the defeatists!

Say, isn't it New Orleans Jazz Festival Time...

Yeah, it is. I'm stuck in Barstow with the Bayou Blues again...

Not sure...

Does anyone vaguely sane still read this thing? I write less, my brothers have largely ceased to write, and the comments we seem to get are largely from insane people with non de plumes based on limp-dick drugs asking bizarre things that may or may not be related to the subject of old posts. How do I import a dog into Argentina...sedate the fucking thing heavily, hide it in your carry-on and cover the bastard with dirty underwear. Hand the guy your passport with $100US sticking out of it. What the hell do I know? Why would I want to? If I wanted to know, I'd ask something other than a bunch of satirist malcontents...

That said, Monty and Fleshy are at it again, and I'm still waiting for my email files of the best of Fleshy from Laura....


Kind of a superb commentary on life, love and the baseball game, ain't it?

Hey, Benny...wanna bless my assless chaps? Not that our Brit chaps don't have asses, but...

Yes, the Irony between the song and the situation is intentional. But, why exactly would the Pope decide to visit England? Take back the Defender of the Faith thing? Possibly be arrested by Dawkins and Hitchens and Charlie Watts for crimes against humanity? Felt the need for some weak, warm beer? Ratzinger is from Bavaria, and I've had a few in his home town and other places in his CV. England doesn't get it...go to Freising and have a bottle of there Weizen Bock or two, and if you can stagger out, you'll never look at a Newcastle Ale quite the same way.

While it's hard to sympathize with Benny the Rat, I find the newest idea from Britannia and its class of civil servants to be one that makes me sympathize, if not with Ratzinger, with the House of Windsor and the British people. Some genius wrote a paper advocating that Benny the Rat visit and bless an abortion clinic, and bless a gay marriage. And, for that matter, wondered about marketing a line of Benedict condoms...Crown of St Peter shaped, I'm sure.

OK...the government has assigned the "junior civil servant" to other duties; hopefully, in some misbegotten place like Khandahar or Doncaster. Here's the problem with that -- the guy got to the point in the government where his ignorance could be dangerous.

Granted, Benedict could probably get the Pope mobile to do a wheelie and get out of there like Steve McQueen in a dark green Mustang GT, so no harm, no foul. But, what has this clown done to the poor people of Great Britain up to this point? Fed Mercury to the cod stocks so you could take your temperature with some fish and chips? Add asbestos to the beer, eliminating the danger of spontaneous human combustion?

Seriously, this level of cluelessness rises to the level of asking Ray Charles to describe his painting...and, I'm hoping this guy is a. a guy because a woman that idiotic would breed at random and b. is Anglican. In that case, the fool would have just confused Anglo-Catholicism with the original product. Seriously, the Anglican faith is the New Coke of Catholicism, and appear to be aging as we speak. 

Bastards need more roughage in their diets...

From Veterans Today...

HOW DO I KNOW I AM GETTING BETTER?

Getting better is like waking up from a nightmare and finding you have been sleeping in your own excrement.

When you have washed yourself off and tossed the sheets into the trash, step one is to head to the cable box, go to “favorite channels” and remove;  Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and any of the “Christian” stations.  Then head to the computer, find your favorite places and delete everything that doesn’t help contain pornography or advice on fixing your truck.

Then get a new email account.  Remember how you got sick in the first place and that you had read, literally hundreds of emails making claims proven to be utterly false.  Remember what happened in Nazi Germany, a culture was built on propaganda and pretty-soon you find yourself standing in the snow in Russia.  “Yesterday I couldn’t spell gulag and now I live in one.”

Gordon Duff is a former Marine, a commentator and a pretty smart guy. Today he addresses the Tea Party movement, comparing being in it to having some awful disease. Terminal dumb assitis, I suspect. I recommend his stuff and the rest of the site to anyone who has served, knows someone who served or can't believe what they're seeing on the news...are we really that goddamn ignorant and dumb?
Well, yes. Or drugged... on media and conventional wisdom.

