the defeatists!

New Supreme Court Theme Song

Irony abounds . Twenty-nine people get shot in Chicago, and the Supreme Court does away with most of the rights of the states and localities to regulate how the Second Amendment will be enforced in their borders, overturning a Chicago anti-carry law. Now, Crusader AXE likes guns, have owned a number of them, still has a 1911A1 Springfield Arms .45 around here somewhere...about three feet away in its case, where it belongs. But, there is a fucking time and place for these things, and shoved in your pants under a hoodie while wandering through a goddamn mall is probably not one of them. Of course, since I expect most of the twits who do to not have completed a NRA safety course, I can envision a lot of ball and dick assemblies being removed by cheap blingy handguns going off while bozo is trying to impress the local girls...however, before we all turn into crazy Alabama guys riding around yelling about people taking our yard signs and shooting over their heads, someone someplace needs to develop perspective. Not that that's likely to happen...

Yes, yes indeed we are, Ducky!

Permanent Depression, Oil Patch and Dustbowl Blues

I’ve been reading Sebastian Junger’s book War and am finding it painfully accurate; soldiers suffer, the grunts suffer the most, and the experience transcends human life. It makes no sense to many who watch it from the sidelines – firefighters, cops, coal miners and fishermen probably understand it better than most, but ultimately, as he said on a recent interview, it’s about brotherhood.

And then, of course, you come home and life just sucks, and entropy being what it is, generationally it gets weirder –when the World War II generation came home, there were jobs and the GI Bill paid for just about everything. Korean Vets faced a similar situation; Vietnam vets found the GI Bill pretty inadequate, barely covering tuition in a lot of cases; there were pockets of problems on the job front, but there were generally jobs until the chickens all came home to roost starting in 1973 with the awakening of OPEC. The newest iteration looks to be a pretty decent package, although not as good as deserved; but, the job situation is horrible.

A kid comes home to the world and discovers that not only is he alone in terms of his experience, he’s out of work. Lots of veterans are always out of work. The longer you hang out in the service, the less you are likely to dig the ditches that corporate America wants you to dig. When you’ve bet your life on the guy next to you in insane situations, it’s hard when the guy next to you is a sniveling crack head who doesn’t show up that often. Meaningful work is replaced by a stint in telemarketing, or working in a Wal-Mart or some equally silly activity. You go to school, you get an education and find yourself not on the day shift, but working for Labor Ready. Or doing consulting, or writing for a blog. Life gets weirder. The last weeks have shown us how much the Senate and the Republicans don’t get it; I’m not sure to what extent the Democrats get it, when Diane Feinstein starts wondering how long to extend the unemployment benefits.

The idea of not adding entitlements without paying for them seems like a great one, but we’ve killed a lot of our young people and wasted a lot of treasure on two wars without anyone every accepting that we have to pay for them. While I fully support adding prescription drugs to Medicare, they didn't bother to pay for that either, subsidizing largely retired and ergo nonproductive workers at the future expense of somebody...

So Schmedlap comes back, can’t sit in a classroom without feeling claustrophobic and finds himself with no job and no prospects and, since he just got back, 26 weeks of unemployment, if he’s lucky. Some states like to fight unemployment for people leaving the service; after all, it's their fault they're out of work, eh? Bastards...
Now, it’s equally rotten for everybody. But, the unemployment situation for veterans is a great illustration. People are still amazed that a college degree is not automatic employment; well, Veterans’ Status isn’t either; far from it. We’re already seeing pushback from employers wondering about PTSD and TBI and general craziness; when I was last working a W2 gig, I watched my employer start to back away from hiring veterans, and my employer was a Defense Contractor! So, if you do everything you’re supposed to do and there’s nothing for you, what exactly can you do? Well, it is an election year; Veterans need to be angry and vote accordingly against anyone who thinks it’s time to cut back on stimulus and unemployment spending. Anyone who opposes jobs bills or demands that we pay for them up front needs to find a new occupation. Trickle down economics don’t work, and it’s time to spike that puppy through the heart.

