember, there is still a glimmer, and I still blow.

2009-09-29T13:27:00.000-07:00

"If The Democrats Can Grow A Backbone..."

Jon used that phrase in the comments section of the last post, and yes, I am taking him waaay out of context, but it prompted me to think of the gelatinous mass above. Welcome to my mental image of the Democratic Party. There are still a few useful parts...I think the fang hanging on the right side of its mouth is Russ Feingold, the vestigial flippers are Kucinich and Leahy, Waxman is maybe the nose.

Update: Why yes, failure is their preferred option: Senate panel rejects gov't-run insurance plan

2009-09-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

Someone Else Sees What I'm Seeing

Julian Robertson sees the pink elephant, and publicly called out the 2008 fiasco. Now he can't figure out how the US and several other countries will avoid triggering hyperinflation with the amount of money they're printing (I can't either). He's noticed that no one is buying long bonds (who would?) and buyers for short ones have dwindled to a few usual suspects. This guy, pun intended, bears watching. He has placed big bets on shorting treasuries and appeared on CNBC to help talk them down:

The US is too dependent on Japan and China buying up the country's debt and could face severe economic problems if that stops, Tiger Management founder and chairman Julian Robertson told CNBC.

"It's almost Armageddon if the Japanese and Chinese don't buy our debt,” Robertson said in an interview. "I don't know where we could get the money. I think we've let ourselves get in a terrible situation and I think we ought to try and get out of it."
Robertson said inflation is a big risk if foreign countries were to stop buying bonds.
“If the Chinese and Japanese stop buying our bonds, we could easily see [inflation] go to 15 to 20 percent,” he said. “It's not a question of the economy. It's a question of who will lend us the money if they don't. Imagine us getting ourselves in a situation where we're totally dependent on those two countries. It's crazy.”
Robertson said while he doesn’t think the Chinese will stop buying US bonds, the Japanese may eventually be forced to sell some of their long-term bonds.
“That's much worse than not buying,” he said. “The other thing is, they're buying almost exclusively short-term debt. And that's what we are offering, because we can't sell the long-term debt. And you know, the history has been that people who borrow short term really get burned.”

A clever person concerned about hyperinflation and wanting to make a financial killing would use exchange-traded funds to go long on 2-year Treasuries and short on 10-year Treasuries, which is probably something like what Julian Robertson is doing.

2009-09-23T17:11:00.000-07:00

A Solution for Afghanistan: Changing the Mission to Observe and Contain

Obama appears to be re-considering his earlier Afghanistan strategy and is bridling at the military's public blackmailing for yet more troops. The politician in him is rearing, nostrils flared and smelling quagmire. As a statesman, Obama seems smart enough to know he's dealing with a buffer zone, one which should be pragmatically set within a framework of limited goals. Unfortunately, he was sold a much wider bill of goods by self-serving interests, military and commercial, which won't pick up the tab for failure.

Those interests are not used to hearing "No," which is why Obama was stupid enough to start down a full-blown nation-building counter-insurgency path; and so, too, have many others before him. Perhaps it's a combination of natural human optimism, the allure of scientific rationalism, and the colossal rocky boulliabaise of cock-up which is Afghanistan, long known as "the Graveyard of Empire." A remaining Everest and K2 of foreign policy circles, it must inspire military planners and wonks to sharpen up their models and say, "I shall tread triumphant where all others have failed, I shall gain my rightful place on Meet the Press."

So many others. England, for its part, apparently suffers from some pathologically driven need to occupy Kabul and Kandahar at least once every century, then leave in disgust and frustration, erecting some cryptic statue to their loss. The Dr. Watson of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's imagination was a wounded survivor of the quite factual Battle of Maiwan, having been carried out of the massacre by his orderly. It's all right there in the opening of 'A Study in Scarlet,' and perhaps the British public supported this last occupation on a purely sentimental basis. The bother of conquering and holding the region goes all the way back to Alexander the Great, who was nearly killed in the Swat Valley after taking a dart in the shoulder. He executed trusted Macedonian lieutenants and soldiers when they mutinied following a victory they felt was too precarious and far from home. In terms relative to megalomania, it was a markedly low point in his career.

The stated military logic, tenuous as it may have been, for occupying Afghanistan was to deny the takfiri jihad (al Qaeda) a base of operations. If we don't occupy, the argument went, we allow a vacuum to exist which draws in terrorists, who then have a safe haven in which to train and mount another 9/11-style event. Deriding the presumption and ridiculousness of this reasoning would be satisfying but illusory. It's worth noting that even at the highest levels, the systems which produce good strategic decision-making in this country have failed or have been completely blocked. Allow me to explain why.

By flipping it on its head, the flaw in the military's opening logic above is easily exposed and solved: if you allow Afghanistan to become a vacuum, and terrorists move in and make bases, all you have to do is watch them with your expensive satellites and predator drones, then move your special forces up close enough to observe and confirm bad guy status while coordinating with local security forces, and eliminate the terrorist threats. This solution is so obvious and executable precisely because the stability of Afghanistan has absolutely no correlation with the security of the United States; it doesn't matter if we risk destabilizing it with bombing strikes on varying numbers of its citizens who we believe plan to attack us.

An Observe and Contain mission can be run in Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan so long as security agreements are maintained with its governments. Withdrawing ground troops from the region will strengthen diplomatic goodwill, reduce domestic taxpayer burden, and enhance the security footing of the United States. President Obama is showing multiple signs of questioning America's overall foreign policy course, and is hopefully on the verge of making the choice not to escalate troop levels in Afghanistan, but to draw them down.

2009-09-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

Oh, For the Days of Separate But Equal (Says Rush Limbaugh)

I've been waiting for the moment when a major anti-Obama personage finally let their cloak fall so you could see the word RACIST tattoed across their chest. A rough equivalent to when, during Pat Buchanan's speech at the Republican Convention in 1991, College Republicans in the crowd started giving the Nazi salute and nobody stopped them before the camera cut away. I've been waiting for something like this:

LIMBAUGH: I think the guy’s wrong. I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. [referring to an interracial fist-fight on a schoolbus] I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America.

Yes, Rush, the cracker barrel just isn't the same anymore, what with the darkies shoppin' in the general store and usin' real greenbacks just like everybody else. How will we protect the women-folk? Some days I can only wonder if the South will ever rise again...

(Note: the snark tag to the above is set on "Stun.")

2009-09-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

Interesting Events, And Good

A few bright spots today, each of which will resound.

First, Newsweek reports that the White House has been briefed that Iran has not been actively developing nuclear weapons for at least the last 6 years. The report must have seriously undermined Israeli claims to the contrary, and cast doubt upon its persistently urgent calls for preventive bombing. The fact that it was finally given at all signals that control of the agency intelligence estimate apparatus has been wrested back, at least temporarily.

Next, and likely connected with the above, President Obama scrapped the Bush/Cheney Poland-based missile shield plan. The "shield," ostensibly intended to defend from future incoming Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles, enraged Russia and many of the members of its former Union. At minimum, the move is a rational de-escalation, and may factor into preparation for upcoming talks with Iran. Which is precisely how Israel will interpret it.

Finally, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, one of the good guys, introduced legislation that will re-work some privacy rights and due process for average Americans back into the FISA and Patriot Acts. Not that we actually needed privacy when speaking on the phone or sending email or anything, the government would be bored to tears by all our conversations, but it's nice that an elected Senator takes time out of their busy fundraising day and thinks of these things.

2009-09-16T21:09:00.000-07:00

Canadians Talk Funny

But they have a single-payer health care system. Here they are talking about it themselves, often expressing pity and concern in those endearing, Depression-era accents for their neighbors to the south.

2009-09-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

Health Plan, Short Take

Drum roll, and grains of salt to day jobs. The Baucus "bipartisan" plan would require every American to purchase health insurance from a private company. That's referred to as an "individual mandate." While there appears to be a limit on pre-existing denials, there also appears to be no cap on rate hikes whatsoever.

Net-net, the insurance companies would pick up 30-50 million new customers and set rates at will with no accountability except to each other. Fortunately, this P.O.S. won't make it out of committee. It and the Democrats will be eviscerated by Republicans, and rightly so. Then something worse will ensue.

We have established what you are, sirs and madames, and there was not much haggling over price.

2009-09-16T15:34:00.001-07:00

Party Differences & Driving Influences

Bush one hour before his TARP speech:

In the theater, the president was clearly confused about how the government would buy these securities. He repeated his belief that the government was going to “buy low and sell high,” and he still didn’t understand why we hadn’t put that into the speech like he’d asked us to. When it was explained to him that his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration.

“Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he asked.

Excerpted from Matt Latimer's upcoming "insider" book about the Bush presidency.

2009-09-15T17:17:00.000-07:00

The Roots of Anti-Communist Hysteria in the United States...

