the defeatists!

Alienation is a helluva drug

Last night I dreamt of you, Abbie Hoffman peddling your books, I gave five bucks to you, the other kids just gave you dirty looks.

 I said "I'm sorry it didn't work out quite the way you planned."

You said, "That's silly boy, the revolution is at
hand."

And if you got a ten spot brother, I got a dime,
These are desperate,
desperate times.

Last night I dreamt of you, Pepe Lopez strung out on a stage, It don't even look like you, smiling like sawed-off twenty gauge.
I still remember the
Telecaster down around your knees,
It's late November and I think I smell tequila on the
breeze.

And if you got the Cuervo honey, I got the lime,
These are desperate,
desperate times.
And if you got the shotgun honey, I got the crime,
These are
desperate, desperate times.--Rhett Miller

Crusader AXE has been too busy dealing with family issues to write or think or do anything really coherent of late. Mrs. AXE retired from Federal Service after 35 years of helping to make the state function, if not optimally, at least better than if she were not there. The afternoon of her last day, she got the diagnosis of colon cancer...so, by mid-month she was in the hospital for surgery, and there she remains. Friday will be three weeks...the words rehab facility were spoken last night. I am not exactly happy about this -- I have no complaints about the quality of her care for the most part, or the professionalism or kindness of the staff. I have concerns about the quantity of the staff...I think this is a problem nationwide, but probably more acute in Southern California because there are so goddamn many people... 

Things haven't gone well. They appear to be unable to actually get the bag to seal to Joyce's skin, which results in her constantly leaking. She remains in the hospital; her surgeon was there last evening and found himself helping try to get the illeostomy bag to work. They had had five iterations earlier, all failing. Which results in linking shit all over everything. On Tuesday,  I had had a brain fart when I left the Crossroads of Opportunity to go to the hostpital after getting home at 1130 Monday night  and had to stop in Target and buy her clothes to come home with. Well, that didn't work as planned...Had gotten her a stuffed animal for a comfort thing, and that got to come home tonight along with the socks she'd been wearing, all of it shit stained. Surgeon is confused since this is a "good stoma" since the hunk of intestine that's leaking into the bag is what he can do with what's available to him. For some reason, they can't seem to get the base of the bag to seal correctly with her skin, and as a result it leaks out the sides. Now, the surgeon does not want her coming home until they get this to the point where she has some faith in it, and the topic of nursing homes came up. I noticed that they do not seem to have a standard procedure, and are experimenting. They have 1 (ONE) colostomy nurse on staff and one brand of stuff with not all the possibilities covered. Anyway, the surgeon had them get some surgical adhesive from the emergency room -- if they can get that to work, and keep the base fully closed on the body, she'll be able to come home. If not, the word nursing home was used tonight. She would prefer that to having her small intestine leak all over her home, but she'd prefer to have the bag work and be able to come home. To finish healing, so she can go back in and have the ostomy reversed and go back to a normal set of solid waste disposal equipment.

I thought that I'm pretty much ok with this. After all, I'm a tough guy, it's not fun or easy, but I'm just lending moral support and helping her when I happen to be there. And, washing the stuffed big eyed Zebra she's got for company. I'm starting to come to grips with the fact that it's a lot harder on me than I thought. Just beat all the time. I go in there, help her get out of bed to use the commode and such stuff, and feel if not helpless at best incompetent. 

Did I mention that getting her to eat is hard? Today she had a hard boiled egg, a piece of toast, and two bottles of Boost Clinical Strength. Well, since whatever she eats is leaking out of her side all over her within an hour or two, she's probably not all that interested...So, at some point this will get resolved but I'm not feeling comfortable with how it's going. She's still in a lot of pain although a lot of it is from the irritation on her skin. They were using something as a binding agent that was largely alcohol. Great...the woman has inflamed skin caused by chemical burns and part of their solution is rubbing it with alcohol. Surgeon is getting incensed...wonder why? Shit. 