The theory that we need to pay upfront for jobs bills is flawed for a lot of reasons. Like it or not, the US is not Iceland or Malta or Greece or the Scandinavian countries. Sorry, Austrian School, but we have assets that Schumpeter and Hayek never considered. I enjoy their work as much as the next fugitive from Economic thought – run away, run away – but the fact is that reality is Keynesian. The way to turn the economy around is to produce excess wealth for all, and the way to do that is to increase production, which can only happen if you maintain and grow demand. The only way you can grow demand beyond subsistence level is to get people spending actual  money, and the only way to get them to spend actual money is to get actual money in their hands. Credit and debt is fine up to a point, but we passed that when someone decided houses make great piggy banks. Unemployment insurance is a way of keeping subsistence demand up, but if you really want to bitchslap it and wake it up, you need to put people to work doing meaningful things.

Paul Krugman has a Nobel Prize in economic theory; Jim Bunning is a goddamn troglodyte; for some reason, Bunning has more impact on the economic direction of the country than Krugman. Frankly, and this is one of my personal bête noirs and hobby horses, I blame the disparity of influence on the basic ignorance of the American people. We don’t understand math, and graphs are confusing. The talking Barbie that said “Math is hard!” may been a sexist statement, but it also spoke for generations. Problem is, Math may be hard and  rigorous, but it is kinda, sorta, oh, FUCKING INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT when you’re talking about money and the economy.

When Vice President Biden says we’re not going to bring jobs back that were lost in the Great Recession, he’s being math-ignorant. We need to create new jobs, lots of the damn things, far more than the 8 million he says we lost. Unfortunately, the world is not static – people keep breeding, and they keeping growing up, and they keep graduating from high school, college and reform schools, boot camps and VA hospitals, and they all need jobs. Real jobs – Americans with MBAs and PHDs and Certificates in System Management and Administration from CISCO and IBM are not going to be satisfied taking jobs away from undocumented immigrants standing outside of Home Depot and Wal-Mart.

I was talking to a senior person with a major defense contractor the other day, and I commented that I was surprised that the DOD hand not been tasked with some greater part of the defense and recuperation of the Gulf. He said not to be surprised when it happened, that for a number of the big contractors, “War, famine, pestilence and disaster are our business.” While I’m not surprised that the Bobby Jindals and Hailey Barbours of the world are sitting on their hands not calling out the authorized Guardsmen and indicating that if the 33 wells that the deep-water drilling moratorium would shut temporarily, everything would be wonderful, I think it’s time to put a helluva lot of people to work tending the silly damn absorbent barriers and distributing respirators and hazmat suits and on and on and on. Instead, BP does a quarter-assed job on shore to go along with the brain dead approach on the water, and the Feds are excited about it. Idiots.

The reason AXE's approach would work is fairly simple. Let’s say we contract to UMR and KBR to run the cleanup properly and pay prevailing wage oil patch wages plus hazardous duty pay to the workers, and do it on a cost plus award fee basis. If you think of the number of people realistically needed, on shore and close in and what they’d need to do the job, you can see a huge economic boost not just to the local area but to the manufacturers of appropriate hazmat materials – respirators, suits, booties, steel-toed shoes, small boats, outboard motors, bottled water, etc. etc. etc. Bubba Dean and Sally Sue will make a living wage and spend it; this will result in additional spending. Which will result in additional production, transportation, distribution resulting in maintaining jobs and starting new ones to meet demand.

The Republican approach is to cut taxes. Seriously, if you cut Dick Cheney’s taxes $100 grand, do you think he’s going to spend it? No. If you take that same $100K and pay it to autoworkers and cleanup crews, they’ll spend it. The people they give it to for goods and services will spend most of it. The people they give it to will spend most of it. The people they give it to will spend most of it. This is the basic of John Maynard Keynes and his thought and why trickle down economics is a failure. The Cheney’s of the world horde their surplus; the working class spends far more percentage wise; the middle class spends almost as much. One reason that the top 5% controls 90% of the wealth is that they can – how many thoroughbred race horses do Lynn, Liz and Mary Cheney need to inherit?

I was interested the night the Senate failed to get a cloture vote on the extension of unemployment to hear Senator Sherrod Brown say that the same day that we failed to get that done, the first $1 Billion Dollar estate was able to be executed without paying any inheritance tax. That’s trickle down at its most obvious, oblivious and odious. It's up to us to do something about it, now and in November.