...run deep, and are inter-joined in our stump with others. Whenever a leader sets about directing our energies away from hunting down menacing Injuns outside to building up public commons within, hysteria recurs. I wonder when or if we can ever recognize we're no longer a frontier nation putting the last touches on its Manifest Destiny. The tendency is reflexive.

Contrast the myriad recent freak-outs with a Vanity Fair article by Sam Kashner on how William Manchester’s book on John F. Kennedy’s assassination came to be describes the morning of Nov. 22, 1963:

“In that third year of the Kennedy presidency,” Manchester wrote, “a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas.…Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; corporate junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.” A retired major general ran the American flag upside down, deriding it as “the Democrat flag.” A wanted poster with J.F.K.’s face on it was circulated, announcing “this man is Wanted” for—among other things—“turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations” and appointing “anti-Christians … aliens and known Communists” to federal offices. And a full-page advertisement had appeared the day of the assassination in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party; when it was shown to the president, he was appalled. He turned to Jacqueline, who was visibly upset, and said, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.”

Fortunately, in the ensuing 46 years our political discourse has improved greatly. (h/t to Blog on the Run)

2009-09-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

Financial Blowback & "W"-Shaped Recession

When President Obama announced economic recovery is here, it was time to call bullshit. It'd be great if B.O.'s right, of course, but fundamentals have actually deteriorated, with hot money pumped direct from the state running even faster through the veins, chasing higher yields and P/E ratios. Insider stock sales, a classic buy-sell benchmark, are currently running at a rate of 31 to 1, sell-heavy. In the still very much deregulated financial industry, the side bets which caused banks to fail have not been taken off. Every month another bank or two goes down because the cancerous transactions were not un-wound, and in return for a bail-out or heist of approximately one year's worth of total US gross domestic product, no meaningful change was forced in regulation or culture.

But it's ok. Right now Wall Street is collectively thinking, "Let the good times roll, baby. We can get away with absolutely anything." While all known historical data say that's a good time to duck, what do I know? What's to duck from, exactly? To me, the US-led global financial system looks like an enormous black pulsating blob. It makes groans, whoops, satisfied sounds. It emits an alarming howl every now and again over the gurglings and gushings which accompany its usual to and fro. Periodically a maw creaks open from a manifold cleft and some be-tentacled larval outgrowth emerges and it thrives while words like "collateralized debt obligations" ring dutifully out.

I certainly don't know what the Blob's going to do next, or when, and it seems to be demonstrably unknowable in the aggregate by any personage or group, inside or out. This is, in fact, its very problem, because financial systems ultimately operate on faith. This Thing inspires the opposite. Its complexity, vastness, and opacity warrant looking for the quiet exit, but that usually involves building your own exit door with spare lumber and cable because that's just how big the Blob has gotten. The other exit doors have drawn their own crowds already, with their own problems.

As if that were not enough, a well-placed few blob-masters were recently given the chance to legally award kingly amounts of blob-extract to themselves and apportion more to their vassals in the name of saving us from a Second Great Depression. They're currently basking with amazing modesty in accolades since it has been announced that Recovery is At Hand. The Blob is smiling; all will be well. There was no need to alter our former beliefs, we just needed some "stimulus," and a bold will to fast action.

People like Joe Stiglitz and the blog Seeking Alpha say, "Not so fast. What you call stimulus, I call sleight of hand. All those fork lifts that loaded containers onto the trucks, where did they go? Where are the containers now?" A rigged system so sly and newly faithful of itself will simply pull its hidden levers yet lower and harder, so maybe there are worse things than double-dip recessions:

The Double Dip Recession, or the “W” shaped recovery that a minority of economists, such as Joseph Stiglitz, is now stating as a strong possible outcome of this current rally, should not be discussed in the realm of economics but rather in the more apropos realm of financial fraud. The fact that the upleg of the “W” shaped recovery that is occurring now will inevitably crumble in spectacular fashion will not be a result of any free market principle, but rather the direct consequence of a fraudulent scheme executed by an elite global financial oligarchy, otherwise known as Central Banks.

If the mission of this current manufactured leg-up in Western stock markets was to fool the world into believing that global economies are recovering, then clearly, up until this point, the mission has been a resounding success. For those unfamiliar with the term “blowback”, it’s a CIA term that was first used in March 1954 to describe the unintended consequences of US government international activities kept secret from the American people.

Though this term has primarily been used to describe the consequences of covert military operations, “blowback” is an appropriate term to use to describe the coming consequences of banking fraud because the US government, US Federal Reserve, Wall Street, the US Treasury, and the Exchange Stabilization Fund have all engaged in domestic and international financial and monetary transactions that have been kept secret from the world, and that will have severe and negative consequences in the not so distant future.

In fact, I predict that the blowback of these activities will not only exceed, but far exceed, the fallout the world experienced in 2008 at the prior apex of this current crisis. Most people today can not even fathom how bad the situation will become primarily because of all the secrecy that the banksters have engaged in – in US Treasury markets, the gold markets, the US dollar markets, agriculture commodities, stock markets, and financial markets – in hiding reality from the people.

2009-09-09T14:05:00.000-07:00

Health Care Reform Officially Dead...The Country May As Well Be...This Will Be A Good Thing, Eventually

Piss in the Cheerios. Just heard it from the suspiciously glazed lips of Senator Max Baucus, the Senate Finance Committee Chair who has taken $2.9 million from the health care industry this year alone, and whose version of the health care bill is the one which will pass: it won't contain a real public insurance option. (My previous post on a windfall for the insurance industry under a self-servingly sabotaged public option was, in its way, the optimistic outcome.) The way Baucus sounded, it may not even contain a fake one, but might stop at expanding Medicare to some undetermined number of po' folk the states will have to pick up some indeterminable percentage of the tab for.

This would really hang a double-toilet seat around the Democratic Party's neck. It would ignite the Metamucil Swillers' full wrath once they calculate how much their pie slices must shrink, and state guvmints will get shafted at a time when more than half of them are facing budget crises and some have already begun curtailing Medicaid services. The only certain things about the Baucus bill is it will contain a large number of ass-rams for US citizens and more sops to the sacred oxen in the industry.

To me or any cynic with a half-functioning brain, this phenotypically congressional eventuality was obvious in a foregone sense as soon as I realized Obama had wired his trap shut about comparisons to single-payer systems, which was along about March. Why didn't I tell you about it between then and now? Three reasons. 1: Pity. 2: Depression. 3: Chance of a miracle.

Rolling Stone editors foresaw the same and unmuzzled investigative rottie Matt Taibbi, who enumerates what fresh hells will be visited upon us to the benefits of the health "care" industry in the article below. He's in rare form and uncorks a must-read, in that he correctly identifies this summer as the when Americans, progressive, wing-nut, libertarian, democrat, depublican, middle, and independent Americans, realize it's all over:

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

That's right, I said it's all over. Not just as an empire. We're finished as a real country. Right now, America is about as real as the town in Blazing Saddles that Hedley LaMarr ran. Seriously, other than to glide bombs onto mud huts with great precision, exactly what is the Federal government capable of accomplishing? Can it do something good? For I say unto thee, ye shall know the tree by its fruit. The United States no longer has a philosophical or practical primum mobile, or at least not one which makes any sense for humans and humanity. It's all become a mechanical and surreal exercise for enriching elites. In fact, if we are to be honest with ourselves, that's exactly what this Land of Opportunity has always been.

Ask yourself: if an 8.5 Richter Scale earthquake happened tomorrow and flattened your domicile, how long do you think it would be before the Federal government, or anyone, got around to helping you rebuild? (Where we live, no one will sell earthquake insurance, unless they determine you don't need it.) I'm not saying it's going to be bread lines in St. Petersburg with starving grandmas burning Social Security checks for warmth, although there will be elements of that and there already are, I'm saying that the public structures we have are no longer very useful, are becoming observably less so, and are irredeemable in practical and legal senses. Could it be any more obvious that Congress, a thing the Founders made to run the country, no longer runs the country? And the Founders? Please. Those bastards are responsible for this mess.

It's gone, people, it's out of control, and this health care debacle is the final proof. Obama had his chance, and it is definitively blown. It's not him-- although to fumble the ball, it must be said, you at least have to try running with the fucking thing in the first place--it's the entire system. It's hollowed out. It's the Privatized States of America. It's time to start thinking of new solutions, new structures and philosophies that actually have sustaining logic to them. Revolutions have to succeed in the mind and on the page before they succeed in the streets. (Hint: the slogan should neither be "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property," nor "Get rich or die tryin.') It will change. And it will start with health care. Read the Taibbi. It's clear. It's prophetic. And I don't even like the guy.

