the defeatists!

We can only devoutly hope...

Rock 'n roll!!! Let's just do this thing and get it over with..

 

In which Ingmar Bergman ingests a potent mix of shrooms and Carlsberg Dark in preparation for the retelling of the Nativity by the Lutheran Spiritual Choir and Chowder Society...

Thanks, WTF and I don't mean the world trade thingee

"She made the decision in what I would call a vacuum of what's best for Alaska..."

Well,that's exceptionally clear...Thanks to Wonkette and Anderson Cooper for this critical piece of insight. Now, while Palin and Joe the Plumber are exceptionally popular with the crypto-fascist base that has the Republican party enthralled, and while a Palin-Plumber ticket would be fascinating, NOT GOING TO HAPPEN! Sorry, Democrats, but that particular piece of audacious hope is just not going to come through.

One thing we know about Sarah Palin is that she's got nice legs, a tight butt and probably would do crank except for the teeth and skin thing. She's definitely got a lot of ADD and barely speaks standard American English. She speaks a version of Valley Girl-Hillbilly ebonics with some odd sports anologies and a kind of DeQuincean poetry that I personally find reminiscent of Frank Zappa at his best... Ok, let's talk basketball for a second. Since she was a pretty good point guard in high school, the idea that weak basketball analogies will work here to explain her leaving the court is absurd but understandable. This nonsense from the spokesperson that she's like a point guard making a pass and then going around the block is interestingly stupid. First of all, point guards run plays -- if they make a pass, it's for a reason; granted the other team may not know and should not know what the purpose is but this play doesn't make a fuckofa lot of sense to her own team. In fact, unlessher spokeswoman is on acid and just incoherent, nobody knows what the play is! Seems more like she's just insanely batting the ball in the hopes of keeping it in bounds. Except, she's spiking it into the official scorer's bench while heading for the locker room...giggling. To kinda crush the whole jockette thing Palin has going, here's a brief fan video of a really gutsy and superb point guard who is trying to bring her team back with a broken nose suffered in the previous game. Sue Bird is an incredible athlete with guts and poise; Sarah Palin is a never-was wannabe.

And, for grins, here's a primer on how to be a point guard for Anderson and everyone else who's still confused.

While this is kind of fun, fact is that Dr Naismith's game doesn't have a lot to do with this. There's a huge amount of speculation on this one, and parsing Palin's statement is just not helpful. It's a shame Tina Fey couldn't do a visit to Saturday Nite to toss this one into the crowd. (Actually, I'm chuckling just at the prospect of it...) One thing I do find fascinating is that Every body is speculating about it.She's pregnant again; she's cashing in; there's another big scandal coming; she's going to FOX news; she's going to teach political economics at Princeton with Paul Krugman, she's going to be the VP of Operations for Exxon. I vote pregnant, cash, and scandal. It's hard to imagine what a Palin TV show does for Fox News. Fox Sports maybe. Paul Begala nailed it, saying he wished Hunter S. Thompson was still alive, because he would have been able to explain it perfectly. We forget that Thompson was an excellent political reporter, and he'd have been on the first cargo plane to Wasilla, carrying the big white shark, his Samoan attorney, and cases of wild turkeys. Probably some peacocks too, but that's up for debate.

As Hunter said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Sarah Palin makes Mark Foley, the congressman who sent filthy emails to pages look almost normal. She makes David Vitter, the senator who was hanging out with hookers, look almost boring. She makes Larry Craig, caught hitting on a cop in a men's room, look almost stable. She makes John Ensign, the senator who was having an affair with a staffer, look almost humdrum (and compared to the rest of the GOP whack-jobs, he is). And she makes Mark Sanford, the governor with the Latin lover, look positively predictable.

It was an almost impossible mission, but in resigning from office with 17 months to go in her first term, Sarah Palin has made herself the bull goose loony of the GOP.

Frankly, I think she was just jealous of Michael Jackson getting all the attention. And, in situations like this, a little bit of Aftermath is always helpful...

Isn't religion...religious?

Guess what? They found "bone fragments" in a tomb. Kind of a reasonable thing to expect to find. So, they must be fragments of St Paul...right?

Ugh, err, no. Benny the Rat is reaching here...

The pontiff said: "Small fragments of bone were carbon dated by experts who knew nothing about their provenance and results showed they were from someone who lived between the 1st and 2nd century. This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that these are the mortal remains of Paul the Apostle."

