the defeatists!

AXE's corollary to Kristofferson's Theorem...

Kris Kristofferson was on his way to a drunken early grave when he sobered up -- Johnny and June probably had something to do with it someplace -- turned to club soda and lime as opposed neat Tequila and, reflecting on his marriage to Rita Coolidge, opined, "Never sleep with someone crazier than you are." Well, I'm not sure on that one. I'm reflecting the list of women I've slept with, and except for the former nun, they were all crazier than I was. Oh, and the unannounced lesbian liberation theologian. (Weren't they the same? I don't think so, but AXE is old, old, old...) But all the rest have been crazier than me. Spouse, significant other, various other encounters -- all fits.

However, Mr. Kris probably has far more to reflect on. However, I believe that this is definitely a true statement...Never divorce your wife to sleep with someone who's less than half your age when her IQ ties your age. In spades if she's less than your age.  As Clarkson says, "Why are you still alive?"

Not a lot to say...

When the spouse came home this evening, she informed me that the Marines were laying off over 350 people at a local logistics center -- 350 "accelerated hires" that they desperately had to hire this past summer. Ouch. Effective date of layoff is...tomorrow. Interesting approach; she coordinates Workers Comp at this place, and I told her expect a lot of people to claim they were hurt today, yesterday and tomorrow. For my friends who are thinking about the WARN notices that should have gone out, I'm not sure they apply to the government. Civil Service HR is weirder than regular HR. So...who knows.

Had to drive out to the installation to pick up drugs -- old soldier drugs, not fun drugs -- and get mail. Post office decided to make the installation post office a one person station at the front. Poor gal was going insane. I get out there about every ten days, and I could see she was being slammed. Hospital was done to one person at the pharmacy, and no supervising pharmacist. Seeing a trend here?

And, although I planned on not watching "the speech" it was the most interesting thing on and I had a headache, so reading wasn't really an option. It was a logical and rational discussion, the sort of logical and rational discussion that should have happened years and years ago. I notice that the upper classmen in the audience, the TAC Officers and NCOs, and folks in civvies were all pretty intently following what he had to say. They got it. The guys with bare blouses or 1 ribbon only, the lower classmen, were the ones who were having trouble staying awake. Frankly, given the West Point regime, most of those kids are either up to their noses in homework at 8PM or asleep. Or, doing push-ups. I was struck by the number of Combat Infantry Badges I saw -- indicated that the wearer had gotten shot at. For real. Probably went to the West Point Prep School after an enlisted tour. In general, good quality.

But, the speech made a lot of sense, starting from the point of view that Afghanistan is critical to our national interests. Is it? Not sure. I do know that the last 8 years haven't been terribly successful. I also know that the cost is beyond reason. Granted, the repayment by BOA of $45 billion in TARP money is nice, but I don't feel a lot better about things based on that.

Well, we'll see. Unfortunately, a modern Army can't ditty mao out of a country overnight. I'd hate to be the last guy to try and get out of Bagram. Or Kabul. Or across the bridge into AZERBAIJAN, if it still exists. I'm just tired of posting gloomy Russian soldier ballads and thinking about Afghanistan. What's happening in Iraq? Same thing that happened in Vietnam in 1973-75. Some other set of assholes are running the place, but it's still run by assholes fighting other assholes about money, power and religion. Afghanistan will ultimately go the same way, I suspect. We'll stabilize it, declare victory, get out relatively unmolested and it'll go to shit in 2014 or so. And so it goes...

Well, he probably doesn't care all that much, but...

Albert Camus died in a car accident and was buried. The guy who wrote The Stranger and supposedly inspired George Bush to buy an dictionary so he could read it so he could pretend to have some depth, and who along with Holden Caufield inspired a generation of Catholic high school intellectual wannabes, and who looks better philosophically every day, wrote novels, articles, and philosophical treatises.  By all accounts, he was a decent guy. A good writer. A honest man. He split with Sartre and Le Temps Modern over all that commie crap. He was neither left nor right...a true libertarian.

And now Sarkozy wants to dig up the poor bastard and move his grave to the Pantheon, the great mausoleum of French Intelligentsia. Jean Camus, the son, thinks it's a lousy idea and would piss off the old man; the daughter manages the estate, and it's ok with him. Sarkozy supposedly is really in favor of it, and is waiting for the family to tell him to bring in the bulldozer, and the French are being French. In a good way...