2009-08-31T21:33:00.000-07:00

News Roundup

The Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate | Newsweek.com
Progressive Nation » Blog Archive » The Republican Party Is Turning Into A Cult
The Week Magazine - Brad Delong - Why health-care reform failed last time

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan | The Evidence Mounts Still Further: One political party in this country is now explicitly pro-torture, and wants to restore a torture regime if it regains power (US more pro-torture than Iran)
Iranians Say Prison Rape Is Not New - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com
Beck: "There is a coup going on ... it has been done through the guise of an election" | Media Matters for America ("And God help us in an emergency.")

Making Home Affordable Program hasn't helped enough, some say - CNN.com (6 months in, only 6% of 4 million eligible have gotten dollar one)
Commercial Real Estate Lurks as Next Potential Mortgage Crisis - WSJ.com
As a Foreclosure Judge, Arthur Schack Tosses Out Cases, Brooklyn Style - NYTimes.com

Felix Salmon » Blog Archive » The systemic threat posed by megabanks | Blogs |
"Loss-Share": FDIC Offers Billions In Guarantees For Buyers Of Failed Banks (socialism for banksters!)
As Biggest Banks Repay Bailout Money, the U.S. Sees a Profit - NYTimes.com

Cellphones Cause Brain Tumors, Says New Report By International EMF Collaborative
Depression's Evolutionary Roots: Scientific American Two scientists suggest that depression is not a malfunction, but a mental adaptation that brings certain cognitive advantages
Asparagus May Ease Hangover - Health News - Health.com

The Medium - Facebook Exodus - NYTimes.com
Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text | Wired Science | Wired.com
Gmail may hand over IP addresses of journalists - Wikileaks

U.S. Says Pakistan Made Changes to Missiles Sold for Defense - NYTimes.com
Average Penis Size Worldwide, Research Conducted by Andromedical®
AdultSheepFinder - The Worlds #1 Sheep Sex and Dating Personals Site

Japan Election Results: Opposition Democrats Win Huge Victory (Republicans destroyed Japan economy)
Japan Vote Points to Political Upheaval - NYTimes.com
Former Israeli Prime Minister Olmert Indicted - NYTimes.com

The Seminal » We Know Failure When We See It (Afganistan)
Taliban: How Crime Pays for the Growing Insurgency - TIME
George Will set to call for pull-out - Mike Allen - Politico.com

Emptywheel » Finder Is CIA’s Keeper In Slanted NYT Op-Ed
The Washington Monthly: Hurting Dick Cheney's Feelings
Cheney Still Manipulating People -- Now In Public Dan Froomkin

Bill Moyers on the health care debate, Democrats, and Afghanistan
Byron Williams: Facts Left the Health Care Debate Long Ago, Emotion Is the Driver Now!
U.S. ranks 28th in Internet speed among industrialized nations, study finds -- chicagotribune.com (almost as bad as healthcare)

2009-08-31T19:56:00.000-07:00

Edward Kennedy, 1932-2009

While on a largely internet-free vacation we got some weekend TV coverage of Senator Teddy Kennedy's passing. Much can be said in sport and criticism of the man, and was, but he had a huge heart that did much good. In the photo above he was 6 years old, in front of Buckingham Palace with his sister Jean as his father Joseph, America's new and rather unsympathetic ambassador to England, called on its King. While not tailored for the grandee, Edward would turn out to be exceedingly comfortable with back rooms and bars and also in the details where deals are made before they ever see the light of day or stage. He had the rare ability to be loved by friend and foe alike.

Another flawed character, the son-of-a-gun-can-write Joe Klein, crafts an appropriate eulogy to the Senator whom he knew professionally for almost 40 years, The Man Who Found Himself:

He seemed a ghost the day I met him. It was Memorial Day, 1970. He was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, black tie. He was still wearing a back brace from the Chappaquiddick accident and he moved stiffly, like a robot cartoon of a politician. He didn't smile, seemed grim even when shaking hands with the civilians; his demeanor was all the more striking because we were at a classic grip-and-grin event, the annual Greek picnic in Lowell, Mass. All sorts of politicians were there, including two who would run for President themselves — Michael Dukakis and Paul Tsongas. The pols gadded about with antic smiles and jackets hooked over their shoulders, ties loosened, sleeves rolled up, trying to look like Kennedys, trying to look ... like him. His family defined political style and vigor for a generation of politicians. But at that moment, and for years after, Ted Kennedy seem to writhe in the public eye.

He was scared catatonic, of course. Scared of death, obviously. There was no reason to believe, in a nation of nutballs, that he would be allowed to continue, unshot. But he was frightened of more profound things as well — overwhelmed by his own humanity in the face of his brothers' immortality, convinced that he'd never measure up, that Joe and Jack and Bobby had been the best of the Kennedys. He was the baby; his political career — the premature ascension to the Senate at the age of 30 — was a family conceit, the closest thing to a regency appointment the Senate had ever seen. He was not only the baby, but also the screwup — cheating on his Spanish test in college, boozing and womanizing well beyond the requisite Kennedy-legacy level, and then Chappaquiddick — and even after Chappaquiddick, after he had somehow allowed a young woman to die, they still wanted him to run for President. There was no way to convince them that he was a hollow shell of the dream.

The piece is worth reading in full, and there's a gorgeous archival collection of the lens-worthy Kennedy Family suitable for mulling a passed era at the Big Picture.

2009-08-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

Insurance Industry Set To Reap Bonanza

Given the curious advantage, one rather akin to time travel, of writing the health care reform legislation before it even gets inspected by the elected Congressional representatives who vote on it, what's going to happen is hardly a surprise. But it is a disappointment, especially for people like me and my wife and at times like this we are quite capable of sounding like anti-government Republicans. Because we share their opinion of a process gone horribly, irrevocably wrong.

We're both self-employed, you see, and our combined insurance premiums and out-of-pocket health care costs total up to more than $20,000 per year. In fact we still owe nearly $4,000 for our second son's no-complication, no-epidural birth, which took only two hours of delivery room time.

Like Obama, we were naively hoping for a little competition to be injected somewhere into the insurance "industry" processes, so a claim can't be denied retroactively six months down the line with no explanation, so the yearly premiums don't go up by an arbitrary 8, 13, 11, or 15%. Couple that cost into our boxcar of $27,000 per year in child care expenses (note: we chose two of the better day care values available in our neck of Seattle) and an 8% higher tax straight off the top for the temerity of having a small business (known as the "self-employment tax"), and it adds up to one dream sail boat or Porsche worth of cash per year. Something has got to give, and it will almost certainly be us.

To the insurance companies, combine 40-some million uninsured folks with the right wording and it's Bring On the Dancing Nurses for a long, long time. There's an article in the LA Times detailing the mechanics of how a "strong public option" will fleece taxpayers and subscribers who don't meet at-need limits:

Lashed by liberals and threatened with more government regulation, the insurance industry nevertheless rallied its lobbying and grass-roots resources so successfully in the early stages of the healthcare overhaul deliberations that it is poised to reap a financial windfall.

The half-dozen leading overhaul proposals circulating in Congress would require all citizens to have health insurance, which would guarantee insurers tens of millions of new customers -- many of whom would get government subsidies to help pay the companies' premiums.

"It's a bonanza," said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc.

Some insurance company leaders continue to profess concern about the unpredictable course of President Obama's massive healthcare initiative, and they vigorously oppose elements of his agenda. But Laszewski said the industry's reaction to early negotiations boiled down to a single word: "Hallelujah!"

The insurers' success so far can be explained in part by their lobbying efforts in the nation's capital and the districts of key lawmakers.

The bills vary in the degree to which they would empower government to be a competitor and a regulator of private insurance. But analysts said that based on the way things stand now, insurers would come out ahead.

"The insurers are going to do quite well," said Linda Blumberg, a health policy analyst at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. "They are going to have this very stable pool, they're going to have people getting subsidies to help them buy coverage and . . . they will be paid the full costs of the benefits that they provide -- plus their administrative costs."

One of the Democratic proposals that most concerns insurers is the creation of a "public option" insurance plan. The industry launched a campaign on Capitol Hill against it, grounded in a study published by the Lewin Group, a health policy consulting firm that is owned by UnitedHealth Group. The lobbyists contended that a government-run plan, which would have favorable tax and regulatory treatment, would undermine private insurers.

Opposition increased this month when boisterous critics mobilized at town hall meetings held by members of Congress home for the August recess.

The attacks, supplemented by conservative critics on talk radio and other forums, drew national attention.

Leading insurers, including UnitedHealth, urged their employees around the country to speak out. Company "advocacy hot line" operations and sample letters and statements were made available to an army of insurance industry employees in nearly every congressional district.

Some insurers supplemented the effort with local advertising, often designed to put pressure on specific members of Congress. Late in the spring, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina -- the home state of several conservative Blue Dog Democrats -- prepared ads attacking the public option.