Supposedly, this Pope is a brilliant scholar and incredibly well versed in philosophy and theology. This is philosophically repugnant to reason, along the lines of that brilliant Thomistic philosopher Johnny Cochran's "if it doesn't fit, you must acquit!" Now, the faithful can get excited, and I'm sure that they will. But, finding bone fragments in a "tomb" that traditionally is said to be the "tomb" of Saul of Tarsus, AKA Paul the Apostle is hardly proof of anything except a body was placed in a tomb. Gender, race, religion, ethnicity...nope. Carbon-dating. Let me point out that there were a lot of people in Rome, handing around and getting thrown into catacombs, the Tiber, or cremated between the first and second centuries AD. This is probably slightly more meaningful than Piltdown Man, which really means, not at all.

Fleshy the Defeatist Cat and the Running Dogs of Capitalism...

Note the little fat kid's resemblance to Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes of Fox News...

Like Bible Camp, only without the hope...

Tiffany, smite this motherfucker. Smite, Smite, Smite. Have nutria invade his underpants...

This is what's wrong with intellectuals as a general class of asses. Just what kids need more of -- regimented time and thought. This dweeb is about as much of a totalitarian as Benny the Rat, only without the Gemutlicheit...

Actually, this is good...Pretty Girls, interesting music and a urinal in a video that doesn't suck!

While music and the New York Times is perhaps odd, I've discovered a lot of great artists that I should have heard of before and didn't by reading the thing. The newest find is Belle and Sebastian, who according to the Times are an Indy-Pop Band from Scotland.

Belle & Sebastian - live
by beautifulcynic

 "Since 1996, Murdoch has been the lead singer and primary songwriter for Belle and Sebastian , the critically acclaimed Scottish indie-pop band. (Indie pop is literate, low-fidelity, oft-downbeat music that doesn’t sell very well and is usually distributed by undercapitalized independent record labels.) Even more than in mainstream rock, misunderstood outsiders populate the songs of the indie-pop universe." (AXE Comment:  Hmm, literate, low-fidelity and down-beat, plus it doesn't sell very well...sounds like Defeatist Music to me! Or, the New Pornographers, Cowboy Junkies, Alehandro Escobedo(although he can sell well at times) and Todd Snider.)...His songs are filled with lonely girls who dream of stolen horses, misfit students constructing clay models of the Velvet Underground — the ur-indie band — and iconoclasts worried about, as a line in one of his songs puts it, becoming part of “another century of fakers.”(AXE comment: Definitely Defeatist/Area51 Music. Sounds like something I can easily imagine AGI and Mr. Fun singing while El Serracho and I do some not very musical harmony, Holier and Captain C mutter in the wings that we're too destructive and jejune. )

An oldie, but goodie...geopolitical style

Honduras Kitchen Reggaeton Concert Papi Chulo
by ZICARLOS

Soldiers entered the presidential palace in the capital, Tegucigalpa, and disarmed the presidential guard early Sunday, military officials said. Mr. Zelaya’s private secretary, Eduardo Enrique Reina, confirmed the president’s arrest and said that soldiers had disarmed the presidential guard inside the residence.

Mr. Zelaya flew into exile in Costa Rica, telling a local television station, “They are creating a monster they will not be able to contain.”

For the record, I see no reason why this should concern us all that much...don't think the Taliban is a big problem in Honduras. Last I looked, the big religious trend in Central America is a move toward the Christian Pentecostal movement. Somebody has to handle all those damn snakes. And, the Army is pretty much an American invention anyway. Still, Obama could be forgiven for thinking "what the fuck's next?"

2005 Moldova (Final)
by Galiza

Well, according to the Atlantic, Moldova is the poorest country in Europe, which begs the question --wither Albania? Just a thought. 

"The easy way out usually leads back in."

The Kantian-Lutheran philosopher of realized reality, Karl Von Clausewitz identified the difference between what was planned and what actually happened as "friction." In much the way that friction slows and stops a ball rolled across a floor, the friction of human events, the "for want of a nail, a horse was lost; for want of a horse, a kingdom lost," beats us all up.

I find a stark irony in John "Biggy" Boehner blasting the Democrats and Obama for not putting everybody back to work in less than six months. (AXE NOTE: Law 7 of the The Fifth Discipline: Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. ) We've had nothing but jobless and near jobless recoveries since the dot.com bust. There are a number of problems that plague the job-market, but bitching about a trillion dollars not producing jobs is kind of interesting as a tactic, but not a good strategy. Bob Herbert says it really well:

Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb. That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo. (AXE emphasis and comment: The Times may be moving from the staid gray lady mode, what with color and occasional cartoons, but Herbert is too much the gentleman and Bill Keller, the Managing Editor too much a wuss to say what they really thing. It's not mumbo jumbo, it's fucking delusional! Utter goddamn bullshit, taking an economic definition and applying it to life. I'll pass over the Will Rogers thing about " a recession is when your neighbor loses his job but a depression is when you lose your job... Now, the definition of a recession is X number of quartes where the GNP shrinks. Governments, banks and the mega-rich worry about economic definitions, as do reputable social scientists. I, as you probably have noticed, am a bombthrower. The recovery is a fucking disaster for real goddamn people.) Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me. (AXE note: The Parable of the Boiled Frog.) The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the scope of the jobless crisis....There were roughly seven million people officially counted as unemployed in November 2007, a month before the recession began. Now there are about 14 million. If you add to these unemployed individuals those who are working part time but would like to work full time, and those who want jobs but have become discouraged and stopped looking, you get an underutilization rate that is truly alarming. (AXE commentary: I keep waiting to see a quantification of that underutilization because it's going to shock people.)