“What do we have to do to transfer Camus to the Panthéon?” asked one reader on the Web site of Le Figaro, a daily that is generally supportive of Mr. Sarkozy. “The son doesn’t agree: It’s Sarkozy who proposed it, so it’s suspect! Ah, the day that the left proposes it, then it will be different. Let’s leave Albert where he is while we wait.” Jean Daniel, editor of the newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur, told Le Monde: “The crushing character of the consecration appears contrary to the ideas for which Camus is famous.” “For me, Camus is the author of ‘The Rebel,’ who spoke of the heroism of moderation,” Mr. Daniel said. “I don’t see the Panthéon glorifying that kind of heroism. Camus was totally libertarian. Never did the rejection of totalitarianism lead him to join either the center or the right.”

Well, the AXE has a slightly different take on this. I believe that Camus would find it ironic and absurd. If he were to be sitting around in the Elysian Fields overlooking the left bank with Sartre, Malraux, de Beauvoir, Kierkegaard, Jim Morrison, John Lennon and Edith Piaf, smoking Gauloises and cigars, drinking Pastis and espresso, they'd probably be having a good old time talking about it and laughing. Lennon and Piaf would be doing a chorus of Working Class hero while Morrison and and de Beauvoir dance and Sartre, Kierkegaard, Malraux and Camus argue about God, Life, and so on. Levi-Strauss might wander in for a chat, bringing along some raw and cooked stuff to snack on. Celine might wander in, glance around, and when they all stop talking, stare scarily until Piaf goes over and leads him to back, where she gives him a blow job. Lennon then offers guitar lessons...

The only real reason to move the guy is to increase the sale of books and memorabilia. "Je suis allé au Panthéon et tout que j'ai obtenu était ce t-shirt moche de Camus." While glancing at some of them, I came on these things, and they sum it up for me quite well...
and this one...

And this...which was on a flimsy T-shirt but if you wanted a good shirt, the price went up very fast. I think the man would have appreciated the irony...and, of course, an unsupported mime...

Freedom is nothing but the chance to be better...

So, AXE's take is simple...it's always better to do nothing than something unless you need to do something. In this case, let the bones rest; put up a plaque at the Pantheon on an empty tomb, saying something along the lines of

"Camus a diminué, se sentant il avait été jeté hors de meilleurs endroits que ceci…"

Seek to maximize the insolence zone...

A True Defeatist -- Irena Sendler

A true defeatist foremother just passed away and, ta-da, her memory is dishonored by Al Gore haters. Well, given the rightwingnut propensity for gratutious nastiness, I'm not surprised. It's a classic defeatist moment -- you feel good about humanity for a second, and then the critical thinking component, the "What the fuck! You bastards!" kicks in. The email text in bold below...

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an 'ulterior motive' ... She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize .....

She was not selected.

          Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.  

Well, goddamn Al Gore. Except, of course, that is lunacy. Linking Al Gore to the Holocaust would have made this babushka break down in tears. The story, while basically true, has some very serious omissions. Check Snopes. She was a Pole, a social worker posing as a nurse. It's a minor form of holocaust denial to contend that she was a German.

Incredible valor and an amazing story. Snopes has some more detail that is critically important to understanding the snarky end of the email-- there's no way to know if Gore and his co-awardees beat out her nomination, because the nominees are kept secret for decades to avoid politicization of the award. The Social Workers who sent the complaint to the Nobel Committee were expressing disappointment. Lobbying for the next year, I suspect.

This is where the skill of critical thinking comes in. Who started the internet rumor and why?  I could start an internet rumor about Dick Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, Anne Coulter, Laura Ingram, unconsenting chickens  and a ballerina tutu and it would take on the same category of outrage that the dig at Gore is intended to cause. Since only nutcases are really enraged with Al Gore these days, it must have been started by...disgruntled Hillary supporters?