(I need to admit that I write for this site under an assumed name, and occasionally will cross post stuff here from there. This is in the interest of full disclosure to the hordes of people naming themselves after contemporary approaches to aphrodisiacs who are really confused about this site. My brothers are not helping here...they have lives and other projects. I'd like more comments on this site, but being asked questions about guitars by someone naming himself after a hard-on drug does pass the time.)

The only hope I have based on the more recent news is that maybe Americans are not as dumb as they sound. I was disappointed in the MSNBC special on Tim McVie; it was a good piece of journalism, but there needed to be more connection between the nonsense on talk radio and in the conservative, heartland media and his decision to kill 164 people just because. However, the relative no show status at the Virginia-DC gun nuts events indicated one thing...some of these people have lives and maybe, some vestigial shame. Maybe they compared their income tax returns this year to last and did a quick Emily-Latella  "Never Mind..." Maybe they had to go to a funeral for cousin Bob, who just got back last year with PTSD and TBI and missing an eye and all, and he was found dead under a bridge because because the VA is back logged.

Gordon begins the article by listing all the Tea-Party complaints and asking what sort of person complains about A happening when A is definitely not fucking happening! His answer is a sick person who needs to get well. My answer is different: pissed off sheep. They know they're getting screwed, and they look to the guy with the shears as the authority figure, and the guy tells them, it's the people who are opposed to shearing and screwing sheep who are shearing and screwing you! And, they believe, and get in line...

Ear worm time, in a good way...

I had this lyric running through my head and it was driving me insane. Couldn't find it, and for some reason the only songs with what I thought was the title were either Pink Floyd or some contemporary Christian crap. Never got into Floyd, although they were excellent musicians. As for the Christian stuff, dear god make them stop.

Reason was, the song is from Wicked Cool Records, Steven Van Zandt's project that has great stuff that doesn't get commercial play except on his Sirius/ XM station, the Underground Garage. However, Lala had both the song and the album. So, from Wicked Cool Records, here are the Contrast with Coming Back to Life..."Things are strange/getting stranger....We won't change/Screw the danger...Coming Back to Life." And, with a title like God of Malfunction, they appear to fit right into our defeatist cosmology over here...

Download Coming Back To Life

 

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The silliest goddamn thing I ever heard...

I never got the Sex Pistols or much of the proto-Punk movement. It makes far more sense now, listening to people who have a pretty good idea what they're doing with their instruments. I've played in some really horrid bands but with good enough players that we realized how awful we were. When it ceased to be fun, we'd move on. Really the smartest thing to do. I also have never gotten the Johnny Rotten teeth thing, or the Shane McGowan, I'm going to drool, slur and stumble on lyrics. Rotten was singing stuff that was pretty awful; McGowan, when not drunk on his ass, wrote some marvelous stuff. Again, I don't get it.

Sid Vicious - My way (Live Paris 1978)
Uploaded by SlashyGuiGui. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.
So, since I've been feeling lousy the last few days, I have been postponing projects. One of them is taking out my new modeling amp (Line 6 75 Watt model) from it's box and plugging in my Line 6 Variax modeling guitar. Another is writing more stuff for the site I'm writing for under an assumed name. Today, I felt so lousy the only time I really surfaced was to go out to Starbucks for some coffee. As I backed out of the driveway, I heard Andrew Loog Oldham babbling about McCleran, the recently dead manager of the Sex Pistols. I ignored it, and then came on the song. A rendition of a Sinatra classic by Sid Vicious. I can not imagine who could have thought this was a good idea...to play, to record or to broadcast.

Frankly, I think it's right up there with Hank Williams Junior's Necrophiliac duet with his father and the Shatner cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Now, it's possible that Hank figured Tear in My Beer was so awful and he had so exhausted the Hank Williams catalog that he had to do something, and here was a justifiably obscure tape of old Luke the Drifter doing his thing; it's possible that Shatner was aware of how awful he was. Hell, this thing is there with some of the worst possible pieces of crap ever conceived of...I'm thinking duet and accordian based duet of Tiny Tim and Weird Al covering Ode to Joy. That's how awful this is.

So, Andrew, thanks a lot. The earworms are out; I have been suffering from Living on a Thin Line haunting, which was kind of ok since it's a great song with great lyrics. But while the Ray Davies masterpiece is kind of holding its own, I know that as soon as my guard drops, I'll have this awful thing in my brain...