Medicine could stand to have some statistical process control and analysis. Got a call from a rep at one of three companies that manufacture and distribute colostomy supplies. There are drying agents, it turns out, that do not involve alcohol. If you have what are basically chemical burns over an area and they need to dry the skin to apply something, using an alcohol drying agent is a pretty bad idea. Unless you're trying to wring out a confession....the gal apologized for the hospital, saying that "a lot of times the product works first time but a lot of times it's a process of trial and error." Sure, let's look at new, non asbestos options for brake pads. Let's start with cheese....nothing is a better stopper than curdled milk products!" 

I've always been a fan of Tiberius Caesar, pre-Capri. I know that my friends IOZ and Captain Capitualtion probably prefer him at Capri, IOZ becuse of lifestyle appeal and Crispin because he just said screw government...but pre-Capri, he was kind of a Julian John Adams.  Grumpy old bastard following Augustus who just quietly went about making the state work. Would be welcome today -- I think that is where dictators come from, the inability of representative systems to work adequately. Or at all, over time. 

 

I don't care about gay marriage.  I'm not that concerned about using predator drones, Gitmo as we sweep up the ashes of the Bush administration, and so on.  I want the state to work. Jobs,food, schools, infrastructure...I want to turn the ignition on my car and not have the fucking thing blow up because there's no requirement to make a car that won't blow up when the car is started. I want to eat a cheeseburger assured that it's not made of horse or rancid meet. I want the ideal society of 1950s Eisenhower Republican America only with racial and gender equality. The curiously fucked up world that I was alienated by/against doesn't look bad at all as a baseline. 

Reading a book on my KIndle while visiting Mrs. AXE  called The Angry Buddhist. Involves California celebrity politics, dog murder, and various forms of madness. Poor protagonist is trying to use the Dharma to keep from ripping the head off a lot of people. It ultimately seems to have the theme that, well, make a list, motherfucker. And keep making it -- you'll never run out of vacuous, vicious and verminous assholes needing to have their heads ripped off. 

 One of my brothers sent out this note about Genesse Cream Ale going back to retro packaging. Upstate NY had some pretty good local beers. Utica Club, Genesse...Utica Club had talking Beer Steins in commercials when I was a kid -- Shultz and Dooley; Genny talked about the sparkling waters of Hemlock late. Far better than 'Gansett or, for that matter, Coors or Strohs. Of course, there had been the Haverly-Congress line, that I still recall a joke of my dad's after they closed down. He said that it happened because they sent a sample in to be tested in the State Lab regulating such stuff, and got an emergency call saying, "Shoot the horse, it's got diabetes..."Still remember the song for the singing beer mugs -- "Brew me no brew with artificial bubbles, those carbonated beers of today/Cause Utica Club'll still take the trouble to AGE BEER THE NATURAL WAY! Utica Club, UC!!"

 

Bad news travels like wildfire and good news travels slow...

Sweating in the ghetto with the wetbacks and the poor
The rats have joined the babies who are sleeping on the floor
Now wouldn't it be a riot if they really blew their tops?
But they got too much already and besides we got the cops
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.-- Phil Ochs

The problem becomes, of course, being able to tell the difference between the two, good news and bad news. Or, becoming aware that they exist in the face of cultural degradation and silliness. This is a day of universally WTF important stories that we are missing because of the Charlie Sheen phenomonon. We've got years of reruns of 2.5 Idiots and there's always Hot Shots and Navy Seals. Stop worrying about Charlie, oh great media machine and pay attention to the things that are going to get the rest of us killed. Oh Tempora, Oh Mores! as that great Italian defense attorney Cicero said in about 64 BCE. Of course, he was talking about viciousness and corruption; we need to add stupidity, greed and the inability to connect the dots. Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, Cato, Crassus, Brutus -- they could all connect the dots. Our politicians and our leaders - not so much.

First of all, there's the latest debacle in Afghanistan. Now, the Afghans are big on blood feuds, revenge killing, pederasty and goats. So, the accidental killing of a bunch of kids herding goats and getting firewood is not just a tragedy, it's symptomatic of everything that's wrong with this war...

