the defeatists!

Kathy, Cathy or Magdalena, looking for adventure in the city in the darkness and the house of 1000 guitars

Odd how the mind moves, and why I think this is England...but, it probably is, i guess. Or maybe, just maybe, any place can be England in the rain... On the other hand, maybe it's really about a Cathy, somewhere rural and southern who wandered to the big city and found, I'm not sure, Mary Poppins/MaryQuaint bondage.. Or maybe, just maybe it was New York...Or what the hell, they're all the same...

So, Malthus, Gingrich, Toynbee and Spengler go into a bar and meet Triple H and Deathdealer...again

I

Is there something else in the water? The AXE has been so busy this week that I'm just now getting around to reading the papers from the past week. And, I gotta tell you, things are not looking up all that much. I noticed that somehow my money market part of the IRA was up to about $60, so I decided to invest in some penny stocks --GM, Chrysler, BOA -- and I couldn't find the damn things. Sorry, no can buy. I probably could have bought BOA since they hold my mortgage and even at that price, it would be like giving a vote of confidence to the guy who sold you aluminum brake rotors and pads. Oddly, my Ford Stock is doing wonderfully.

However, Paul Krugman appears to have nailed what's troubling me on the MACRO level...and I really wish he bitchslap Tom Friedman every time the guy starts ranting about getting Kumquats from Kabul or Lemon Vodka from France in tones better suited to a pot-bellied preacher gushing and sweating about the Hore of Baby-lon and the fucking rapture. Krugman has actually read some books, and has so perspective and got his degrees from real universities that make people think. Or used too. Newtie Toot Toot is such an intellectual that Republicans on the egg-head fringe of the party worship him, and he talks nice about Sarah --you can see Russia from Alaska --Potato-head. Krugman is the real thing...
of course, they rarely give Nobel prizes to people who got their minds in a Walmart Warehouse Store.

Writing in 1919, the great British economist John Maynard Keynes described the world economy as it was on the eve of World War I. “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.” And Keynes’s Londoner “regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement ... The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion ... appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.”

But then came three decades of war, revolution, political instability, depression and more war. By the end of World War II, the world was fragmented economically as well as politically. And it took a couple of generations to put it back together.

So, can things fall apart again? Yes, they can. (AXE Commentary and emphasis: And will, from my negative-Neo-Hegelian point of view. Or, as I said in a conversation with another manager this week who made the mistake of reading books as opposed to doing whatever the hell it is the normal corporate drones did to get where they are, "Gresham was right -- Bad drives out good. The reverse doesn't work. Oh, and I don't know if the play on the Obama campaign was intentional but if it wasn't it should have been. )

Now, I'm not feeling prescriptive this week, but the first thing that we probably need to do is re-visit the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Whaaa? Well, the Soviets had a lot more advantages going in, in a realpolitik kinda way; and, after a long time and the loss of a lot of men, money and meaning, got their ass handed to them. I'm reading a book called The Great Gamble by Greg Feifer of NPR's Moscow Bureau that has "fucking bad idea from the gitgo!" as an underlying theme.

Browse Inside this book Get this for your site

He cites Gorbachev's first meeting as a member of the Politboro about Afghanistan where after the usual optimistic bullshit from the generals, in that case from a hero of the bloody battle of Kursk! and the capture of Berlin! Slightly different war...And given the doctrinaire attitude of the Soviets toward change, they were still waiting for the Totenkopf Tanks at least in a spiritual sense to come over the hill in 1985. Gorbachev simply said something to the effect that they needed to get the fuck out of there soon. That stretched to a year, and then in a discussion with Reagan, to four years. Immediately would have been better, of course, but "reality intruded." No, actually, it really would have been better; I get confused sometimes about the idea that you need to keep shifting the endgame further to the right in time when there's no upside to doing so. Same for health care. Why pretend that the Republican party wants health care reform? They don't. Individual Republicans do, but like lemmings overcome by peer pressure after a bad night's drinking, they can't help themselves. Pass the damn Kennedy bill now! Or fail to pass it, and blame it on the arcane Massachusetts deal about six months to replace Ted Kennedy, and do it through reconciliation. But, if health care reform is necessary, and it is unless we want to all work for Walmart so we can send all our money to the international health cabal, then it's necessary now. In a discussion with the union bargaining rep, I presented a grim alternative yesterday: "Fuck with me on this, and I can never do that again. We can either keep trying to use good faith, judgment and common sense to handle these issues, or not." He agreed with me completely, and we worked out a reasonable solution. Over the phone in ten minutes. But, we were talking in a common continuum; they're not.

There are an infinite number of these sort of issues. Bush and Cheney were pretty effective at implementing really bad ideas because they were bold ideas and they wouldn't listen to reason. (By the way, am I the only one who occasionally thinks of D2(Dubya and Dick) and gets a visual of a family gathering in Arsenic and Old Lace?)