(Alternatively published on Veterans Today with less swearing, no music and under an assumed name...)

MERSA SPREAD BY COWS AND SEX AND SEX WITH COWS...

Sometimes, you just want to know more...FAIL says that the headline is too long but if the purpose of the headline is to make you want to read the rest of the story, well, shitfuck...

Another take on the whole Afghanistan thing...

For a left-wing commie, pinko lesbian Rachel Maddow is pretty pro soldier. However, she made excuses tonight for the failure of the military to have VIPs at the opening of a trauma center, saying that this was because the military is in chaos over the McChrystal Balls-up. Sorry, doesn't fly -- Afghanistan Command has a perfectly competent commander with three stars who can run things until the congress gets around to confirming the Four Star who used to supervise McChrystal and dreamed up this counter-insurgency nonsense anyway. Bethesda is a pretty short helicopter ride away from the Pentagon, the White House and the VA. The best way to assure the world that everything is normal is to act like everything's normal. Because it is -- if McChrystal had a brain anyuerism on one of his ten mile daily runs, do you think this same level of nonsense would be going on? Generals are important, but not that important...

COIN is starting to feel a lot like Vietnamization, and if you're not familiar with the term, I recommend re-reading David Halberstram's The Best and the Brightest. Or reading it. Read Street without Joy too, while you're at it. Or, read some of the stuff about the Soviet adventure...

However, as I have mentioned before, in an alternative existence I write for another site under another, assumed name. It is not Gordon Duff. Gordon is more of a legitimate journalist than I could ever conceivably be. I'm not a journalist; I'm not sure what I am, but I'm not one of them. He writes well, and has spent a fair amount of time on the ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan and in other mid-eastern and Asian Garden Spots. His take on this particular goat rodeo/snake fuck is evolving, but worth looking at and considering for perspective and insight. He also reminded me of something...

McChrystal held on, for awhile at least.  With the billions in drug money floating around, floating into so many pockets, buying everyone in sight, no report will come out, certainly not from Holbrooke nor especially from the CIA.  Wouldn’t it be nice to hear, “I coudn’t take it anymore.  I didn’t sign up to be a security guard at a whore house.”  But that isn’t true, that is exactly the job Stanely McChrystal did sign up for.  With a bit more talent, he could have played piano.  If being a “Special Operations” guy working for Dick Cheney with his personal death lists, doesn’t make one immune to the smell of sewage, I can’t imagine what would.

Gordon's point is one that I find troubling. He seems to think that McChrystal set this up as a way of getting fired -- going to Obama and Petraeus and admitting that the whole thing was a total clusterfuck for which he bore some of the blame and that he couldn't work with Holbrooke and Eichenberry because they were clueless, egotistical clowns and that after 10 years of holding Karzai's dick, the guy still couldn't piss straight. He makes a pretty salient point about COIN and where we are in Afghanistan at the moment -- the only Afghani we're sure isn't Taliban is Karzai.

Gordon reminds us that MickeyC led the cover-up on the Pat Tillman affair. While I think his conspiratorial view of how that particular tragedy happened is a bit paranoid, I have to remember who the ultimate master of disaster was -- Dick Cheney and the Bush propaganda machine. I don't think Tillman's own unit would have killed him; but, who the hell knows. It was a friendly fire incident; they did really screwy things to cover it up; there was a lot of lead flying around.

I'm sure the General's memoirs will be interesting.

What the hell were they thinking? They weren't...

I was not impressed with the way the administration fired the general in charge of Afghanistan before Mcchrystal. Hell, MickeyC came in and immediately started saying the same stuff the previous guy said. Nor, as a grunt, was I ever that impressed with Special OPS Senior Leaders when they moved out of their comfort zones. Since they replaced a highly competent general officer with a guy who'd been running Black Ops for a long time, what the hell? Egos amongst General Officers are huge -- you're at the top of a highly competitive profession where in fact they do kill the weak and wounded. So, having Rolling Stone come along to listen in probably seemed like a good idea to somebody. The Boss obviously runs his mouth when he's relaxed, and his staff of hard charging Special OPs guys run their mouths. The boss says something and everybody else says something worse.