Now, Paul Krugman and a number of other folks not blinkered by definitions have repeatedly pointed out that the stimulus package was probably not close to big enough. And, they started saying it a lot sooner that Big Boehner, except they wanted a different result. On January 25, Krugman's column led with:

House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan. Unfortunately, the plan — which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape — looks like a lemon. Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.

On March 8, Krugman got pretty specific...

As I read it... (the)  White House has decided to muddle through on the financial front, relying on economic recovery to rescue the banks rather than the other way around. And with the stimulus plan too small to deliver an economic recovery ... well, you get the picture. (AXE comment: Yup. Audacity bumped into "prudence" and "Temperance" and Audacity blinked.) Sooner or later the administration will realize that more must be done. But when it comes back for more money, will Congress go along? Republicans are now firmly committed to the view that we should do nothing to respond to the economic crisis, except cut taxes — which they always want to do regardless of circumstances. ( AXE Commentary: Ah, yes, another "Bush" recovery. Great idea. Fuck 'em.) If Mr. Obama comes back for a second round of stimulus, they’ll respond not by being helpful,(AXE Comment: Were they helpful the first time?) but by claiming that his policies have failed.The broader public, by contrast, favors strong action... But will that support still be there, say, six months from now? (AXE Commnet: Maybe. Start answering their question, where's ours?) Also, an overwhelming majority believes that the government is spending too much to help large financial institutions...

It helps to remember when contemplating the Republicans that Marie Antoinette wasn't being callous when she said, "Let them eat cake." She was trying to be helpful. If you have no bread, eat cake...yeah. On the 27th, in his blog, Krugman wrote:

Now, no doubt this is partly about politics, which, as Brad says, (AXE Note: Brad Delong, Department of Economics, UC Berkeley) makes some people stop thinking like economists...   ( AXE Credo: I have come to believe that politics makes people stop thinking... or, better stated, true believers and politics results in the confusion of thought with passionate intent.)...But I think there’s something else. Doing what I think of as real macroeconomics — the tradition that runs through Keynes and Hicks — actually involves thinking about interdependent markets, in a way many economists never learn to do. At minimum you have to keep straight the relationships among the markets for goods, bonds, and money; if you try to think about either interest rates or the price level in terms of just a single market — interest rates determined by supply and demand for lending, price level by quantity of money, full stop — you get it all wrong, (AXE emphasis) especially in times like the present...And as I pointed out a long time ago, many economists just don’t know this stuff. Even in macroeconomics, you could build a career without ever understanding what Keynes and Hicks were driving at — and if you’re under a certain age, perhaps without even ever having heard about it.

Ok, this could go on for pages. However, Paul Krugman and Brad Delong and Tom Herbert have gotten it right. Timmy Geitner, Lawrence Summers and gang including Treasury, Commerce and anyone else you want to think about have GOT IT ALL WRONG. One of the interesting things about Berkeley and Princeton is that they both have a tradition of not being solipsistic in their thought. One of the things about Harvard and the University of Chicago is that they do have that tendency. However, the guys that seems to underline Krugman's thinking appears to be Peter Senge and Russell Ackoff, and the need for systems thinking. Government doesn't lend itself to systems thinking -- departments equal turf wars and compartmentalization. The President and his closest advisers are supposed to systematize things, see the inter-relationships and look at consequences and then...then...make value judgements. In American politics today, the AXE suspects that the only consequence is the immediate and the only value is re-election. Madeline Albright asked the question of Colin Powell, "What is the purpose of having this marvelous military machine if you don't intend to use it?" Bad question, of course, as the Secretary of State should have included a priviso about using it wisely to accomplish things. But, same underlying issue for Batboy...Why accrue all this political capital unless you intend to wisely use it to accomplish things.

Someplace, late Boomers are having existential moments while Farah joins Lily

Farah Fawcett has joined Lily in the memory of a lot of men in their forties... as memories of old posters rampage through the cortex. 

And Elizabeth Taylor, Dianna Ross and Lisa Marie have a mass of mixed emotions. But, who's going to worry about the monkey? Ultimately, it was all about money...just money.

Keith Richard has outlived two more people...