YesYESYESYESYESYES!!!!

Boogaloo Down Broadway-Fantastic Johnny C-1967-Part 3
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>br>Has anyone ever tried to make a porn film based on Ulysses? Should, since the damn thing was considered pornographic back in the day, and is probably still considered that way in Utah. Speaking of Utah, this is incredibly good news for an anti-theist like Crusader AXE. Southpark does the book of Mormon on Broadway. I was accosted once by these bastards on the Streets of Dublin where I'd just been looking at that days flip of the Book of Kells in Trinity College. Ruined the whole thing for me...not. Still, it was a jarring note of how bloody stupid Americans are...of course, the Mormons, like the Masons and the Illuminati are everywhere, in their Holy Underwear...so, Molly Bloom would be cheerfully yelling all over this one...I suspect.

Everyday that we sit there stroking our beards and discussing and singing kum by ya is a day we're not punching Bill O'Reilly in the nose...!

You've undoubtedly heard Crusader AXE growl about the typepad Hobbits repeatedly over the past years that my brothers and I have been doing this. I wrote a piece based on the following video, and the goddamn little bastards fucked it up while I was taking a dump. New tricks...I believe that the Hobbits have joined the tea party and need to be smitten. Anyway, this video is from someone who filmed a Young Democrats meeting where Congressman Anthony Weiner, henceforth, CAW, laid waste to the Republicans as only a New York Congressman who used to room with Jon Leibowitz, aka John Stewart and is seriously tired of the nonsense can. He says that living with Stewart was fun; CAW contends that he was funnier than Stewart but that Stewart got laid more. However, that is not the funniest bit in the piece, or the most important. On the tea party, he says first that he follows them on Twitter, and then shows up just to fuck with them, which seems like a great idea. Of course, that means that since he has been photographed using the dreaded F-word, he'll never be anything except a New York Congressman. It's not like he sold out to big business or tried to fuck a page (there's that word again) or preached sedition...he said a bad word.

CAW says something that makes me think he's a potential Defeatist nominee for President. Our dead commie didn't do so well last time, and Captain Capitulation ran screaming from our midst when we nominated him; Holier than Mao actually moved, so far as I can tell, to some Buddhist monastery. Weiner is at least as tough as Gus Hall, and has the advantage of being alive. Anyway, he said that it seems that a lot of times, Democrats go into a political struggle, like "bringing library books to a knife fight." He seems to advocate bringing a flamethrower to knife fights. Or, a big fucking AXE...

Cross posting to save time...

Published under an assumed name on Veteran's Today.

Vet’s Guide to the Economic Meltdown, Part 2 -- Notice that the snake doesn't gag

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.  – Franklin D. Roosevelt,  Message to Congress, 1938.

 On Saturday, I got a haircut and then decided to get the car washed.  I went over to a place owned by a Korean family, and while I was ordering the Double-Diamon-Zeus forever Wash or whatever they called it, the son offered to give me a price on tinting the windows. Well, the offer was good, and I agreed to come back after closing so he could do it without interruption.

Anyway,  I brought a book and was just sitting there reading Frank McLynn’s  Marcus Aurelius: A Life (Party Boy of the Danube) when the guy said something to the effect that I reminded him of his business economics department  chair at San Diego State.  We started chatting as he worked, and he told me that he had been an investment banker, and then was laid-off during the early stages of the meltdown.  We talked about how this had all occurred, and I discovered that he was pretty knowledgeable about some things. However, I watched his eyes glaze over as we discussed the bonds market. THIS KID WAS WAY SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE BEAR, HAD MAJORED IN ECONOMICS, AND HAD BEEN AN INVESTMENT BANKER, AND HE DIDN”T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY’D DONE!!!