Now, I too have been offered new opportunities because of my irrepressible wit and joie de vivre...or, to be honest, because I have at times been too blunt, too direct and too goddamn stupid to shut up. Sometimes I wish I had shut up; sometimes I'm proud I didn't. Recently heard that a former sniveling subordinate was bragging that he got me fired by telling people at sector about things I said. Weasels abound; doesn't bother me. We need to remember that people in the military are people. As Luther said, "On the highest throne, you sit firmly on your own ass..." And, people will badmouth the boss; people who like their boss will badmouth their boss' boss. It's part of Homo Bureaucraticus. What I find interesting is that the General --according to Cosmo -- according to Women -- reached out to apologize to Joe Biden about the bite me crack before Biden had read the article. That shows some grace. I also suspect that he was pretty much convinced that he needed to resign before Obama accepted the letter. Screwed up, my fault, I won't be a pain in the ass because you're right. I find that refreshingly courageous, candid, competent and committed. Army values.

One thing I found disconcerting on the MSNBC coverage was Jonathan Alter's comment that Obama will tell people, "Do this and that's an order..." Chris Matthews chimed in that military folks he had talked to indicated that if you told people that something was an order, you weakened it. Well, yeah -- no shit. If I tell you to come here, I expect you to come here. If you don't come here, there's a problem. If I clarify that I'm really telling you to come here, I'm giving you and order, if you don't do it there will be consequences...you should know all that already. You do know all that already. You just don't believe it or you don't care. Perhaps the President is used to a more collegial environment where the executive has to assert his authority at times. Problem is, he's the President of the United States. He has the authority -- if he tells soldiers to do something, they'll probably do it if it's legal, moral and possible. Congressman, foreign diplomats, governors -- not so much. Subordinates serving at the President of the United States are a different story. If he wants to weaken his message, well, that's up to him.

So, the General leaves with dignity; Petraeus agrees to a demotion -- although one Four Star billet is the same as another one in a lot of ways -- and the poor bastard grunts continue to do their jobs, wishing that the generals remembered what it was like humping a rucksack up a mountain while getting shot at.

I'm just curious...and, it probably has something to do with everybody's frustration here...just what the hell is the end state supposed to look like? Jeffersonian democracy is not about to break out in the tribal areas; the opium farmers and drug cartels aren't going to find Jesus. Hell, I wonder if they even have found Mohammed.

It's been a while since Crusader AXE agreed with much coming out of Rome...

I got to spend a good part of the day in the just-down-the-hill Mall; dropped the wife off at Regis for a 10000 mile service, the car off at Sears for a 5000 mile service and spent hours not drinking in the Tally Ho Tavern trying to beat the devil but sitting in Barnes and Noble. Constant stream of phonecalls that I didn't get because Motorola appears to have made that cell phone shielded from the signal...the calls would have pissed me off or amused me or something -- we don't have the oil you asked for for the sled but we have this and we're going to do it; we don't have that either but we have this other stuff; oops, we were wrong, we do too have what you wanted and we're going to use that. Go figure.

On the way out, we stopped and traded in cell phones and carriers. People were actually very helpful -- I always found Catherine Zeta-Jones the image of helpfulness, my self -- and we now have semi-smart phones that I am probably too bad tempered and ADDS these days to really figure out. However, the spouse is happy because she now has GPS and I'm happy because I hate AT&T on principle. I realized as we were driving home, that I had not checked email once all day, and figured that I was probably not missing anything important, but would probably have a mail box full of alarums and hazards from Defeatist Central and Malcontent Control. Nope -- which is good, it means they had better things to do today than send each other emails. It's actually almost pleasant at the moment in the Crossroads of Opportunity -- still low 90s; other years, 110F has been consistently buried by this time and the temperature is still climbing, headed for 100K...I spent a few minutes looking at stuff, and saw this, which gave me a smile and a momentary good feeling about the Faith of My Fathers, Mothers and Everybody Else going back to the 5th Century...

Indeed, the announcement that the Vatican rag of record has declared The Blues Brothers a Catholic classic is somewhat redemptive, I guess...Dan Ackroyd announced that he'd been an altar boy at age Six which I do not believe, but that he was somewhat lapsed, which the AXE had no trouble believing, but he was writing a check for the local parish. Most of us old and lapsed Catholics from pre-Vatican II days really have a lot of residual fondness for the old girl, even though the ideology is absurd: Ratzinger a totalitarian more interested as Protector of the Faith in theological trivia than abuse of power through the abuse of children; and Jesus wasn't a Catholic or even a Capricorn, but a Jew...giving the whole Christkiller thing kind of an odd-twist...in fact, Jesus was found guilty by a somewhat corrupt Roman military governor and executed by Romans. So, the Italians killed Jesus. Or not...