Look, it's a low tech place, and kids play while they're doing choirs. See the helicopter and run around -- and, some door gunners think, "Oh shit, Taliban..."  and ratatattat. We've ruined the lives of Afghan families, which will piss off extended families and result in payment of blood money and probably American blood. Shoot my neighbor's kid from the sky while he's doing the equivalent of raking leaves, and I might be predisposed to not want to help you do anything but get the fuck out of my country...Inshallah! If we're worried about Psyops, well, this kind of shit that happens entirely too often is why we can expect no real results from Psyops. It a low tech place, in tough terrain, with a warlike populace who are pretty good at not going along with strangers. It's noble of Petraeus to go and apologize but to the Afghans invovled, he's just another outsider. It's his fault...they may understand that. They won't get accidents happen; collateral damage is inevitable.

I'm all for orderly withdrawals, since the alternative is a fighting retreat, but it needs to happen now...not in two or three or ten years.

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported on its Web site that the suspect was carrying a large amount of ammunition when arrested. The police said they could not confirm that report.A man whose office is near the site of the shooting, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect his business, said witnesses told him that before opening fire the gunman shouted “God is great” in Arabic. --NY Times

Then, there's the murder of two Airmen on their way to Afghanistan as they're getting on a bus at Frankfurt's international airport. The Politzei haven't identified the guy yet,but it appears that the guy works there. The Times points out that there have been no major terrorist attacks in Germany but states that they've been on alert for a while expecting some. The media claims that the guy is a Kosovar who was born in Germany...citizenship in Germany not being easily available to non-Germans. There are about a million Turks, Armenians, and every other type of non-German living in and born in Germany legally who have no citizenship rights. Supposedly the guy got into an argument with the GIs...ok, I can see that. What I don't see is why or how the guy had a gun...Germany has really stringent gun control laws. This non-citizen would not have come close to getting a pistol permit. Hell, he'd have had trouble getting a permit for a sword...I wandered all over that country, and never felt nervous. I stayed away from the docks and red light zones, and saw no evidence of street crime. I recall being on "Courtesy Patrol" -- an oddball Army thing where some NCOs or Officers would put on their Class A or B uniforms and go someplace that soldiers might go and get drunk and in trouble, so they could exert a calming influence at best and at worst haul the bastards back to the barracks. Normal vehicle was a jeep with radio, driver and two NCOs. When I did it, I told the senior guy  to man the phone/radio, and we took a five ton truck so if there were drunks, we'd have room to carry them. Anyway, this particular adventure was at a major Beer Festival in Wurzburg, my favorite city in, oh, the universe. We were standing around over by the main Politzei area, and some belligerent German drunks were dragged into the shed that the cops were using. A huge cop came out, smiled at us, and shut the door, standing against it and bracing his back against the door. Bodies proceeded to slam against walls for a few minutes -- I am not exaggerating to say the walls seemed to bulge. Next, the cop opens the doors and helps drag the drunks, now docile, out and away...I also was involved as a witness and as a translator a couple of times when the Kriminal Polizei were involved. Guns were drawn, and people were very cooperative. Whole Miranda thing not an issue over there. So, while I'm not naive enough to think that there were no guns in the hands of thugs when I was there, I am pretty sure that this indicates that they've lost the bubble on arms trafficking there. Expect more. Why exactly are we flying people into Frankfurt to move them on to Ramstein AFB before flying them to Afghanistan anyway? The piece mentions that we've downsized a lot in Europe, that there are now only 50000 total Army, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guardsmen there. I guess my thought is "Why are there any beyond essential liaison with our allies?" And, if our allies really want us there, why aren't they paying for it? I know that there are overcrowding issues at some US installations, but unmothballing a few and putting soldiers there would make more sense than not. And, create jobs here, by the way. Turning the Yakima Firing Range into an Afghanistan style joint readiness training center would work great...it looks like Afghanistan, and has basically the same sort of weather...hellish.