Roosevelt was able to implement generally good ideas because he was at least as charming as Obama, connected at least as well, would listen and smile and do what the hell he wanted to do somehow. Johnson threatened to have Hoover leak his files on black mistresses and gay relationships involving Senators to pass civil rights. Great ideas, ruthless execution...if we are to survive and accomplish anything worthwhile, well, we need to have ruthless execution of great, bold and smart ideas. Compromise -- Gorbachev, Roosevelt backing away from the New Deal in 1936, TARP, etc. are the equivalent of painting a sinking ship. The paint may be waterproof and fresh, but all you're going to have is pretty looking site for future ocean archeologists to explore and wonder at it's shine.

Ah well...

Ted Kennedy was by far the most successful of the Kennedys. Bobby was my hero, Jack was my inspiration, but Teddy was a true Irish American pol -- he did the heavy lifting and did it for a long time. There are damn few ballads about guys who under-attain but do great things. It took the R's 40 years to find a target to fund raise against more lucrative than Teddy.  I met him once, and never heard anything bad from anyone who knew him. Far cry from most of us...he could have become a complete afterthought after the Mary-Jo thing; instead, he won re-election overwhelmingly, and nobody ever came close, in western or eastern Massachusetts. Hell, is being alive even a requirement to be a Senator? Dead, he'd be a better Senator than Strom Thurmond. The best the Republicans could do against him was Mitt Romney...tell me how that worked again?

The Irish have a knack for flawed heroes. We put them on pedestals so they can fall further. He fell, and bounced and vaulted higher. And, like Frank Skeffington in The Last Hurrah, when some hypocritical yahoo mutters "I bet he'd do a few things differently now, if he could," I'm fairly sure he'd rise up, laugh and say, "Pogue mahon, you bastard...the hell I would."

WElllllllll...I didn't think you had it in you.

I'm quoting Johnny Ringo in Tombstone, but I am amazed. Crusader for Freedom of the Press and of Speech and of assembly and of privacy and generally combining the concepts of populism and "damn, he touched me, I need to take a shower!" says something interesting and that I completely agree with. And, that will never happen, since most Americans think they're at their most individualist and independent when they are doing what the boss wants, and he tosses them a cookie.

I'm calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.

Let's set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn't effective -- if the politicians ignore us -- we do it again. And again. And again.

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It's time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.

The rest falls to politics...the fault in us and not in stars or theories

Young people seek certainty, so they come upon a concept and embrace it with passion. A few years later, they cringe at their certitude, and maybe learn to laugh at themselves. A few reverse completely -- the Churchillian statement of young and not liberal equals heartless; old and not conservative equals brainless -- but most sort of drift. For every Churchill, a Reagan -- "His I didn't leave the Democratic party, they left me" means nothing; he opposed in later life everything that he embraced as a young guy.

The fundamentalist, the convert -- these are scary folk to Crusader AXE. Reason and nuanced thinking don't make for soundbites, but they make for sound policy if not great politics. The Clintons are incredibly bright people, very capable of getting more done than they did. The mistake they made was simple -- they were nuanced in their approaches, and the health care thing screwed them. Obama and his advisers are as bright, as nuanced, but trying to learn from the Clintons, and being more nuanced. We'll see how that goes.

Frankly, I find the drill fascinating; todays Crossroads column in the Times is fascinating for that reason. David Leonhardt focuses on Adam Smith, and how he was far less the true believer than most lasiez-faire  capitalists types can stand, or appreciate. For example, on wages Leonhardt cites the difference between what people think Smith meant and what he said:

Smith was indeed a champion of individual liberty and worried about how governments might muck up an economy. But he also wrote that the goal of employers, “always and everywhere,” was to keep wages as low as possible. “When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters,” he concluded. He supported a tax on luxury carriages and taxes on alcohol, sugar and tobacco. He said that “negligence and profusion” inevitably occur when corporate managers control shareholders’ money. And as the historian Emma Rothschild has noted, “The Wealth of Nations” uses the phrase “invisible hand” precisely once. In the 1,231-page Bantam edition, it appears on Page 572.

Now, if the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow made similar statements today, and somebody read them, the focus would be on everything else but the "invisible hand." We forget that Smith was primarily not interested in math and probably had no understanding of double-entry accounting. He was not a specialized, narrowly focused technocrat but an English philosopher and moralist writing during the Enlightenment, was for complex ideas is a pretty stupid way to operate. Not sure what I mean? Compare Jefferson's thought to Jefferson's policies and actions. Or Hamilton's. Or Madison. Or Franklin...one of the great frustrations that contemporary readers have with these guys, and a frustration that I share to an extent, is that "they won't say what they mean!" The frustration is with them of course; the flaw is in me.

