the defeatists!

WE MUST GET AGI in this CAR!!! For the sake of the Blogosphere...

Some of you may recall that my brothers have had an on-going sabotage campaign against Shakesville, a small-minded blog for small-minded, big-butted androgynous hobbits who propose all sorts of fearless stuff in a closed-minded society. AGI's spouse recently announced that she was pregnant; since he made a comment this week that he couldn't wait for the next four months to pass, I'm guessing he's kinda oblivious around the house, or his wife is so petite that were he to meet the Shakesville crew, they'd figure he kidnapped here from the Hobbit-House Saloon in Tinytown and try to liberate her from his clutches. Probably both...

Anyway, AGI has decided to get a new car. Money is an object, of course, but so is a surprising amount of political correctness...Dude, You're killing me, get a Hummer if you want space and safety for the little one! Or, and as the designated Hunter S. Thompson of the collective, I have got to advise you, the best thing to get is a Corvette. Ok, AGI has always shown some common sense, and far too much to fall for the "Dude, do what you shouldn't do, and that will make you happy..."And, did I mention his wife coaches girl's lacrosse? 

So, here's suggestion. The Volkswagen Jetta Sports Wagon TDI...The main reason for this is that the reviews all indicate that it's a helluva good car and checks all his metaphysical boxes . They do have horrid commercials, although replacing the Techo-dude and dudette in their first run at this market with a talking Bettle is a sign that they are slightly less tonedeaf than we might have thought. It gets 40MPG and sounds like a car.

Da Da Dogs | Movies & TV | SPIKE.com

And, as indicated in the link, it's the number one Lesbian Car in the US. I mean, shit...how about a way to make peace now?? The testicularlly challenged and gender-confused might even let him express himself again in the comments. No matter how pointed his remarks, how could they turn on a guy who drives one of their own? 

We can only devoutly hope...

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

 

"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...

Mummy Mummy Mummy...I'm ready for my closeup, Mr Gordie!

El Serracho was driving through the Shire of Ectopia on Friday and some Hobbit rear-ended his rental Corolla (Seriously, talk about letting the side down bro...should either have been a Yaris or a Hummer! Maybe a Mustang GT convertible. A Corolla is so...Shakesville.) and somehow moderately damaged his wife. Appeared from the picture he sent that it pants his car, which was odd. That, for no reason, makes me wonder about Michael Jackson and Republicans. Well, the reason actually is that the Annals of Improbably Research sent me a video, and not unlike Mike, Crow, and Servo I found myself drawn to it like one of Pavlov's siberian wolves.

This one was about "medical cannibalism" which, it turns out, was quite the fad until the 18th Century. Appears that nothing the old docs from the 11th century on like more than grinding up some poor dead shit's millenial old body and forcing it down the throats of those who were willing to pay. One English guy actually dug up what appear to be early Britons and ground up their bones as well.



What has this to do with Jackson or the Republicans. Well, most people figured out due to the lack of anything like success that the mummy didn't do a lot. Unlike bleeding, which would make you weak and then ultimately kill you, the best you could appear to hope for from magic mummy powder was to clear up you constipation. Yet people kept pushing it and taking it. Not unlike solving all the problems in the world through prayer and tax cuts, hence my thought about the Republicans. Christianity and Tax Cuts -- the powdered mummy of the 21st century.

As for Jackson, I never want anyone so basically harmless yet amusing to die. The people who let him have "sleepovers" with their pre-teen sons, sure, Tiffany ought to fuck them over just 'cause they are stupid or greedy or both. But, Jackson needed help. Hillbilly heroin and demerol, one of the pharmacopeia's precursers of heroin weren't the help he needed. Michael Jackson, Rush Limbaugh and Herman Goering -- junkies. He was obviously in need of a lot of kind people speaking in soft voices and a constant applause track. Here's MJ, wearing a Burka! Here he is hanging Prince Vladamir the 14th out of a bathroom window by his feet! Here he is going to trial in his pajamas. Here he is moving to Dubai. Watch him screw over Paul McCartney...Harmless but amusing...yet, a lot of people are enthralled by the freaky little guy. So, I'm wondering if they were to chop up his skeletal remains, how much could you get for a piece of Michael Jackson? Would the ghouls who stood around a hospital waiving signs about how much they loved the guy grind up his bones and drink it in a tea to make them young? Or, would they carry the relics around, claiming to be able to cure depression and feel light on your feet if you only believed?

Well, the top two earners, supposedly, among dead musicians are Elvis and John Lennon. Guess the little guy will be bumping heads with them. Probably John will alternately egg them on and then seperate them, depending which side of his multiple personality is manifesting itself at the time.

"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.

Just like the headline...Don't mess with Yoghurt!

2 suspects freed in Texas yogurt shop murder case

Seriously, I know it was probably tragic at the time for the families and all that, and it's tough for the two guys who might be exonerated by the DNA samples, but, Sheetfuck! as they say in Nagodoches, that is something new under the sun. Unlike Iraq-Iran-Absurdistan, John uninteresting Ensign, Mark "We don't need your stinking money...opps, I was wrong" Sanford and his four sons, and Newt "Booblehead" Gingrich. I keep trying to care about these dipshits, and I just can't. Charlie Gibson wants to know about the prez and his healthcare? It's part of his compensation package, and oh, yeah, it's the same as he had as a senator.