Leading Democrats have fought back, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) last month calling the industry "immoral" for its past treatment of customers and suggesting insurers were "the villains" in the healthcare debate.

Still, recent support for the public option has declined, and the stock prices of health insurance firms have been rising.

Undermining support for the public option wasn't the only gain scored by insurance lobbyists.

In May, the Senate Finance Committee discussed requiring that insurers reimburse at least 76% of policyholders' medical costs under their most affordable plans. Now the committee is considering setting that rate as low as 65%, meaning insurers would be required to cover just about two-thirds of patients' healthcare bills. According to a committee aide, the change was being considered so that companies could hold down premiums for the policies.

Most group health plans cover 80% to 90% or more of a policyholder's medical bills, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. Industry officials urged that the government set the floor lower so insurers could provide flexible, more affordable plans.

"It is vital that individuals, families and small-business owners have the flexibility to choose an affordable coverage option that best meets their needs," said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's Washington-based lobbying shop.

Consumer advocates argue that a lower government minimum might quickly become the industry standard, placing a greater financial burden on patients and their families.

"These are a bad deal for consumers," said J. Robert Hunter, a former Texas insurance commissioner who works with the Consumer Federation of America.

Meanwhile, companies would probably see a benefit by providing less insurance "per premium dollar," Hunter said.

"It would be quite a windfall," said Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna insurance company who has become an industry whistle-blower.

Consumer and labor advocates acknowledged the industry's lobbying success.

In the first half of 2009, the health service and HMO sector spent nearly $35 million lobbying Congress, the White House and federal healthcare offices, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

With more than 900 lobbyists, that sector -- whose top spenders are insurance giants UnitedHealth, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Aetna -- was poised to spend more than in 2008, a record lobbying year.

UnitedHealth spent the most, $2.5 million in the first half of 2009, and hired some of Washington's most prominent political players, including Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader who served as an informal health policy advisor to Obama.

"They have beaten us six ways to Sunday," said Gerald Shea of the AFL-CIO. "Any time we want to make a small change to provide cost relief, they find a way to make it more profitable."

2009-08-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

Iraq: Maliki Being Angled Out

Big news in Iraq, not unexpected.

Iraq's major Shiite parties announced a new coalition Monday that excludes Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, a development that will likely force the prime minister to join forces with non-traditional allies if he seeks to keep his job after parliamentary elections in January.

If the new Shiite coalition remains intact and secures a majority of seats during the Jan. 16 vote, Iraq's next government likely would be run by leaders with deep ties to Iran, which would considerably curb American influence here as U.S. troops continue to withdraw.

Maliki has been quite the survivor, but this will be too much. The implication for him is that he'll be out very soon.

For Iraq, the tectonics are such that the Shia "rump" will start to behave more as a de facto region of Iran. If for some reason Iraq holds together after a further US military withdrawal, it will evolve into something like an Iranian satellite. This might not be an entirely bad thing, given the Sunni and Kurdish fractiousness and all the required balancing acts that situation would entail. An independent Iran/Iraq/Af-Pak could act as a greasy syncro-mesh between China, Russia, India, and the West. One might think of of this mythical, admittedly optimistic place as a sort of earth-bound Tattooine for oil deals.

2009-08-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

No One Could Have Predicted The Pentagon Would Repeatedly Beg For More Troops in Afghanistan

The median age in the tribal region known as Afghanistan is 17.5 years old. Over 50% of its population is 15-64 and there are roughly 14 million Pashtunis in the provinces where NATO has something less than 80,000 combat troops. It can be deduced that 3-4 million armed, hostile and clanned-up males are living large in those parts, not to mention getting visits and aid from 28 million sympathetic Pashtuni cousins over the porous Pakistan border. Nation-building with 100,000 troops there simply doesn't cut it, a fool's errand in a half-assed war.

A NYT article on the nature of things to come, the first official announcement of Serious Deterioration issues from the Pentagon, a mere four months after the start of the Af-Pak Surge, in 'US Military Says Its Forces Insufficient:'

The commanders emphasized problems in southern Afghanistan, where Taliban insurgents continue to bombard towns and villages with rockets despite a new influx of American troops, and in eastern Afghanistan, where the father-and-son-led Haqqani network of militants has become the main source of attacks against American troops and their Afghan allies.
The possibility that more troops will be needed in Afghanistan presents the Obama administration with another problem in dealing with a nearly eight-year war that has lost popularity at home, compounded by new questions over the credibility of the Afghan government, which has just held an as-yet inconclusive presidential election beset by complaints of fraud.
The assessments come as the top American commander in the country, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has been working to complete a major war strategy review, and as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, described a worsening situation in Afghanistan despite the recent addition of 17,000 American troops ordered by the Obama administration and the extra security efforts surrounding the presidential election.
“I think it is serious and it is deteriorating,” Admiral Mullen said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “The Taliban insurgency has gotten better, more sophisticated, in their tactics.” He added that General McChrystal was still completing his review and had not yet requested additional troops on top of those added by Mr. Obama.

Clearly, then, we must give McChrystal more money to throw onto Fortuna's roulette wheel. He aggressively campaigned in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back ("Taliban Now Winning") to go whole hog, more or less saying the Taliban were about to overrun a Wal-mart near you.

The odds against him are even more steeply fun now after last week's election wreck. In short, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah (nice media ring to that name!) will dispute the election, cite widespread reports of fraud, and probably force a run-off with Hamid Karzai, who was already known as "The Mayor of Kabul." Now he will be known as "Ridiculous Shithead Who Can't Even Rig An Election In The Most Corrupt Country on Earth."

To quote a general now lost to history in the Google Age, meaning I once read something attributed to him, probably in David Halberstam's 'A Bright Shining Lie,' and then googled for it and couldn't find his reference or his name, but anyway here goes: "It'd take 500,000 troops 8 years, and even then you couldn't do it." At the time, the general was estimating the number of troops it would take to stabilize Vietnam and turn it into a democracy. For Afghanistan, start with a million troops, think 20 years and then hope you get lucky. Quick, somebody pass Obama another bong hit.

2009-08-21T22:02:00.000-07:00

The Stack Market

The long-term rule of thumb for fair valuation of the Standard & Poor's 500 price to earnings (P/E) ratio used to be 14. Generally speaking, when the PE ratio was above 14, stocks were considered to be expensive, when it was below they were cheap. When the market's collective PE climbed to 20, you started looking for vacant lots, and when it fell to 7, you started to look for publicly traded mattress stores. That's what the game was like from about 1936 into the late 1980s from the sell crest (red line) to the buy trough (green line). Twenty years on the late 80s, the definition of value investing in equities has changed by almost an order of magnitude.

The price investors were willing to pay for a dollar of earnings greatly increased during the late-90s dot-com boom and continued through the early-ought dot-com bust. Recently, as a result of the plunge in earnings and stock market rally following the 2008 Wall Street bailout, fiscal stimulus, and job-less recovery, the ratio spiked again and peaked at a PE of 144. With 97% of US corporations having reported for Q2-09, the S&P 500 PE ratio currently stands at a vertiginous 129. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Like Hamlet, Horatio was a student at the University of Wittenberg. He was a model of rationality, was probably an economist, deeply uncomfortable with the notion that Hamlet was talking with his father's ghost. But it is precisely from the lips of our father's ghosts that we hear condemnations of the ugly suppurating brutes that stand before us wrapped in silk and garlands, announced by jesters waving sparklers to the pensions of Elsinore. The PE ratios have gone vertical, Ophelia has climbed out onto a fallen branch over the river, and it might mean something.

2009-08-16T22:10:00.000-07:00

Barack Hoover Obama

Kevin Baker has an exceptional article in the July issue of Harpers about some peccant similarities between our current president and the vilified-by-sands-of-time Herbert Hoover. One finds quickly, dirty, and disquietingly in the history that Hoover was also once considered the most Complete Man of his generation:

The comparison is not meant to be flippant. It has nothing to do with the received image of Hoover, the dour, round-collared, gerbil-cheeked technocrat who looked on with indifference while the country went to pieces. To understand how dire our situation is now it is necessary to remember that when he was elected president in 1928, Herbert Hoover was widely considered the most capable public figure in the country. Hoover—like Obama—was almost certainly someone gifted with more intelligence, a better education, and a greater range of life experience than FDR. And Hoover, through the first three years of the Depression, was also the man who comprehended better than anyone else what was happening and what needed to be done. And yet he failed.

Scarier still, Baker isn't a GOP drobot but a deeply competent free-thinker who bemoans his own comparison, which is why I withheld posting his article for some time. Yet as of three months ago, I also knew health care reform would grind down into a Children of a Lesser Group Health Co-op Initiative. I watched as the Federal Reserve bought increasing amounts of each succeeding auction of treasury debt--until last week, when it bought an astounding 47% of the total amount of Treasury Bonds offered at auction. They have been weighed, and found wanting:

It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression, catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of Guant·namo, a floundering education system. Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—to seize the radical moment at hand.

Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done.

A moment was proffered, a boldness was required and abstained. Now bookend Baker's backdrop with a hard-hitting current New York Times piece by Joe Nocera about Obama’s status-quo financial plan:

Three quarters of a century ago, President Franklin Roosevelt earned the undying enmity of Wall Street when he used his enormous popularity to push through a series of radical regulatory reforms that completely changed the norms of the financial industry. Wall Street hated the reforms, of course, but Roosevelt didn’t care. Wall Street and the financial industry had engaged in practices they shouldn’t have, and had helped lead the country into the Great Depression. Those practices had to be stopped. To the president, that’s all that mattered.

On Wednesday, President Obama unveiled what he described as “a sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system, a transformation on a scale not seen since the reforms that followed the Great Depression.” In terms of the sheer number of proposals, outlined in an 88-page document the administration released on Tuesday, that is undoubtedly true. But in terms of the scope and breadth of the Obama plan — and more important, in terms of its overall effect on Wall Street’s modus operandi — it’s not even close to what Roosevelt accomplished during the Great Depression.

Rather, the Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dike, and not rebuild the entire system. Without question, the latter would be more difficult, more contentious and probably more expensive. But it would also have more lasting value.

Obama, like Hoover, has punted at best. What will be called recovery will probably be treading water, and the time for that may be short. Ours is a case of devaluing milk, true, and of casting about for towels, new bottles and next solutions.

2009-08-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

The Schoolyard Of Forever

I'm not sure exactly when it dawned on me in conscious words, when its virtual 12-point type scrolled across the frontal marquis, but it did so. Most people never mature emotionally beyond who they were at 17 or so (I haven't) and many freeze earlier. If you find yourself talking to a roomful of executives, for example, assuming they're rational adults is a huge mistake. We may be experts at hiding it, but in the electric assemblages which our neurons fire, including the envelope which stretches from back to front and in which we perform name-calling, we're still children.

In that roomful of professionals there is a boy like the one you slammed your head into on the playground your first day of kindergarten; there is the poor speller who still feels dumb about it; there's the girl whose primary objective is to maintain a clique; and sooner or later, there'll be the guy who's been held back a couple times, the pissed-off terror who is going to rough you up and try to establish a protection racket. Boardrooms are classrooms, politics are schoolyards. Dick Cheney and Rummy are still out there, holding people up against the anchor fence, we're still beating up the maladapted kids from the bad homes.

The title above is a poem by Charles Bukowski. In it, he picks up the regimented brutality of a Prussian-designed compulsory school system, turns and examines it, telescopes it up then declaims it down into what's lacking in a country's soul. An awareness of it. A resistance to it. Apparently his grade-school nemesis was named Herbie Ashcroft; one of mine was named Alan Pabis, who has a facebook page. No hard feelings, Alan, hope you're well. Can't think of you without feeling that spot on my right hand, the 4th metacarpal. Where the bone thickened after the teachers privately came up and thanked me for hitting you. Here is the beginning to The Schoolyard of Forever:

the schoolyard was a horror show: the bullies, the dragons, the
freaks

the beatings against the wire fence
the eyes of our mates watching
glad that they were not the victims
we were beaten well and good
and afterwards
followed
taunted all the way home to our homes of hell
full of more beatings

in the schoolyard the bullies ruled well, and in the restrooms
at the water fountains they owned us and disowned us
but in our way we held
never begged for mercy
we took it straight on
silently
we were trained within that horror
a horror that would later hold us in good stead
and that came around
as we grew in several ways with time
the bullies gradually began to deflate, lose power

grammar school
Jr. high
high school
we grew like odd plants
gathering nourishment
blossoming
then the bullies tried to befriend us
and we turned them away

(for those who would go on, here's the rest from bukowski.net)

2009-08-05T14:25:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Chuck Grassley's Debt and Deficit Dragon

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Spinal Tap Performance

The Grassley Knoll

For a man who sweetens his corn flakes with lead shavings, Iowa's Senator Chuck Grassley has sure overachieved.

Long serving as a general benchmark for lowered public discourse, a recent Senate presentation outlining his position against health care reform is a modern classic, and a strong hint at his Party's future messaging style. There's no describing it, really, but the clip above is narrated by The Most Trusted Man in America (an incredulous Jon Stewart) and must be seen to be believed. You are going to laugh...and then you'll wonder, "Couldn't they at least have spelled 'Sur Taxalot' correctly?" I mean, Grassley's top donors are all health care companies, so you'd think they'd demand better.

(h/t to Lord Wife and Daunting Ideas)

2009-07-27T16:31:00.001-07:00

Blogging From The Obama Room

No, really. I am. It's located in a cafe that houses the Museum of Bad Art. The picture of the topless chimp masterwork above was taken with my replacement 3G-S iPhone, long live the iPhone, while getting jiggy with all its new features and toys. The old first-gen iPhone slowly expired as its touch-screen lost sensitivity, then all usability, like some poor Alzheimer's victim which would have to be painfully re-booted on every drama-filled visit: "You're here to kill me, aren't you? Agghhh!"

It's probably not above 100 degrees in the Obama Room, a torporous 91 outside. I can continue to blame a terrible bout of blogger-block on the weather, or come clean. Truth is I've been 'whelmed by the momentum of Big Events swirling in the flushes of a ridiculously petty News Cycle. Scores of posts have passed through my head, of course, but few even reached draft stage. I've been almost silent on the tumult in Iran that's playing out, on Health Care Reform (a.k.a. "Obama's Stalingrad"), and on moon-walking to the car in Michael Jackson's memory. It all seems transitory, minor when compared to The Anomaly reaching for us. If you say the sky is falling, best to explain how and why. Tricky, that.

I've dined with heads of state and have cleaned up the vomit of the developmentally disabled. I've worked for and passed through the doors of many edifices, majestic and humble, and all I've ever found anywhere is human nature. Forces ignored at peril. Maybe the pull I've been feeling is a vast, inexorable vacuum of denial between reality's arc and its PR firms and stockbrockers.

Put in Star Trek terms, Captain Obama is asking too much of Scotty's thrusters, Mr. Sulu doesn't have a frigging clue and something is about to bust. I will try to form my dread in more direct terms. Admittedly, I'm looking at a perfect reproduction of Van Gogh's "Starry Night," made out of yarn, so enjoy your day to the full.

2009-07-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

RIAA Spokesman Declares DRM, Self Dead

Interesting. More accurately, however, DRM is undead, a deceased business model which will continue to behave as if legally alive until incinerated. The Recording Industry Association of America, the very folks who helped craft the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) might better have questioned the wisdom of suing senior citizens whose grandchildren copy DVDs. And going after universities? Oooom. Big No-No. The RIAA's high-water moment came in 2006, when it won a court ruling which declared all online file-sharing illegal.

iTunes may have scrapped DRM, but the heart of what constitutes digital ownership remains dark. Under the DMCA (which I was forced to read while strapped down in a Microsoft "therapy" center, metal eye-lid claws clamped firmly in place), when you buy something and download it to your machine, you do not own it. You have merely secured the rights to use it under certain conditions. Thus can Amazon brotherfully erase George Orwell's 1984 from its Kindle e-readers, without notice, redress, nor mindfulness to all that is holy and good. Surprisingly, the definitions of book ownership used to be similarly constrained before rights to loan and even re-sell were won. Via Daily Tech:

The RIAA is one of the most controversial corporate organizations in America. It has carried out a prolific lawsuit campaign against file sharers, including its record $1.92M USD judgment against Jammie Thomas-Rasset. It has also taken other less high-profile, but equally contentious positions including declaring making CD backup copies of legal bought works "stealing" and supporting Digital Rights Management (DRM), a means of trying to prevent individuals from copying digital works for backup or other purposes.

One of the staunchest supporters of DRM, RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol once commented two years ago, "DRM serves all sorts of pro-consumer purposes."

Even last year as DRM floundered against public opposition, the RIAA held hopes for a comeback. However, it now appears the RIAA has forsaken DRM, the tool it once held dear. In an interview for an upcoming SCMagazine article, Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA comments, "DRM is dead, isn’t it?"

With iTunes going DRM free, DRM indeed seems set to go the way of the dinosaur. However, a few commercial entities like Electronic Arts continue to cling to DRM implementations like the controversial SecureROM for their brick-and-mortar sales. Even EA, though, has removed SecureROM from copies of its game Spore sold on Valve's Steam download service.

In the end, DRM struck the public as simply too anti-consumer -- you already bought the content, so why shouldn't you be free to use or copy it? Malware-like implementations also did not help DRM proponent's case, nor did the fact that the protections were easily defeated -- as evidenced by Spore being the most pirated game in history. Now it appears the end is at last near for the scheme as its last advocates forsake it.