In other words, turning to Smith, Newton or Jefferson to get talking points misses the point. you want complex ideas ground up and misinterpreted, go to Bill O'Reilly or Keith Obermann. Or, if you are really eager, go to Michelle Bachman.

A Seattle Treasure in LA...

The Big Lebowski came from the Shire of Ectopia? Not really all that surprising ...and, for those that are not sure, Fremont is where they have the annual parade of the lunatics, including the naked bike riders... As for David Horsey, he always deserves another Pulitzer for editorial cartooning...and, he appears to have good taste in friends.

Slowly, slowly... what does Bush have in common with Radovan Karadzic?

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld's next roomate?

The news that the Pentagon is going to release the names of prisoners to the Red Cross is interesting for a lot of reasons...the fact that we haven't been puts us squarely on the side of the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese, the Russians, the Japanese, the VietCong, Shining Path and on and on and on. One of the basic humanitarian functions of the Red Cross has been to assure prisoners that their conditions are being monitored and that they need not fear summary execution. Another is informing families that their loved one's are alive. We have spent decades demanding this information and railing against the axis of evil-doers who refused to provide it. I am not an expert on the Geneva Convention, beyond the basics that ever soldier knows and the stuff I had to take in various courses. But, during the Bush years, this sets us squarely on the side of Pyongyang, Hanoi, Moscow, Tojo and other folks that we portrayed as beasts and minions of the devil. I think it makes various pieces of the Pentagon and its leadership probably indictable at the Hague for war crimes.

Oh, and then there's the news from Newsweek:

According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up," said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death."

Well, that definitely opens up the problem, and addresses directly the issue of whom we are and whom we want to be. It's particularly interesting and relevant as Quentin Tarantino's new fantasy opens.
I have no real problem in war with killing enemy leaders. Individual soldiers for whatever reason is a radically different solution and, if  you don't have a war, that's a different situation. Not to quibble, but we don't have a war. We have some clusterfucks on-going. One might argue, successfully, that we have an ideological conflict and I could live with "Wanted Dead or Alive" posters going up all over the middle east. But, once we get them alive, then we're responsible to keep them alive. It may be reassuring to want to say with the basterds that killing "Natzis is out bidness, and bidness is good..." but not giving into temptations like that is one of the reasons that I can say that the expected breakout of Jeffersonian democracy and Friedmanesque capitalism (Milton, not Tom, although Tom carried a lot of water for them) was powered not merely by propaganda but by idealism...note that ideology and idealism have the same root.

Oh, remember the bad guys torturing Chloe's boyfriend with the power drill in 24 a few years back. Was some retired agent or paramilitary or hell, the agency itself, providing technical assistance? Or, worse yet, were the same guys inventing what went on getting hints from 24? 

Speaking of Tarantino, I caught a bit of him talking about the film and what he had been listening to while working on it over on "Little Stevens's Underground Garage" and one was this song from a very silly movie, Roy Orbison's "With this much shit, there has to be a cowboy ", which he didn't use in the movie. Tarantino said nice things about the film, which scares me a lot. Our most famous auteur is insane, but we knew that already.  I'd skipped that movie and probably still will, and couldn't find a video of th song by Roy. However, this is from a Gibson sponsored celebration of Roy's birthday a while ago by Peter Conroy, and it's worth listening too both in and out of context.

It's not that I don't care, it's just that I'm busy and...I don't care that much

Ballad of an old, thin man... Years ago, while I was in exile from the real Army to the reserves as an adviser, my partner told one of the young local sweethearts that I had been at Woodstock. She said "Where?" which resulted in one of her buddies, another sweet young thing, to say, "Woodstock! You know, it's in the history books." So, Bobby D is only getting a bit of what the rest of us go through as we age.

Somehow, the image of Dylan wandering around, looking at decay and deterioration really sums up what we do as we get older. I'm utterly pissed off at birthers, deathers, and the various inbreds, ingrates, liars and thieves infesting out society. However, I'm busy -- so busy. It seems like everyone at work has a plan 2 -- call the AXE, he'll unfuck it! And, being that kind of guy, I try. But shitstorms get interesting into the second act, and Obama needs to take his game up several notches. The American people want action, not reason. The Dems have been reasonable; now it's time to go it alone. The whole Chuck Grassley -- Be Afraid! Be very Afraid! Runaway!!!The death committees are coming to get you! -- nonsense indicates why we really need to have a cleansing fire.