Then, there's Dr Doom and his merry Gang of Tricksters. Nouriel Roubini sent me this today... Download Gmail - Fwd RGE's Wednesday Note - Fallout From the MENA Days of Rage - March 2, 2011 - crusader.axe.ofthe.lost.causes@gmail.com The good doctor and his think tank are pretty expensive to subscribe to, but I do get some of his newsletters, and his team sent one today that was just marvelous to behold. Here's a bit...MENA is Roubiniese for Middle East-North Africa, by the way.

As RGE Chairman Nouriel Roubini examined in a recent piece, the economic costs of MENA unrest extend far beyond the region, with rising commodity prices the most significant linking factor. A further increase in oil prices would pose a significant downside risk to global growth. We expect demand destruction for fuel products to occur at lower oil prices than in 2008, as U.S. and EU consumers are more stretched. Fuel importers will suffer from higher prices, and global central bankers will face a more difficult job in setting policy. Countries like Turkey and South Korea with extensive goods and services exports to MENA countries could face two challenges from the region’s disruption: a stall in their projects with the countries and a deterioration of external balances from an increase in oil prices.

Beyond food and fuel security risks, the waves of unrest are washing up on the European continent in the form of increased numbers of migrants to southern EU nations. Already, Italy has reported an increase in Tunisians in Lampedusa, and some of the 100,000 Libyans flooding into Tunisia and Egypt may well try to make their way north. An increase in illegal migrants and refugees could stress the broader EU, which is still suffering from high unemployment rates and fiscal austerity...

Here's my problem. Austerity has been proven to not work, to drive down GDP and to screw things up in general. Yet, we have an entire Republican party devoted to saying "we're broke...: Well, not really. What we have is a revenue problem -- we need higher taxes at the state, county, municipal and federal levels. And, the immediate return to the Clinton Tax Rates for the richest makes sense, but we actually need a lot more. As the Wisconsin debacle has shown, we've got issues with reality; nobody likes to pay taxes and have government waste; however, we kinda like things like schools, libraries, roads, sewers and bridges. It takes money to build those things...I suppose we could anticpate our inevitable downfall and institute an annual corvee but that would be incredibly stupid. Expect the Tea Party to immediately endorse it...

Now, Robert Rubin has pointed out repeatedly, that the concentration of wealth at the top end does a disservice to the top end. The Koch Brothers probably think that their ideology makes sense and we're just dealing with hiccups, but not distributing money from the people who have money to do the things that need to be done in society while trying to take it from those who do not have so much money is pretty damn stupid. Now, I'm not rich enough to squirrel away a lot of my money in municipal bonds or state bonds. These are generally tax free, if you can afford to buy them. Earnings from Munis or State bonds are not tax free if part of a mutual fund. Hedge fund managers and portfolio managers love these things for salting away excess wealth -- no risk and the lack of tax makes them more attractive.So trust funds, pension funds, insurance agencies, low risk mutual funds and so on love them. They're considered almost as safe as T-Bills and you get better returns.

So when Doctor Roubini and his band of gypsies tell the Wall Street Journal that Municipals will probably drop about $100 Billion in defaults this year, that's hardly a good thing. It appears, from the Journal's piece that they regard this as being good news that at some level we've got disaster fatigue. The loss of a $100 billion worth of wealth will shaft investors, but will do a number on any municipality or state that happens to have to default. Or, appears threatened. Interest rates will shoot through the roof; when Texas state bonds are accorded junk bond status along with California and a few other places, what the hell, over? Pensions will go under, investors will go crazy, and some one will come up with the great idea of bailing out Hedge Funds...we can't let a trillion dollar industry go south, can we? Think of the children!

And, of course, the hits keep on coming. The Dems cave on this two week funding thing, everybody with any credibility tells the House Republicans and the Tea Party and the General Public that their economic plans are based on bad math, lousy economics and general ideological paralysis of the insane. And, we continue to go merrily down the road...

To Reverend Phelps and his church. Frankly, I tend to almost always side with the Bill of Rights. Free speech should be protected at almost all costs. But, the Founders would be dumbfounded by no constraints. They tolerated a lot, because they had faith that society would punish those who went too far. Hamilton died because he said things that he'd probably said before, possibly to Burr, but this time to someone who published them. The same reasoning that brought us Citizens United and the best Congress the rich can buy has now found in favor of the Westboro "Fag-Hating, Jesus-loving" Baptist Church.

“Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible,” Chief Justice Roberts concluded. “But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials.”

I spent my life dedicated to the cause of free speech among others. This one bothers me...a lot. The only reason that these damn things have not degenerated into blood, mud, fire and riot is that we're far too disciplined in the military and veterans communities, and far too tolerant on the left. Idealism doesn't get in the way of Clarence Thomas or Scalia. I interpret this to mean that cross-burning, which is hate speech by definition, is probably protected speech. Yea! More fun ahead...

Meanwhile, Charlie Sheen has been spotted walking down the Vegas Strip with a gun, a speedo and a feather sticking out of his ass. Oh, half the men in the US have HPV. Which, since the virus is largely assoicated with women, means that a higher percentage of women have it. Which means that maybe we should be vaccinating everybody for it, since the virus itself is not so bad, but the cancers are. Or, maybe we should just skip it. Quick -- shoot Tiger Blood Charlie with a tranquilizer gun using the Siberian White Tiger dose and test him for it!

 

 

 

Plotshave I laid, inductions dangerous...

"I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other."--Richard III

The governor of Alabama denies the universal brotherhood of mankind. I have tried not to get too weird lately, but this one is pretty much out there. If you're not a Christian but a Jew, a Buddhist, a Zororastarian, an Atheist, a Deiist, an Agnostic or a Tiffanyist and you are a resident of Alabama, the governor denies you. He'd like to be your brother, but he just can't...I'm actually thinking it's even more restrictive -- you probably have to be a born again Christian. Roman and Orthodox Catholics, Episcopalians, Anglicans, Lutherans and Quakers need not apply for his love; it really makes you wonder. One guy hallucinates various founding fathers; one guy wanders around the house babbling inane crap; one guy shoots signs and threatens people; this guy is stating that he feels that non-Christians are lesser creatures in spirit. Is it necessary to handle snakes or speak in tongures? What the hell is wrong with the public life in these places that nutcases get elected and then are free to babble this nonsense?

I like Alabama; I like the south. I like a lot of people. I suppose that if I were to sit next to the governor of Alabama on a plane, I'd find him polite and courtly. That said, doesn't this set up a religious test? If Muslim is convicted of a capital offense in Alabama, can he expect a fair hearing by the governor? Who denies his basic humanity...

Not Atlas Shrugged but Lord of the Flies...

now i was 15 in 1973, and as the years went by it dawned on me, as it dawned on a lot of folks, that there wasn't going to be a revolution. also it is a bit hard for an anarchist to contemplate the actual mechanisms and results of actual revolutions. none of the twentieth century revolutions eventuated in anything that resembled the rhetoric of the revolutionaries. and every successful revolution of the twentieth century eventuated in a totalitarian regime. and i got sidetracked of course: love, poetry, philosophy, drugs. i remained committed to the ideas, which i found in emma goldman or developed for myself, and i have tried to express them or stay true to the anti-authoritarian impulse, of which i have found over the years that i have an inexhaustible supply. but i also made some sort of peace with some sorts of authority (even my own: the hardest task).

Crispin "Bowties and ee cummings are cool" Sartwell, 12-15-2010

Way back when we first started this thing, one of my bros found a political-social index that ranked you on a left-right, libertarian-statist matrix. We all were various combinations of left-libertarians...I believe that I was the furthest to the left, and Mr. Fun was furthest to the right although more libertarian than I. Of course, that calls into question the real meaning of Libertarianism.

Well, Christopher Beam in New York Magazine has a great article on just that topic. It's kind of anti-libertarian, but only in so far as the more radical and Objectivist types push it. Reading it, I realized  that the most conservative of the founders, Hamilton and Adams were probably the most statist; Jefferson and Madison would have seemed far more liberal, in all senses of the word, as well as the least statist. Intersting how that happens...When Ron Paul accuses the Federal Reserve of covering up Roswell or whatever other nefarious doings, he is the spiritual heir not of Hamilton but of Jefferson and Andy Jackson.