Ok, having taken a few deep breaths, here’s what is going on. There is a concept in accounting called retained earnings. If you look at a balance sheet, the assets are supposed to equal the liabilities. For every debit, there is an off-setting credit. The last thing listed is called Owner’s Retained Earnings, or Equity, or something. This can be a lot of things – actual money, other investments, or intangibles – the value of the brand, good will, or whatever. Most of it is normally the intangibles. There is no big pot of money or gold or jewels or secrets of the Illuminati in a damn vault somewhere.  It’s an intellectual tool to make the numbers add up and balance. That’s all. If I value the equity at 1 dollar or 1 KAZILLION dollars, it doesn’t matter. The auditors and regulators may not agree with the number, and we may discuss this for a while; it’s possible that they may get me to change the number to something that we can agree is reasonable. Then, they can give me the auditor’s letter saying that my accounting meets the standards of the Generally Agreed Accounting Principles, and that the balance sheet is reasonable. Reasonable. Not accurate, not correct, not honest, but reasonable. A pretty good SWAG  (in case you’ve forgotten, Silly Wild Ass Guess), as we used to put it back in the day.

When I taught finance in China, this was the hardest thing for my students to grasp. Not unlike the stupid bank commercials with the slimy guy and the children with the wagon and the ponies and the Easter Eggs, these students got that there was something inherently wrong with this; they weren’t willing to accept it as a tool of the “grown-ups,” they wanted to understand it. We really ought to try and recapture some of that innocence.

While I think that Ron Paul and his followers are largely intellectual Luddites and somewhat deranged on some things, Dr. Paul rails against a lot of this sort of thinking and he deserves something of a hearing.  At the most recent Conservative Convention – the one where he lost to Mitt Romney by 1 vote in the Straw Poll – he talked about corporatists and said that Obama is not a socialist but a corporatist.  “He’s a Corporatist. And unfortunately, we have corporatists inside the Republican Party and that means you take care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country.” Personally, I was shocked, shocked, shocked that, not unlike the gambling in Casablanca, there are Corporatists in the Republican Party. Arrest the usual suspects!

In fact, Corporatism and Corporatists are part and parcel of Capitalism as practiced in the United States. There has been a tension since Hamilton and Jefferson over whom the government was supposed to serve, the people or the corporations.  The Wikipedia Article on Corporatism is pretty thorough, although all over the place as can happen with that resource.  As Congressman Paul means it, Corporatism is the practice of the government taking care of corporations first, then the state and then the people.  While some might hold that that is the nature of laissez-faire capitalism, there is a difference. Laissez -faire is a Darwinian approach – the government ignores the business world, and lets the chips fall where they may.  Realistically, by refusing to referee, those organizations with the greatest power win. But it’s fair…like a game between the champions of a local Kiwanis T-Ball league and the Yankees.

Corporatism is more the practice of doing what Dr. Paul accuses Obama of doing, and unfortunately what he has on balance done – not in health care, but in finance and economics.  Perhaps the president was looking for results based on the negotiation principle of reciprocity.  If so, he was wrong.  The banks and financial institutions were bailed out, and they didn’t even say thanks, send flowers or call. They took the money, locked it away and haven’t done a goddamn thing to help the people they screwed.

Quite the contrary.  In fact, the hypocrisy of the big banks is amazing. Huffington Post cites JP Morgan Chase for opposing any relief for underwater mortgages, citing the borrower’s responsibility to pay.  The contract is sacred – we agree to loan you the money, and you agreed to pay us. HuffPO obtained an advance copy of the “CEO for Home Lending” testimony to be delivered today.  It’s worth quoting:

"Like all loans, mortgage contracts are based on a promise to repay money borrowed," Lowman's prepared remarks read. "Importantly, there is no provision in the mortgage contract, express or implied, that the lender will restore equity or reduce the repayment amount if the value of the collateral -- be it a home, a car or a stock market investment -- depreciates.

"If we re-write the mortgage contract retroactively to restore equity to any mortgage borrower because the value of his or her home declined, what responsible lender will take the equity risk of financing mortgages in the future? What responsible regulator would want lenders to take such risk?"

Well, that’s a hell of a good question, given the paradigm in this guy’s head. Obama and his advisors were probably operating from another point of view – that of the common good – when they didn’t ditch the Bush era TARP plan and let the banks go down the tubes. I don’t agree, but for argument’s sake, I’ll stipulate that there is nothing wrong with having different world views, that they’re all equally valid. I just think that taking the taxpayers money and not providing some kind of reciprocal benefit to the people slammed by this economy while taking huge bonuses and posting insane profits is immoral and should be illegal.