I find the complaints about Health Care Reform from folks on Medicare almost as funny as complaints about it from people, like myself, who are on Tricare. We have socialized medicine in this country, and it works. The VA and the Military systems are HMOs although there are PPO aspects of Tricare. Yeah, I also have employer based healthcare and my wife is now in something called Tricare for Life that ties her Tricare to the Medicare system, supplemented by my insurance from Ginormous. Still, I listen to military retirees blather a lot about the cost of health care reform.

Cost is a problem of course. IT"S A PROBLEM FOR EVERYGODDAMN THING!!! There's some right-wingnut bitching about Clinton going to Korea, that it cost too much. Yeah, that's right. War would have been better...or, better yet, let the North Koreans in effect kidnap and hold Americans at hard labor in something like the Chicom camp Bruce Wayne meets Raz Alguhl in, only without the martial arts training for the Americans, and with a nice ration of soupy weeds and grass instead of rice for the prisoners.  Absurd? Hell, yes...and that is the level of argument we're reduced to.
Lies

Fortunately, I've found some other amusements. I'm watching Bones reruns in the evening instead of Obermann and Maddow; although the best USA shows are on hiatus and they're showing reruns of Top Gear, Scfy has Eureka back and Warehouse 13 is a winner. There are interesting things going on in music; there are some interesting books coming out, and I have a fast car to go back and forth in. Life could be worse, and probably will be. But for today, things are ok.

Anway, the police in that Joisy Township and Newt Gingrich are the winners of the Second Periodic Tits on a Wheelbarrow Award for basic uselessness. No Dylan, and the world would be different. Granted, he looks like Phil Spector on a good hair day, but the guy has looked like that pretty much since John Wesley Harding. As for Gingrich, why would anyone listen to him? He's not just a malicious intellectual whore, he's an incompetent malicious intellectual whore! Was it that great political theorist Christian Finnegan or Chris Soliza who pointed out this week on the few minutes of Obermann and Maddow that I watched that there really is no scenario imaginable where Sarah Palin becomes President of the United States. TOAW! And, the announcement that the "Death Committees" have been withdrawn is enough to make the Grassley/Gingrich/Palins almost retire the award. Grassley voted for it in the Medicare reform bill currently in law, and two Republican legislators introduced it into this healthcare bill. It's still in one of the versions in the house, and I think Nancy Pelosi and Harry the Horse ought to form a cabal and make certain that it's in the act, calling it the Palin-Gingrich-Grassely provision for empowering Grandma.

Another thing that popped up this week was the realization that the Militia Movement is alive and well...Now, I have to wonder where those who realized it had been hiding? Did they not watch the McCain Palin campaign? Who did they think those people were? The whole "I can't trust Obama because he's an Arab-Jew-Kenyan-college professor-lawyer guy" schtick is one small step from General Jack D Ripper and his precious body fluids. We had a vice presidential candidate who had been a member of a secessionist party, and whose husband still is! I'm pretty sure the gang at the Southern Poverty Law Center who broke the story weren't surprised by it...they were wondering where the fuck the rest of us were!  Oblivious? Buying Hybrid cars? Shopping at Aeropostale?  Fixated on the wrong enemy? Well, Lucifer L. Lucifer has a different persepctive.  Here's three responses from their site, in a dogshit hue identified as Nutmeg!!!...

Sorry I am not a hillbilly racist nazi, just a legal non-violent gun owner that knows your demonizing gun owners is completely evil propaganda… We know who the fall guys are…and as a American who believes in Liberty and Freedom for all can see the same old game the SPLC plays…and I am one of millions waking up to the evil lies that are written by .org’s as this one. You should cringe because your game is so transparent. (AXE comment: I'm a legal non-violent gun owner who wonders when people like this dude start writing threats, although the actual threat isn't so much made as implied. I cringe when I read crap like this, because the paranoia and blithering idiocy is so real.

———-

LUCIFER L LUCIFER
999 HELL STREET
HELL
GA
24652
United States
1-999-999-9999

U/R DIRTY SHIT EATING COMMIE SLIME MAGGOTS, HATCHED FROM A KARL MARX TURD.

I’M WAITING FOR U DOWN HERE, GET READY, MAGGOTS (AXE comment: Illiterate teenage masturbatory nonsense. Of course, this time of year the heat and humidity make Georgia a pretty close approximation of hell for those of us not snakes...)

————–

I heard your representative Mr. Potok, what a friggin duetch-bag.  He voted for Obama. …

You group is a fraud and chasing Americans and calling them terrorists is the reason why they are going to shoot you in the ass, you fraud….

Your screwing up the country.  (AXE comment: Class acts all the way...)

Welcoming all our robot masters...EB, the Defeatist Robot

We Defeatists are nothing if not forward looking...and, why is there never a trail of urine in 50's and 60's monster/science fiction movies? By the way, the Mooney Suzuki are pretty cool...

Bob the Squirrel...new defeatist ICON