The thing about libertarianism is that it's really not a left/right thing but a high/low thing. Someone who is totally libertarian is...well, possibly Crispin "Snakewalk" Sartwell, who is in fact an anarchist, a professor of Philosophy at Dickinson and owner of an extremely large and disturbing collection of pictures of John Mayall. (He also is the Stig on Top Gear -- the real one in England, not our phoney version. And a practicing Druid...) However, Crispin is far too generous and kind -- except to his students where he channels Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds by being cruel to be kind -- to fit the extreme social libertarian mode. Crispin, as a philosopher, knows that when you carry thing to their logical extreme, they tend to warp and become illogical. Light bends in atmospheres, and ideas bend in connection with reality. Pure light and pure ideas are interesting concepts, but what mainly of Platonic importance; we can argue about the essence of libertarianism or of light in the abstract -- however, getting things done and maybe getting some ambient lighting in the cave would be more illuminating. We can argue about Orcs all we want, but it's of little practical use unless you're an animator, a writer or a fan of Atlas Shrugged...Crispin, far more articulate than I, puts it well, as he always does even when (or perhaps especially when) I disagree with him.

 

The New York Magazine article nails that aspect of libertarianism really well --

Consider the social side of Libertopia. It’s no coincidence that most libertarians discover the philosophy as teenagers. At best, libertarianism means pursuing your own self-interest, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. At worst, as in Ayn Rand’s teachings, it’s an explicit celebration of narcissism. “Man’s first duty is to himself,” says the young architect Howard Roark in his climactic speech in The Fountainhead. “His moral obligation is to do what he wishes.” Roark utters these words after dynamiting his own project, since his vision for the structure had been altered without his permission. The message: Never compromise. If you don’t get your way, blow things up. And there’s the problem. If everyone refused to compromise his vision, there would be no cooperation. There would be no collective responsibility. The result wouldn’t be a city on a hill. It would be a port town in Somalia. In a world of scarce resources, everyone pursuing their own self-interest would yield not Atlas Shrugged but Lord of the Flies. And even if you did somehow achieve Libertopia, you’d be surrounded by assholes.(AXE Emphasis Added)

Beam earlier makes the point that a radically libertarian reading of the Constitution probably is closest to the original intent of the Founders. However, that original intent or idea had all sorts of provisos about the common good, the general welfare, justice and so on. Thus there was room to evolve, and the government has expanded in order to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. Does it go too far at times? Yeah...but, in a libertarian world, a truly libertarian world, there is no agency to really do those things. Beam points out that out and does it exceptionally well...Citing a former Cato Institute Wonk who left because he was either too intellectually pure or not pure enough, Brink Lindsey, who says that "The dominant strain of libertarianism these days is—and I’m not using these words in any kind of pejorative sense—radical and utopian,” he says that mainstream libertarianism is pretty far out there.

Libertarian minarchy is an elegant idea in the abstract. But the moment you get specific, the foundation starts to crumble. Say we started from scratch and created a society in which government covered only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a courts system. I’m a farmer, and I want to sell my crops. In Libertopia, I can sell them in exchange for money. Where does the money come from? Easy, a private bank. Who prints the money? Well, for that we’d need a central bank—otherwise you’d have a thousand banks with a thousand different types of currency. (Some libertarians advocate this.) Okay, fine, we’ll create a central bank. But there’s another problem: Some people don’t have jobs. So we create charities to feed and clothe them. What if there isn’t enough charity money to help them? Well, we don’t want them to start stealing, so we’d better create a welfare system to cover their basic necessities. We’d need education, of course, so a few entrepreneurs would start private schools. Some would be excellent. Others would be mediocre. The poorest students would receive vouchers that allowed them to attend school. Where would those vouchers come from? Charity. Again, what if that doesn’t suffice? Perhaps the government would have to set up a school or two after all.