2009-07-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

The Quiet Coup

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent.

In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent, and finance became the United States' largest industry.

Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

Banks won't be healthy until they write down bad assets, recognize their insolvency and become nationalized. They would start making loans again, and after stabilizing, they'd be broken up into regional entities and spun back into the private sector.

That's what the IMF would have them do, but none of that is happening. Because what's good for Goldman Sachs is good for the country.

2009-07-14T16:18:00.000-07:00

Obama's War

I had hoped Obama wasn't actually serious about nation-building in Afghanistan, that stony place, because it could serve as a useful diversion for filtering troops out of Iraq, for declaring quick victory, and then bouncing them home. A hemi-surge, if you will, a ready means to cut losses. But all signs indicate he is set to take his babblings about moral obligations seriously, eating foreign policy lotus blossoms in a temple by a bubbling fountain, burning incense while chanting over a copy of the Wall Street Journal. In short, this is the stuff epic disasters are made of, and if his pronouncements are not pure and brilliant sophistries, the war in Afghanistan is already lost. Via his mouth, our stated aims are to:

promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government . . . advance security, opportunity and justice . . . develop an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs.

None of that is going to happen. Those goals are "off the table," Vietnamistan-style, so it's time for us to "move on." Obama can't wave a Hopey Wand and achieve any of those objectives, and in a world where states like Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Niger, Georgia, Lebanon and Alaska are vulnerable to al-Qaeda and unsafe for Wal-marts, it should not take a genius to realize one screamingly obvious fact:

AFGHANISTAN IS NOT IMPORTANT!

Rather, it is a vacuum the US has amply filled after sponsoring both sides in the current conflict. Past proxies are fighting our new proxies. That may be confusing, but it means we have no excuse for getting paranoid-schizo over control, as all within its borders know. Rory Stewart, the modern Lawrence of Arabia for Iraq and Afghanistan, has written a devastating critique of Western policy re: those parts in the London Review of Books, titled 'The Irresistible Illusion.' His advice is to scale back objectives, combat troops, and to emphasize development. He donned hip-waders for examining the official BS, and came back to translate realistic, lower-cost prescriptions into ambassadorial language:

...the presence of NATO special forces, the challenging logistical and political conditions in Afghanistan and lack of technological capacity, are likely to impede al-Qaida in Afghanistan from posing a significant threat to UK or US national security. Instead development in South Asia should remain the key strategic priority for the UK government in the region.

Custer should not have attacked at Little Big Horn, and he would've gotten much further by focusing on the dwindling buffalo herds.

2009-07-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

Can't We Seize Resources Right Anymore?

(Snark Tag is "On.") There was a time when a US President could call the ambassador of a country on the carpet and say, "%^&@ your democracy, %^&@ your country, and %^&@ you. You're nuthin' but a fly on an elephant's ass." (Quotes are from Lyndon Johnson's chastising of Greece's ambassador, circa 1968, before sponsoring a coup to depose that country's elected Prime Minister over a perceived slight.)

How times have changed. Even after invading Iraq and Afghanistan with our energy reserves firmly in mind, after Cheney's energy task force divvied up the fields beforehand, and after the BushCo Administration openly stated that the new oil fields would pay for the war, we apparently can't even grant our companies pillage rights to one measly little subjugated hell-hole. Maybe it's their hell-hole now that we've withdrawn combat troops, but it's still sitting over a whole bunch of our oil, and we can still bomb the ingrates back into the camel age. What's going on here?

We might be seeing the next stirrings of a free and independent Iraq, and that would be a complete disaster. Saddam himself would've been easier to deal with, and as anyone knows, "free and independent" is just high and mighty wonk-talk for "pain in the ass." Here is how they are resisting sucking up their only valuable commodity:

Only one of the bidders for the eight contracts to run oil and gas fields in Iraq has accepted oil ministry terms.

Six oil fields and two gas fields were available in a televised auction that was the first big oil tender in Iraq since the invasion of 2003.

Iraq has asked the rest of the companies to consider resubmitting bids for the other seven contracts.

In short, Iraq is setting a cap on how much money each oil contract can make, an unexpected wrinkle oil companies don't find very sporting. Oh, they can still make nice money, honest profits, and could treat the fields as a non-OPEC hedge pools, but that's not the point. The point is, nobody gets away with this, and the Iraqi parliament has taken all the fun out of free market oil extraction. They're offering complex government-interference contracts which unfairly limit the upside, and what self-respecting oil company wants to play that?

For this we spent trillions, killed millions, and tortured thousands? Policy Fail!! (Snark Tag "Off.")

2009-07-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

Researchers Describe 90-year Evolution Of Swine Flu

Note their recurring "accidental release from labs" suspicions:

June 30th, 2009 (via PhysOrg.com)

The current H1N1 swine flu strain has genetic roots in an illness that sickened pigs at the 1918 Cedar Rapids Swine Show in Iowa, report infectious disease experts at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health in the New England Journal of Medicine. Their paper, published online today and slated for the July 16 print issue, describes H1N1's nearly century-long and often convoluted journey, which may include the accidental resurrection of an extinct strain.

"At the same time the 1918 flu pandemic was rapidly spreading among humans, pigs were hit with a respiratory illness that closely resembled symptoms seen in people," said senior author Donald S. Burke, M.D., dean, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. "Early experiments confirmed that this 1918 swine virus and a human strain emerged about the same time. Since then, this ancestor virus has re-assorted genetically with other influenza strains at least four times, leading to the emergence of the new 2009 strain, which has retained some similarities to the original virus."

In the paper, Dr. Burke and lead author Shanta M. Zimmer, M.D., assistant professor, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, describe the temporary "extinction" of the H1N1 virus from humans in 1957 and its subsequent re-emergence 20 years later. They note a small 230-person outbreak of H1N1 in 1976 among soldiers in Fort Dix, New Jersey that did not extend outside the military base. Then, H1N1 influenza re-emerged in 1977 among people in the former Soviet Union, Hong Kong and northeastern China. Careful study of the genetic origin of the 1977 strain showed that it was not the Fort Dix strain, but, surprisingly, was related closely to a 1950 human strain. Given the genetic similarity of these strains, re-emergence was likely due to an accidental release during laboratory studies of the 1950 strain that had been preserved as a 'freezer' virus, they said.

The authors hypothesize that concerns about the Fort Dix outbreak stimulated a flurry of research on H1N1 viruses in 1976, which led to an accidental release and re-emergence of the previously extinct virus a year later. The re-emerged 1977 H1N1 strain has continued to circulate among humans as seasonal flu for the past 32 years. Although originally traced to Mexico, the exact physical origins of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic virus are unknown. Because the current strain shares common ancestry with older flu strains, it is possible that portions of the population may have partial immunity to the new pandemic virus.

The authors also go on to explain that the danger posed by a virus isn't based solely on its lethality, but also on its transmissibility, which is the ability to jump from animals to humans and to survive by mutating to adapt to its new human host. H1N1 influenza viruses have demonstrated this ability throughout their history. "Studying the history of emergence and evolution of flu viruses doesn't provide us with a blueprint for the future, but it does reveal general patterns, and this kind of information is critical if we are to be as prepared as possible," said Dr. Burke.

2009-06-30T13:27:00.000-07:00

Dippy Dead Celebrity Week Is Over!

Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays all died last week, sending this blog into a tailspin of mourning as the media trampled over small children to hog Serious News Time. For example, an entire Keith Olbermann show was devoted to Michael Jackson coverage, with no mention of "mentally ill pedophile."

We create our celebrities, we twist and transmogrify the beautiful into the grotesque, which is to say, their faults are ours, and ask not for whom the bell tolls. May these tortured souls rest in peace regardless, and Farrah's Speedo nipples achieve deserving immortality.

Without further ado, I hereby usher in the Al Franken Era. Minnesota's governor just announced he would rubber-stamp Franken as Senator. For conservatives, this is going to be great! Every time Al opens his mouth to drone nasally on about metric shoe sizes or some other liberal doggerel, they will writhe and awwk like vampires speared to beach-chairs in Bermuda. Just do us all favor: bite the bullet, take the pain. Close your eyes, and think of Sarah Palin!

Update: Jon of the aptly named 'He Is Not Dead Ye t' corrects my celebrity body count mistakes:

Marc: You forgot about Ed McMahon. Also, we all know that celebrities dies in threes: Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson. Billy Mays threw in an extra, fourth dead celebrity AT NO ADDITIONAL COST!

