the defeatists!

WE GOT EVERYTHING IN THIS TOWN!!!!

So, I'm headed for the ATM in order to deposit my net bonus for the first quarter - a roaring $350 but what the hell, I do this for love not money -- and I hear a thin voice singing a Beatles song over a battery powered amp and a guitar sound that has to be Black Diamond strings in need of a change. I saw the guy, standing in front of a Dollar Store next to the Vons where my ATM/Bank here in the old Crossroads of Opportunity. Go in, do my thing and come out and listen for a second -- scratchy voice but in key, doing a Beatles song. He then changed keys for the bridge and then went back. That merited a couple of bucks and a have a nice day from Crusader AXE. I walked over and low and behold, a no-name acoustic electric and the guy is blind. The Blues have made it to Barstow...

Busking is not exactly an American tradition outside of a few locations, but you have to wonder why. How many guitars are out there right now? This guy isn't particularly talented, but he's doing what he can to make a living off of a tip jar and while it bears a passing resemblance to begging, he's not bothering anybody and he's actually, in a small way, making the world better.

Maybe after the indictments and prosecutions, Bush can be a street mime.

Well, that would be interesting...

Since we're currently living through a total clusterfuck of a time with civilization, the environment and the whole zeitgeist being summed up by the Dali Lama plaint that he can't do anything about Tibet, it always helps to get some perspective on things. Despite the Luddite-ness of the argument and the B-Movie Flick aspect of the whole thing -- anybody else remember Crack in the World? -- there's a bit of fun here. And, given how well everything else has gone, maybe it'd be better if we just skipped this? Or, maybe it would be better if we went ahead, full bore...maybe we could set up multiples of these next to each other, maybe oriented toward each other.

In an e-mail message, Wagner called the CERN safety review "fundamentally flawed" and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission's standards for adhering to the "Precautionary Principle," he wrote, "and has not been done by 'arms length' scientists."

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

"The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots," said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

It might not be a bad thing to get sucked into a black hole. As Jon Stewart would say, "Maybe there'll be cake!"

Kinky Freidman's Lesbian Dance Class Redux

One of the recurring themes in the Kinky Friedman  mysteries that seem to have ended with him falling into the East River with the villainess whom as I recall was his upstairs neighbor and ran what he referred to as a Lesbian Dance Class through the series. I also seem to recall that somewhere along about "God Bless John Wayne!" they got it on. Well, no reason to think that of any of the gals  here, but I gotta say, when I read it, I was  immediately reminded of that schtick.

As hard as Ms. Peterson tries to create an exacting architectural world with bodies and props, the familiar songs, like “Ramble On” and “Kashmir,” overpower just about everything, including the choreography, which sends dancers thrashing onto the floor or curling on their sides, frozen in stillness.

But the ending provides the weakest moment. As the dancers methodically coil the tubes and place them along the back of the stage, Ms. Peterson turns in slow, dreamy circles to the lesser-known song “That’s the Way.” Yet after such raw detachment, the switch is anticlimactic — even sugary. And sugar and Led Zeppelin don’t mix.

While it would be fun to imagine a Britney-Justin duet on Rock n' Roll, it would be awful to hear or see.
This is just radically silly, and if I were in New York, and drunk, I'd love to go see it. Since I'm neither, I'll just have to imagine it the way I would the Britney-Justin thing... Speaking of Rock N Roll--

 

Battle of Algiers, anyone?

BAGHDAD — Sometime during my four years of traveling to Iraq, I developed a recurring dream in which a Middle Eastern country invades the United States and occupies, among other places, my old neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The dream flashed briefly through my mind on Thursday as I walked the dirty, broken streets of Sadr City, a teeming Baghdad slum that forms the power base of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric....

Alleys: they are dangerous only when used by those who grew up in them. That is the basic reason Mr. Sadr and his fighters simply will not go away in this war.

What makes the case so difficult is that it is not just a question of a battle with American troops, here from half a world away carrying out operations that Mr. Sadr and his fighters consider an abhorrent occupation. Some 3,500 troops in the Basra fight are Iraqis from outside the province, and witnesses say it is clear that few if any of the Iraqi security forces in the assault know the neighborhoods the way the Mahdi Army does. Its fighters literally pop in and out of alleys, battling a federal force of nearly 30,000 to what is, so far, a stalemate.

I'm pretty sure that this sums up the whole fucking mess really well -- one of the first rules of military operations going back to Clausewitz if not earlier is that the map is not the terrain. You don't fight wars on maps. Firefights are not done on 1:25000 scale video display. We have great communications tools, but we can't communicate the immediacy, the smell, the heat, the exhaustion. We can communicate images. This article does a good job of pointing out something -- this is not our home. They don't want us there. We peeled the scab off a gangrenous mess and now it's going crazy.

So, yeah, we can conduct patrols and calm things down. We can brutalize, terrorize and do things that we do not want Americans to do. These guys are doing what John McCain would do if the Mahdi Army took over Sedona. However, I suspect that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al would be lining up for those good jobs translating and narcing out the patriots defending the homeland, while talking about how great it all was that the evil Democracy had been overturned by the liberators...