The fact that the Poles haven't been telling the world that this little social worker saved thousands of lives and was tortured for it is interesting. They could easily have let the world know and started a groundswell years ago. The fact, unfortunate as it is, that the Poles were historically as or more anti-Semitic than the Germans might have played here...likewise, the Catholic Church. ( I'm assuming Sendler was Catholic, which is a pretty safe assumption in Poland.) I seem to recall a Polish figure in the Church who might have done something with this; Copernicus? Chopin? I don't know,  Karol Wojtyla? Something like that...Got a job in Rome, as I recall, back in the late 70s and passed away with little notice a couple of years ago. There's something in that book the religious-rightwingnuts like to quote so much out of context, the Bible (Not Axis Shrugged), about "what you do to the least of these you do unto me." It's difficult for me to imagine anyone lesser than a baby in the Warsaw ghetto with the SS closing in.

Why didn't the state of Isreal do something to honor her? Probably for the same reason as the Polish Church -- awareness of this would highlight a number of things they don't want to highlight about the holocaust. It's convenient to ignore the people who tried to help -- adds to the guilt of the rest. In not showing this to the world in technicolor, the Poles hid their own guilt; the Isrealis hide the fact that unlike lambs led to the slaughter, they walked.

The Hasadic Jewish tradition holds that at any time, there are 70 anonymous "just" men and women on whom the survival of the world depends; without them, God  gives up on humanity and goes off to Sandals in Bermuda to swim with Mrs. God in a bikini or something.

Well, if Irena Sendler wasn't one of the 70, the world is in better shape than I think it is. I wonder what they have in the Holocaust museum about her? And, since I regard the Nazi SD a forerunner of the Cheney Homeland Security, I wonder what our servants would have done to a woman smuggling babies out of horror?

JOAN BAEZ & MIMI FARINA
by Francis-Albert

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.

At some point, reality will bite back...Step Away from the Job!!!

Be careful what you say to someone with nothin'/It's almost like having it all!...

“Last Spring , I got arrested in Greencastle, Ind., for pot,” Mr. Snider said amiably, seated in an East Village bar during a trip to New York. “Most people don’t care if a singer smokes weed. But this one kid did. The sheriff ended up telling me he was the Barney Fife of the town. I was more embarrassed about getting caught than doing it. I’m getting in my 40s. This kind of stuff is getting old. I thought maybe it was behind me a little bit. And I think it is.”He shrugged and sipped at some wine. “Probably.”

The song is “Greencastle Blues,” a tragicomic confessional that anchors Mr. Snider’s fine new album, “The Excitement Plan,” which was released last week on Yep Roc. Produced by the Grammy winner Don Was in a recession-efficient two days — “there’s no bread to dilly-dally anymore,” Mr. Was said — Mr. Snider’s ninth studio record marks a relatively calm patch in a volatile career and should finally help secure his place alongside peers like Steve Earle as one of music’s great populist, if not popular, singer-songwriters.

It all started when I had a problem with a guy on a highway crew...Get one phone call, two tylenol and the cold grey walls closin' in!

And, of course, the hero for all of us who are fed up...DB Cooper!And this is the way we all began musically...

That's just profoundly...nonsensical. Next thing, you'll be wanting these things to be merit based!

Oxford does it. Cambridge does it. Trinity College, Dublin does it. Why not ?

"It will not be easy to produce a low-cost, high-quality three-year curriculum for a college degree, but now is the time to try," Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former education secretary and a past president of the University of Tennessee, told a group of educators this year. "Today's economic crisis and tight budgets are the best time to innovate and change."

Passing over the fact that a lot of people still work during the summers to pay tuition and expenses, and on and on and on, there is a huge difference between Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College and Party School U or Ginormous State University someplace. Literacy and relevance. I know a lot of Americans who graduated in three years--they were very bright, had a clue as to what they wanted and had the money for all those extra courses and summer sessions. They were focused, and didn't care that much about booze, broads, bridge and bullshit. They're all drones now, of course, but they got done in three years.

Have you talked to an American kid lately? They're terrified of graduating because of the debt burden and 10% unemployment. The newest "doing the right thing" commercial from Liberty Mutual (not Liberty U, which should probably lose it's tax exempt status over the latest madness, but what the hell? Why not suppress speech and argument. Do you need to be able to logically debate the issues and pay attention when you're swinging a viper around to show how much you trust Jesus? Do you?You talking to me?(AXE, ...calm down. This is not about Zombies worshipping Zombies...and, if Jesuah ben Joseph was really a Maccabee, he'd definitely been down with barring people you don't agree with. Hell, he'd probably have been done with killing them. Falwell's university is not true to the true Jesus...whatever the hell the guy actually said. Seriously...)