2009-06-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

Goldman Sachs To Make Record Bonus Payouts

As we listen to the those "om-nom-nom" sounds draw closer, it's good to remember what the point of all the hubbub was: to have Goldman Sachs keep Wall Street on business-as-usual footing, and in return to allow it to take over the United States banking system. So glad Obama has placed the financial fate of the country in these people's hands. Via the Guardian:

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm’s 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Staff in London were briefed last week on the banking and securities company’s prospects and told they could look forward to bumper bonuses if, as predicted, it completed its most profitable year ever. Figures next month detailing the firm’s second-quarter earnings are expected to show a further jump in profits. Warren Buffett, who bought $5bn of the company’s shares in January, has already made a $1bn gain on his investment.

Goldman is expected to be the biggest winner in the race for revenues that, in 2006, reached £186bn across the entire industry. While this figure is expected to fall to £160bn in 2009, it will be split among a smaller number of firms.

2009-06-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

Iran News Roundup

Everybody's pressuring Khameini, who seems past the point of no return. In response, the Revolutionary Guard warns of much more violence waiting for protesters:

A statement posted Monday on the Guard's Web site warned protesters to "be prepared for a resolution and revolutionary confrontation with the Guards, Basij and other security forces and disciplinary forces."

Mousavi bets otherwise, and urges more protests. ""In your protests, continue to show restraint. I am expecting armed forces to avoid irreversible damage," he said." (Reuters)

Former President Khatami chimes in, who "warned of 'dangerous consequences' if the people were prevented from expressing their demands in peaceful ways. " (Reuters)

Iran arrested 457 demonstrators yesterday per state radio, although Rafsanjani's daughter has been released. (AFP)
The Guardian Council validated the election after review, but official dissent builds. Parliamentary Speaker Larijani:

But in a sign of the divisions emerging among senior Iranian figures over the vote, parliament speaker Ali Larijani said: "A large portion of the people perceived the election result to be different to the one officially announced. This perception must be respected. (AFP)

The sensational video above is of "peaceful demonstrations" Iranian-style, wherein police are sent into full-tilt retreat. Watch it. Then tell me if you can remember any instance in American history when police or army units did not fire on a crowd acting in similar fashion. Because I can't think of one.

2009-06-20T21:54:00.000-07:00

Iran's Crisis And Opportunity

Naj over at Iran Facts has been in understandable distress over the tumult in her country, and today abjured my silence. Truthfully, I feel adrift in Iranian internal affairs, but am someone who marvels at the sheer number of Iranians, millions of them, willing to peacefully put their lives on the line in passionate service.

Listening to Publicly Traded Media frame the demonstrations this week, you'd think post-election disapproval boils down to a generational dispute. In one corner, we have a forward-looking, freedom-loving Twitter Generation casting away beards and head scarves to square off against a severely backward, unyielding theocracy. While social networks have been useful for the opposition and the authoritarian regime was so blog-darned clueless it thought banning foreign reporters would diminish coverage, the media narrative has distorted the basics in exchange for Packaging...which is, of course, their Job. They have cast the conflict in mythical terms, something like "The Islamic Revolution vs. Gay Marriage," when more accurate political Packaging would be Godzilla vs. Mothra.

If you wonder what makes modern Iran tick, it doesn't take much poking around to conclude that it's complicated. It's a constitutional democracy, yes, well-functioning at local levels, but also resembles a Soviet command economy and is ultimately run by a Supreme Leader. The leader is a cleric powerful enough to invalidate voting results in an insultingly obvious way, and then publicly decree that the demonstrations will be put down by force. If the Mormon Church ran the US, figuring out the resulting factional dynamics would be next to impossible, but they would be easy compared to Iran's.

Few in the West or the East know what goes on behind and between the doors of the Assembly of Experts, Guardian Council, Expediency Discernment Council, or have any insight to the respective rabbinical squabbles and sways over Parliament (Majilis) which commonly result in overturned legislation. As a measure of volatility, one-third of sitting Majili candidates were disqualified from running again in 2008, indicative of a cresting conflict between theocratic and democratic factions.

When trying to predict outcomes with sparse data, falling back on fundamentals of the Human Condition is advised. Impulses towards civilization, i.e., living by agreed-upon rules conducive to peace and harmony, often clash with wills to power. There is constant tension between individuality and groupthink, rationality and emotion, morality and immorality, and there are simple questions. Who has power? What are their motivations?

Hashemi Rafsanjani is Iran's richest man. A former President, he chairs both the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Discernment Council; he is rumored to have resigned from the latter body last week, one tasked with mediating disputes between the Supreme Leader and Parliament. His nickname is "Shah," he is a pro-business free-marketeer hostile to the current President's isolationist policies, and he sent an open letter to Khameini, the Supreme Leader, a week before the presidential election warning of vote fraud consequences.

The wronged opposition candidate (Mousavi) is a pragmatic and open to rapprochement with the West, yet seems to be unacceptable to both Khameini and, for the moment, to Rafsanjani. Khameini, Iran's first post-revolution President and survivor of a 1981 assassination attempt, has a history of violent repression and executed thousands of dissidents. Rafsanjani can now use Khameini's response to popular protests as a reason for dismissal in his capacity as Chairman of the Assembly of Experts, which has the constitutional power to elect and oust the Supreme Leader.

Mere logic is often unreliable in these things, but Rafsanjani appears to be angling toward installing himself or a proxy as Supreme Leader. The basic structures seem unlikely to change, and Mousavi's appeal for a return to uncorrupted revolutionary principles is similarly unlikely to occur (see Naj's translation of his remarkable letter), but his appeal will bear strong offspring. Theocracy is intransigently shooting itself in the foot, hollowing out its authority and provoking conditions for a long arc towards modernism in elected offices with less direct control of church over state. Politically, the next tactical step would be commercial back-channel communications by Rafsanjani's son, the head of Gaz-Iran, to the Obama Administration on nuclear and energy issues.

Rafsanjani is a firm supporter and direct beneficiary of the nuclear power generation program, appreciates its implied effects on Israel, and would almost certainly trade close monitoring for shifting administration contracts to US suppliers. While innocents protesting election fraud are gassed, beaten, shot, and photographed for future detainment, this is the cold-around-the-heart door they're making it possible for Iran to walk through. If such is done, Iran will immediately be immunized from attack by Israel and the unbalanced scales of power in the region would swing towards equilibrium.

While sometimes achieving desired results, naked applications of force are expensive and unreliable. As of today, Iran's Supreme Leader set a host of unintended and, for him and the current regime's supporters and enemies, undesired consequences in motion. Having known and abetted the protests which brought down the Shah in 1979, resisting the will of the people is a Supreme Irony.

2009-06-17T15:53:00.000-07:00

The Seattle Rain Watch Begins

In a previous rant on Brett Favre I mentioned we've been having nice weather here. How nice? All-time record nice. 29 straight days without rain nice, never happened here in May and June before. Ra roams loose in Western Washington. There are clouds today, but there was yet sun, too, and there will be more when it peers through the nimbus and the Olympics' scarps after 9 tonight.

2009-06-16T21:19:00.001-07:00

Neko Case In The Crystal Ballroom

Seats for Neko Case's show at the Paramount in Seattle were already selling for $250 back in April. They were only $25 per in Portland so a kindly internet goddess, aka Lord Wife, swooped in to scoop up two for my birthday, booking us onto an Amtrak and into the Hotel DeLuxe. It's just a few blocks away from the Crystal Ballroom where she played two nights, an old hall with a fully functional "floating floor" once popular for swing dancing.

I was turned onto Neko Case by a friend's facebook aside in late February, never hearing anything of her before. The more she sinks in now, the clearer she stands as a poet who happened to develop into a singer. Poetry in turn brings back Mr. Marcinec, my high school AP English teacher, who once asked the class to debate whether verse can be assessed on technical merits alone, or if the artist's life must be taken into account. The answer, to me, was as sharp as a late hit. If you walk home past dark woods on bitter-cold nights near Robert Frost's haunts, as I did, musing on death whilst rejecting it is an option is easy to spot. You have to move, or you have to freeze.

Knowing that Coleridge woke up from his opium dreaming of Xanadu and Kubla Khan increases your odds at guessing what suppressed wish a stately Pleasure Dome signifies, and J. Alfred Prufrock's spiritual exhaustion starts to resonate when you plot it against T.S. Eliot's European travels as Edwardian life unraveled prior to World War One. Neko Case went to school in Tacoma, leaving home at 15 to live in a classmate's unfinished cellar while the nearby Green River Killer was ripping through more than 70 young women, half of them under-aged runaways. She's still scared to walk alone at night, and absent that context, you might awkwardly misinterpret one of her most popular songs, Deep Red Bells. She wrote it not as an ode to g-spots, but to victims:

where does this mean world cast its cold eye?
who's left to suffer long about you?
does your soul cast about like an old paper bag
past empty lots and early graves?
those like you who lost their way
murdered on the interstate
while the red bells rang like thunder
deep red bells, deep as I've been done

Putting Case's name in the same breath as Coleridge and Eliot is intentional. She belongs. At 18, she started playing drums for a succession of punk bands. A god-given ability to sing was noticed and invited to do covers, and from there she went on to share in the artistic processes of a number of bands. She credits collaboration with musicians such as The New Pornographers, The Corn Sisters, The Sadies, Cub, Maow, and Kelly Hogan for teaching her the craft. She began to write her own material, releasing her first solo album (The Virginian) in 1997.