Now, Crusader AXE totally buys into the idea that the sign of a bad policy is when you have no good alternatives. And, I find the ragheaded version of fundamentalism to be as repugnant as our own, if not more so because, at present, we don't have any aggressive, invasive Christian theocracies running around trying to destablize the world. Of course, that's my perception. The boys in the Mahdi Army might have a slightly different perception. And, they haven't landed on Virginia Beach yet...

Disturbing on so many levels...

Why did this woman get her nipples pieced? And her navel?  And, they have nipple piercings in LubbocK?

As for the TSA aspect of the story, well, we have managed to really dumb down the government during the last 8 years. I'm sure this Texan from Lubbock fit some profile as a terrorist. The bar and the ring are probably some sort of arcane symbol -- yin/yang? Penis/vagina? -- that indicates the person is a Muslim extremist fanatic and if she put the two together, she'd produce a light brighter than the son.

So, not content with torturing POWS -- I'm sorry, enemy detainees -- the Bush machine has now found a way to get Americans to torture themselves.

Actually, it's only about 3000 years old

And, it isn't running for President or Pope...

Son of Enron meets Daughter of Anderson in the Pit of Ethical Impropriety...

I'm confused. Isn't this where the Bush administration came in, vowing that nothing like this would happen again?

Well, the comeuppance of KPMG isn't all that surprising...

In a sweeping accusation against one of the country’s largest accounting firms, an investigator released a report on Wednesday that said “improper and imprudent practices” by a once high-flying mortgage company were condoned and enabled by its auditors.

Even less surprising, of course, is that this resulted from an effort to curry favor from executives by allowing them to... well, to lie to the shareholders.

The profit was important because it allowed executives to earn bonuses and convince Wall Street that it was in fine shape financially when in fact its business was coming apart, the report contended.

Least surprising is this, of course --

 

A spokeswoman for KPMG, Kathy Fitzgerald, denied the accusations. “We strongly disagree with the report’s conclusions concerning KPMG,” she said. “We believe an objective review of the facts and circumstances will affirm our position.” 

A spokesman for New Century, which is being managed by a restructuring firm brought in early last year, said the company was looking forward to its liquidation plan.

What would be most surprising would be if a courageous Federal Prosecutor or the Congress or the Attorney General of New York or perhaps the candidates -- any or all -- forced an investigation into the failure of the non-regulating regulatory agencies to act responsibly. Prosecution of these guys would be wonderful, of course. However, I'm sure at best some sacrificial goat will get his/her/its while the restructuring firm reaps profits from the losses of millions.

Isn't this where the Bush administration came in? Faith based corruption ending works about as well as faith-based anything.

soul on a roll but you treat it like soap on a rope

my oh my. i just had to jump in here and do something about the amazing travesty posted below. Marmoset is right, it's like a car wreck.. it drew me in. i couldn't look away. scroll down and watch it if you haven't. then come back up here to cleanse your palate.

We the underpaid...

Just got a note from one of my buddies who's taking a vacation from Ginormous Defense Contractor INC back home in Texas. We're both about equally fed up with the bureaucratic nonsense, risk aversion and down-right hypocrisy of the world of the Fortune 500. So, we're thinking about quitting, moving to Austin and opening a bar near the U. My piso refers to a guy with a Squirer and battery operated amp standing on a street corner on 6th one time when he was down there, playing "Burning Down the House." Now, he knew one chord -- E, of course -- and only knew "Burning Down the House." My buddy threw a couple of bucks in the guitar case, and then went into a bar, had a beer and a burger and came out about a hour later. Guy was still there, fingers hadn't started bleeding yet and was still slamming out that riff. Well, hell, we can do that...This is not that, but close in terms of overall awfulness...

The ultimate do-over

At times as my mortality comes to mind, I miss some aspects of Catholic faith. i'll pass on a lot of it, but Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter had a lot of meaning for me as long as I could suspend disbelief in the dysfunctional family and pet that made up the godhead. Although Jesus acceptance of his faith in Holy Week is not particularly heroic by American standards of heroism, it does establish an ideal of acceptance and trust in the will of the father. I don't recall and don't care enough to check and see which of the early "Fathers of the Church" wrote it, but the idea of the resurrection is the true message. If you try, you will be  triumphant. Was it Ireaneus? Athanasius? Cleophas?  Turns out it was Tertullian of Carthage, although Wiki indicates that it is perhaps a poorly remembered summary.

Natus est Dei Filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est: et mortuus est Dei Filius; prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile.

"The Son of God was born: there is no shame, because it is shameful. And the Son of God died: it is wholly credible, because it is ridiculous. And, buried, He rose again: it is certain, because impossible."

With the concept of Confession, Catholicism provides the do-over. No matter how screwed up you are, you could go in the booth, unburden yourself, and after the three decades of the rosary or whatever the priest came up with, you'd be cool. Until the next time you screwed up. Then you'd go back. Thus, Catholicism offered the Mulligan of Life. In much the same way, the idea of the personal resurrection was the ultimate social promotion. Although early Christianity offered only one swing at penance for the sinner, so you better get it right,  the idea of a triumphant  comeback for all was exciting. LIke the Cubs winning the series.