Anyway, as I've pointed out in the past, no Catholicism, no Irish monasteries preserving culture after everything went pear shaped for the empire. No Occam's razor, no Aquinas, no Gothic cathedrals, no Charles Martel and boys at Tours. No Catholicism, and we'd all be Muslims. Or, possibly Druids. Or Vikings.



Most likely Muslims, although Christianity does pretty well in really cold climates; not so much Islam, although parts of Western China, Pakistan and Afghanistan get cold as a Viking Hell. No Catholicism, no Protestant Reformation, work ethic. No Catholicism, no Elizabeth; no Bono and Edge. No Catholicism, no revolt.

Doesn't mean it's right. James Joyce, when asked if he were becoming a Protestant after he renounced Catholicism, said no, why would he  trade a logical absurdity for an illogical absurdity; he thought so much of his witticism, he put it in Portrait and in Ulysses and probably in Finnegan's Wake but in some nonsense non-rhyming Irish version of Cockney rhyming slang and Sanskrit. Probably put it in a personal ad in Zurich looking for a typist. 



No Catholicism, no Protestantism. It serves a purpose, for those who need it. For those of us who don't, it's a fond memory that appears to mask a falling fortress, crumbling under neglect, ignorance and the assaults from within of the privileged and the trivial. Now, in a piece in the Atlantic, Ross Douthat makes a critical point discussing the idea that the Catholic Church is on it's last legs.

"The Church has been horrifyingly corrupt in previous eras and still survived. It’s been led by ecclesiastics who make Bernard Law’s hands look clean, and still survived. It’s faced fiercer enemies than Richard Dawkins (think Nero, or Attila, or Voltaire) and still survived. Time after time, G. K. Chesterton wrote, “the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs.” Each time, “it was the dog that died.” But if the Church isn’t finished. period, it can still be finished for certain people, in certain contexts, in certain times. And so it is in this case: for millions in Europe and America, Catholicism is probably permanently associated with sexual scandal, rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ. And as in many previous dark chapters in the Church’s history, the leaders entrusted with that gospel have nobody to blame but themselves.

I don't know. I think that there will always be those who need a god and who need a personal god. Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Animism -- they exist because we had a need that we still have. The AXE's blend of Stoicism, Tiffanyism, Existentialism and Scholasticism is definitely based in large part on those 16 years of Catholic confinement...and Dan, at six your were probably a choir boy rather than altar boy. However, same silly costume and same nuns pointing the way toward the truth, the light and boy's room. 

There are days I miss Sister Teresa Marie teaching first and second and then second and third grade simultaneously. Feeling of safety is long gone, the feeling that someone has a plan is definitely long gone; Sister Gregoria hasn't shown me how to throw a curveball later, and Fr. Major hasn't told me to grow out my crewcut and use a comb either. That church is gone, as is the sense of trust and the belief that God sees all. If God sees all, Ratzinger and the Pederastic Priests and Brothers are in for a hell of a hell.

I ultimately go back to my anti-theistic epiphany -- there is no god, god has a plan beyond our understanding, or god is an evil motherfucker with a warped sense of humor and no good intentions toward us. I know what I think...

Random Neko Case...

"I didn't make it to your funeral/I didn't want ritual or resign.." So,because we can...and yeah, I miss Tacoma. And, Neko is an incredible talent and the media is worrying about Perez Hilton and Miley Cyrus' underwear...

Tiffany is pissed off because she doesn't have a 62 foot tall Statue...in Ohio

There are moments that really shouldn't require any comment...however, a tacky plastic foam statue of Christ next to a highway really doesn't deserve a kinder fate. Poor Jesus...bringing new meaning to the suffering servant of Yahweh since sometime in the first century...

Really a shame about that earthquake...

Why has this pestilential place not returned to the sea yet? I mean, who knew that earthquakes came in freaking swarms?