BMLT! Only real way to get off this Chain Gang!

Let's see...we've got triple digit unemployment, high gas prices, fear and trembling and fucking vomiting over the status of 401Ks and mortgages and consumer loans; we have minimal consumer protections and fears of further job loss, and the fuckers are nervous because no one wants to buy any goddamn thing?

NEW YORK (AP) -- Americans may have poured money back into stocks this year, but market watchers worry that they aren't spending enough on other things -- like clothes, cars and computers. This week, the average U.S. consumer returns to the spotlight. The Commerce Department reports on May personal spending and incomes on Friday, the same day that the University of Michigan reports on June consumer sentiment.Recent data has shown that Americans' confidence is climbing but their spending is still lagging. Personal spending has fallen for eight of the past 10 months. Consumers are the primary driver of U.S. economic growth, and if their spending doesn't rebound, the market can't, either. ''If you take a quick snapshot here, the consumer is still looking to pay down debt, increase their savings, and curtail their consumption,'' said Joseph V. Battipaglia, a market strategist at Stifel Nicolaus & Co.

Let me make this clear--the markets and banks went nuts loaning consumers money for mortgages, consumer good, durable good, and so on; everybody went gaga over every new and scary and generally unnecessary innovation like IPHONES; people are so leveraged it's bizarre and bankruptcy works great for GM and Chrysler, but not so great for the guy who has a wife needing surgery, no insurance and has just gotten a 60 day notice that he's losing his job so paying his maxed out credit cards is not a solution anymore AND THEY ARE WORRIED BECAUSE US POOR BASTARDS AREN'T BUYING CRAP AT THE SAME RATE?
I'm thinking that one reason inflation isn't a concern for the FED lies in the fact that the only people who are really feeling the stimulus at the moment are involved in banking and investing. Hell, my boss who is significantly well-paid for which I have no problems since he has now worked his ass off sufficiently for the benefit of GINORMOUS DEFENSE CONTRACTOR that he has none left and is working on his left leg recently got a note that he was eligible to "defer income." He asked me what that meant, and I said it means you can agree to let them hold on to some of your money for several years until after you've retired. "Why would I want to do that?" Well, baseball players and other athletes do it. Ken Griffey deferred a lot of his income with Cinncinati and Seattle, for example, so that they could have more cash to spend on other players. "Ken Griffey? What the hell does that have to do with me?" Nothing; however, this isn't really for you. You won't really see a lot of benefits, except that you'll probably pay lower taxes after you retire. It really makes sense for the big boys...the Sector Presidents and their direct reports, and the top end at CORPORATE. "Fuck 'em."

The AXE is fairly frustrated with it all. I was thinking about a new car, and discovered that I didn't really want to spend the extra cash. Seems my current car was a rental before I bought it and was in an accident in Hawaii. I bought it from a company that doesn't exist anymore. They didn't disclose the accident, and as a result, after three years and paying extra each month as well as having a decent interest rate and a reasonable down payment, the people I talked to about a two year old Bullit Mustang GT were trying to get the price for the 2009 model from me and shorting me on the trade-in. I'm still upside down on the current car...and, they are eager to rip me off on the "new" car. Fuck 'em. Car runs fine. Some body work, a tuneup when do, headers and an upgraded cooling system and maybe a tank of nitrous in the trunk, and it'll be wonderful. And, cost me a lot less in anger, frustration and erosion of my income.
I'm not buying as many books, get all my music from XM and Rhapsody as opposed to buying it, and am doing damn all except paying bills. I expect a lot of Americans are in the same way. If not, we're dumb.

What they have done to us is not unlike what Lillith did to Niles Crane...taken away all our liquidity and beaten us. Now, they want us come back. Unfortunately, most of us do not have a Daphne to run off with, and she was crazy anyway...Sorry, most of us are not going to run off to COSTCO for giant bottles of capers.

If consumers are going to be the main driver in the US economy, we need to get money in the hands of the folks who are not in the Investment-Class top 5% level. We need to find radical solutions to get more money in the hands of the class that consumes responsibly. Anybody who's current on their mortgage and pays less than 31% of their income for housing, for example but is upside down. In other words, consumers who didn't leverage themselves that badly. People who used to make money and then their jobs died. Put them to work, and not at McDonalds. People who are facing or have been run over by bankruptcy because of medical bills. Instead, the bulk of the consumer money is going to those who can't do math; the one's who didn't balance their checkbooks. And, this is after the bankers and the financial types have skimmed a lot off the top. Populism can turn ugly...altruistic and principled as I like to portray myself, I'm getting angry as I wonder "where's mine?" I'm not hurting yet, but..."Where's mine?"

Damn right, I'm not spending a lot of disposable income. Neither will a lot of people. We're too worried about being disposed. Here's a thought -- allow incomes under $500K to deduct consumer interest. Allow incomes under $500K to take a tax credit, not a deduction, on mortgages that are upside down. And, fuck the banks, the financial sector, and the other rip-off artists that have thrived since Reagan rode in one his fucking Palomino and delusions. Fuck 'em.