On health care, President Obama eventually got mad, bitch slapped the opposition and made his own party sit down and act reasonably. On this one, he needs to do the same thing and there are a number of possibilities. My home dropped 40%. Give me a tax credit equal to 30% of the original purchase price over 4 years, back-dated to the taxes due for 2008. This could be done based on zip codes; pretty simple; slightly more complex but not impossible would be to transfer that money directly to the mortgage holder. Or, and this would help a tremendous number of people, require banks to allow people who are now upside down on homes that were at time of purchase the primary residence, to refinance at the lowest interest rate without requiring mortgage insurance.

Or, and this is probably what I’d prefer, remembering that I’m not an economist, I just occasionally impersonate one, do something else that mitigates the disaster for the people. Not the banks, the people. Odd thought – I kind of agree with Ron Paul.

 

 

Pederasts, pedophiles, and priests...oh, where to start?

Crusader AXE is watching the whole Catholic Church sex scandal thing with a bit of sorrow mixed with cynical glee. The latest piece is particularly exciting, with Hitchens and Dawkins trying to get Benny the Rat arrested on crimes against humanity...

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, two of the world's most prominent atheist intellectuals, are seeking means to try the pope for crimes against humanity, their lawyers confirmed this weekend.

The pair are said to be working with British lawyers to see if the pope can be arrested for his part in the alleged cover-up of widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church during a visit to the United Kingdom in September

The Vatican has suggested that the pope is immune to prosecution as he is a head of state - Dawkins and Hitchens suggest that he is not immune as the Vatican is not represented at the United Nations.

Frankly, I'm sorry to hear that they're going after Benny on this one; the guy is a totalitarian, and when the institution threatens people, his instinct is to protect the institution. There are so many more things to indict the church for, and Ratzinger has got to be shaking over the hell that awaits him if he has been right theologically. However, if Canada didn't let anyone near Twitsheet de la Dweeb during his speech last fall, let alone Mounties with warrants, I suspect the Brits will avoid any unpleasantness with Ratzinger.

Maureen Dowd has written some of the best opinion pieces on this issue. Her column yesterday was superb...comparing the situation of women in Catholicism to that of women in Islamic countries. 

How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination? I was puzzling over that one when it hit me: As a Catholic woman, I was doing the same thing.

I, too, belonged to an inbred and wealthy men’s club cloistered behind walls and disdaining modernity. I, too, remained part of an autocratic society that repressed women and ignored their progress in the secular world. I, too, rationalized as men in dresses allowed our religious kingdom to decay and to cling to outdated misogynistic rituals, blind to the benefits of welcoming women’s brains, talents and hearts into their ancient fraternity.

To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus...

Dulcinea appears to still be a practicing Catholic, even though her persona to Crusader AXE is sort of that as Tiffany's sexy, smart and stylish aunt Mo, who isn't afraid to tell the singularity that yes indeed, her jeans make her ass look fat. What I've found interesting is that the number of women pundits, world wide, who are royally pissed off about this whole mess is growing exponentially. Benny the Rat will probably preside over a revolution inside Catholicism...or, its end end. Probably not the later, and the odds are he won't live to see everything fall apart, but I could see a lot of changes coming thanks to the willingness to torment children. I guess all that shepherd imagery hid a tendency to toward sodomy going back a long time...

From The Times of London...

So let me speak as a Deist and cradle Catholic — albeit long alienated — and say that I rather welcome their campaign. This thing needs airing properly, if the good bits of world Catholicism are to survive. Sometimes, with real sorrow, I fear that they won’t. It is not just because of what bad priests did and bad bishops hid: it is also what they made others do.

Even in Ireland, the thing has gone so far south as to be replacing the priests with gay penguins. Substitute Ratzinger for Nelson in this poem by Louis Macneice, and it fits so well...it fits so well.

Grey brick upon brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals -
O'Connell, Grattan, Moore -
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.