Her pieces combine stark observation with gorgeous melodies and fervent passions. Anger stirs unmistakably below all the surfaces, and there's a wild, even creepy quality to her, like wind blowing dust over abandoned roadside attractions. Flash-floods of overstuffed vans and army bases, grabby brakes and shabby blokes, emotional voids and hangovers, waitress gigs and crippling angsts come gushing through like gray water in laundromats. While her songs aren't always equally intense or personal they're sent from the same address, and she writes only as a woman who has been helpless before men can. It must've been very tough for a control freak of such high order. Her body of solo work is nothing less than a resolution to turn and face the humiliations of love, and, with music as her protector, to learn. With Middle Cyclone, she sets out to explore, finally having taken her struggle by the smooth handle.

The album seems to rein in vocal strength in favor of sharper lyrical focus. Every note and part of each composition is arranged to let you apprehend the words, delivered atop exceptionally precise instrumentals which often meander from traditional verse/chorus structure to weave in micro-songs. Heard live, the band performed a studio-perfect version of every piece, so tightly that "Neko Case" might best be thought of as a collective. Middle Cyclone was accordingly recorded in her barn in Vermont with over a dozen musical guests, including Garth Hudson (formerly of The Band), M Ward and a nest of robins in the rafters.

The Crystal Ballroom was Sold Out and a waiting line had already formed outside the closed box office two hours before the show. We spotted it in perfect time, so I snagged the best standing-room spots in the house--we occupied the "Magic Corner" 20 feet away from the artistic breakthrough of the year's main mike. Even without industry backing (Case's US label is ANTI-), Middle Cyclone debuted at #3 on Billboard, occupies the #2 spot on US Rock and is easily the most successful indie release of 2009. After a long hike, she arrived at a secret narrow embarkation point where critical acclaim meets critical mass.

Case had long been pigeonholed as a banshee, a speed-baller for belting out other people's songs. While there's no overlooking her dominating voice, labeling her as a torch singer is downright obstructive, and fails to describe how she can sail across genres and vocal planes. Let me put it this way: she could sing like Patsy Cline, Tanya Tucker or Rosemary Clooney, but they could not have easily returned the favor. As a pure singer, she's capable of nerdy introspection, tobacco-row mourning, indie-pop smoothies, eco-folk, jagged punk, charcoal chanteuse, retro orchestra and I would bet Wagnerian opera. She can conjure an interstate truck stop at 4AM, high school sweethearts home for goosebumps, fuzzy heroin magic carpets, square dancers bouncing off '68 Cadillacs with big chrome bumpers, and spiky CBGB mosh pits. Her voice attracted big-label attentions, but its proprietor had other plans:

"I'm not out to become Faith Hill, I never want to play an arena, and I never want to be on the MTV Video Music Awards, much less make a video with me in it. I would like to reach a larger audience and see the state of music change in favor of musicians and music fans in my lifetime. I care very much about that."

Case claimed there would be no love songs on Middle Cyclone, that all the lyrics could be taken literally, that Nature would be the focus. Which may be technically true, but it's akin to Stephen King stating, "I'm through with horror. My next books will all be travel guides." Ruthless restraint and a naturalist's aperture are devices which set the album apart, brilliantly so, because her genies can't be bottled or chained. You feel them straining and threatening to break loose at a remove, and you can hear when they beat the screens down. The first song is about a libidinous tornado unable to find its lover, or make him understand, carving his name across three counties. "People Got A Lotta Nerve" is about a caged elephant and an aquarium killer whale taking revenge, but like Coleridge's subconscious, Case sidles up and becomes a defiant predator giving fair warning. Then, as with Frost's deep dark woods at night, it's a mite difficult to rule out indelicate possibilities when she tosses her throat back and wails, "I'm a man-man-man, man-man-man eater!"

At a concert you pick up things the albums and tubes can't convey. You realize Neko's an introvert, not very comfortable in the spotlight, self-conscious of her relatively flat butt. Her skin and hair have the translucence and texture of perogies in orange vodka sauce, and she honestly loves animals. She's really just there to cut diamonds, and to compensate she's hired a statuesque, lung-expanding brunette backup singer arc-welded like a water tower to her left who banters in the pauses like an extroverted emcee, announcing her love for good burgers, that she's 46, and "my beauty secret is low wattage."

Before singing "The Pharaohs" Case remarks, "This song is about my second boyfriend," and when she pours out the bourbons of "my body burned, my legs ached/but you never came to bed/you just left me there awake/you kept me wanting wanting wanting/like the wanting in the movies and the hymns," veins thick as her middle fingers stand out on her neck. She discloses that "Red Tide" is about 3 million assholes who moved apropos to Seattle during grunge's gestation and suddenly noticed they hate the rain. The mollusks, they have won. You notice she reads voraciously and make a mental note: if you ever run into her, don't ask her about what she's done. Ask what she thinks of The Confessions of St. Augustine.

After whistlings and stompings on the trampoline floor the backup singer came back up first for the encore and you caught her say "Oh, what the hell." They played for another forty-five minutes, so you knew they were done for good and pressed back through the bodies of screaming cognoscenti. You walked up to the DeLuxe and asked your wife how best to classify sui generis. She pauses and says, "Country gothic," and you think of how Boadicea might have fared if she'd properly armored herself for the Romans and their arenas. You think of her song about waking up to disorienting hotel fans spinning overhead, heads webbed with indiscretions watching maids who have nowhere else to be in Portland on a Sunday morning:

Prison girls are not impressed
They’re the ones that have to clean this mess
They’ve traded more for cigarettes
Than I’ve managed to express

2009-06-15T21:40:00.001-07:00

Why Brett Favre Will Never Retire

It's easy to make fun of Brett Favre, a National Football League quarterback so famous even Lord Wife knows who he is. She was once moved to remark, "Why do those announcers just keep repeating the words 'Brett Far-vuh, Brett Far-vuh' like some kind of &*$#ed-up bird call...did he get back from prison or something?"

Admittedly, this post is just to get me rolling over a steep blog-slump borne of unspeakably gorgeous, teasingly tenuous Seattle springtime sun that could get shut down going into the summer like Mariners' batters facing Mariano Rivera in the 8th inning of the 2001 ALCS. The trade-offs of radiation plus children, travel, and time have resulted in a pathetic recent pace of one post per week. It's more parental gulag than semi-retirement, with swim lessons, bikes, strollers, eating fries in Tangletown under Hornitos sunbrellas, Adirondack chairs on stone patios and being condemned to perpetual chauffeur and bodyguard duties (my true callings) in relentlessly nice weather.

Thankfully, Favre is thinking of coming out of his 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th (depends who you ask) retirement to play another season in the NFL. Why would he do this? Many point to his competitiveness, his love for the game, how he holds the known records for consecutive quarterback starts and for vomiting on sidelines and in games. Some have said he might want the record for interceptions thrown (310), but I just looked it up--he already owned that by 2007. Others suspect life on the road suits him and the little sum'pins he might have on the side, but he's made enough money to buy his own team. The Green Bay Packers offered him 20 million dollars to retire and he turned it down. I, having known all along he would never retire while he was physically able to roll his shotgun arm back to the huddle on degenerative hips, know why he won't.

His father was his high school football coach, dying on a Sunday in 2003. Favre played the following Monday Night game against the Oakland Raiders, throwing four touchdowns in the first half enroute to a 41-7 victory. Brett Favre still plays for his dad, and to deny death.

2009-06-08T14:00:00.000-07:00

Uh-Oh...Sarah Palin Just Found Her Message

"If the government owns 60% of GM and is borrowing money like crazy from China...who really owns GM?"

It's a very good question. She and the GOP have figured out the open door to walk through. Attack government borrowing and point out that it comes at the cost of giving increasing policy control to foreign power. FDR's stimulus in the Great Depression was not funded by foreign powers, a point the Chinese Finance Minister echoed when he said today that US Treasury bonds should be issued in yuan, not in dollars.

Palin's interview with WWF character Sean Hannity will be aired tonight, and the message will probably be co-opted by the fractured GOP and gain wider traction. It hits the fear buttons, and it's true. Early transcript of her interview here.

2009-05-27T17:15:00.000-07:00

Beware Of Doug--The Far Side

Was driving along, saw a "Beware of Dog" sign, and my inner insurgents idly thought of getting out and sabotaging it to read as above. Came home, searched, found. Thank you, Gary Larson.