There, I'm better. Education, not bad sense. That's what I'm wondering about. The latest Liberty Mutual doing the right thing is telling your kid you're going get laid off, he's going to have to drop out of school and be a fucking migrant farm worker and sex slave, and the kid says, "Shit pops. I'll just join the Air Force..."

But critics said they fear that an undergraduate's academic and social experience would be compromised by shortening it to three years. College would tilt more toward job training and away from the broad-based education many U.S. schools have offered."Most high governmental officials who speak of education policy seem to conceive of education in this light -- as a way to ensure economic competitiveness and continued economic growth," said Derek Bok, president emeritus of Harvard University. "I strongly disagree with this approach."

Well, of course. Let's face a few facts -- most curriculums are more like job training. Always have been. Why aren't you in an engineering school? A business program? Pre-law? Pre-med? Pull your pants up, get a haircut and maybe you'll meet more girls. Shit...HOW ARE YOU GOING TO PAY THESE LOANS BACK! So you have a degree in liberal arts? How does that work?

There is some truth to that. As a guy with an undergraduate degree in philosophy with a cute little gold key that opens nothing and a guilt feeling because I never did get that degree allowing me to pontificate at Amherst to a crowd of rich young twits every year about Sarter, Schopenhauer and Pop Culture, education doesn't guarantee anything. It does guarantee the ability to frame a situation. But, if you want a good job, get a degree in math and a MBA.

The thing about Harvard and Yale and Oxford and Cambridge is that deep down, they are upper class schools with a lot of rich kids. I agree that as a human being, the socialization of the undergraduate experience is probably just as important as the education. Where else would I have been able to live in a hothouse environment, and focuse on...booze, broads, bridge, guitars and poltics? But, there is a difference between what education is and what people think it is. Remember, the mantra is not "to be a better person" or "to be a whole person," or "to live a full life..." it's "to get a good job, get a good education." Mine got me a rifle, a rucksack, and a guy from Georgia with no teeth cursing me while I was crawling through mud. It got Agi a cubicle. It got El Serracho a cubicle. It got IOZ a job with a nonprofit, but of the various left-libertarian-anarcho-syndicalist types that I virtually hang around with, IOZ has the most genteel background. Of course, he's the most radical of the group by far, and he makes full use of his education and his life experience. It got Mr Fun a job watching the river flow for unbearable assholes. But, even though we may not have the greatest jobs, we are able to look up through the bars of our prison and see stars. Of course, we question their reason for existing, make snarky remarks about their sexual identities and call them motherfuckers, but still...

An awful lot of kids in colleges would be better off with what the Brits call a "polytechnic..." a trades school. A lot more would be better off in an "Arts School..." Richard Hammond of Top Gear , Keith Richard  and lots of other folks went to those things. But, since nobody makes things and god help us if anyone actually pays attention to the arts, those alternatives are limited. Jagger, of course, went to the London School of Economics...

So, without four year college educations where would we be? Where would folks like me get to learn how to play LouieLouie in Latin, or sheltered teenage girls get to experiment with their sexuality and undergraduates explore Satanism or concoct plans like carving Obama's name in their chest...upside down...to get McCain elected? I guess I don't know...but, I do know this. Lamar Alexander is a dickhead. Everytime someone complains about needing to add innovation and efficiency to an institution, whether it's the American League or the College of Cardinals or the Stanford Cardinal, bad things happen.

Probably not something to do at home, drunk, with a turkey baster and a chisel...

I'm cynical about most things, incredibly cynical about lots of the remainder and indifferent to most. However, if you want to be a hero, this is an easy way. However, I strongly recommend that you follow this sequence -- Find a goddamn hospital first.

Tire Rims, Anthrax, Fava Beans, Chianti...

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

But let’s be serious here, John. The modus operandi of the past 10,000 plus years of human civilization has been to chop up one’s date into little tiny pieces and sprinkle the remains throughout the date’s homeland. I mean, hell, she actually likes anthrax! We must kill her and all of her kind!

And really, partisan squabbles are always about the minutia, like whether we stop at Jack in the Box or Carl's Jr. for lunch on the way to flattening some third-world nation in order to steal their natural resources in the guise of seeding a Jeffersonian democracy.