And so on. There are reasons our current society evolved out of a libertarian document like the Constitution. The Federal Reserve was created after the panic of 1907 to help the government reduce economic uncertainty. The Civil Rights Act was necessary because “states’ rights” had become a cover for unconstitutional practices. The welfare system evolved because private charity didn’t suffice. Challenges to the libertopian vision yield two responses: One is that an economy free from regulation will grow so quickly that it will lift everyone out of poverty. The second is that if somehow a poor person is still poor, charity will take care of them. If there is not enough charity, their families will take care of them. If they have no families to take care of them—well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

Of course, we’ll never get there. And that’s the point. Libertarians can espouse minarchy all they want, since they’ll never have to prove it works.

It's also worth noting that we basically tried to do all the stuff noted above and none it worked. When every bank printed money, it didn't work. My "Bank of AXE" fifty dollar bill might not work so well in Orange Country where they're mainly using "Bicycle Sites Bank" money. If I say I have a bank, I can print money...yeah, didn't work in the 1800s, and won't work now. Private Toll Roads as opposed to public roads? Didn't work. Private charities -- with a severly weakened government safety net, they're in trouble. Eliminate it, and have you seen Angela's Ashes recently? One can argue that privatization of natural monopolies is an example of extreme libertarianism, and I think that -- if we consider Enron as a great example of this kind of thinking -- one would be right and establish Beam's position of true minarchy would result in being surrounded by greedy assholes.

Government should provide that which can not be provided equitably or adequately by the private sector. For example, the Food and Drug Administration outsources the responsibility to review research proposals for human subjects in clinical trials to Institutional Review Boards. That works reasonably well, except that the people paying for the review are...the people who are trying to get the trials done. I used to work for one of those boards, and frankly, I found there to be a serious disconnect between the idea of making money reviewing the ethical standards of a research proposal and then taking money from the people you're reviewing. In no way do I question the integrity of the organization -- far from it. There was a motive in making certain that the research proposal conformed to and that the research was then conducted in strict accordance to the rules -- nobody likes to be sued for gross negligence or go to jail for corruption. Since the airwaves are now crowded with commercials for various law firms that talk about suing for serious side-effects, the big Pharmaceutical companies don't want anything to screw them down the road; approval of shody proposals would result in bad research, risk to subjects and possibly huge damages.

By basically outsourcing this responsibility -- approving research as meeting FDA requirements -- the FDA was putting responsibility for that piece of the approval process  in hands that made sense and that had a strong economic motive to do a good job. However, if you outsource operations of a major airport to the private sector or even sell it to the private sector you are guaranteed problems if there is a crunch between regulation and requirements versus profitability. If you like spending days with the several thousand of your closest strangers waiting for someone to get the runways cleared and the planes deiced, then such an arrangement would be right in your comfort zone. However, if you're not insane, you want the people making decisions to allocate resources to be primarily driven not by profit for shareholders but services for stakeholders. The focus of the constituencies is different -- and, the common good in this place should outweigh profit.

 

Sleepy old Dublin Town...oh wait, getting their Irish on!

If my cousins across the sea can get their act together and do this, maybe there's hope for us. Notice that the demographics of the people angry at the banks and rest is the same as that of the Tea Party in the United States. Says something about having good schools and making people learn math...and, note the anger at the interest rate.They've done the math...and why the hell should Greece get a better rate than Ireland? Of course, the link should take you to the Guardian's page that also has the interest rate for 30 year mortgages through the Royal Bank of Scotland...we've been robbed.

Builder Mick Wallace, who has had to lay off 100 of his workers due to the crash in the construction industry, said it was time the Irish became more militant. "We are far too quiet. We should be more like the French and get onto the streets more often. Because our politicians go over to Europe and tell the EU that our people do not demonstrate, they don't take to the streets. It's time we changed that and openly opposed what is going on," he said.

Jimmy Purdy, 77, from Dublin's Ringsend area, was at the demonstration outside Dublin's GPO – the scene of the 1916 Easter Rising. "I have lived through three recessions and I think this could be the worst one yet," he said. "I'm here because I'm angry that the EU are telling us to cut euros off the minimum wage and boss Irish workers around while the people that caused this crisis get off scot-free."

Now, Ireland has a parliamentary form of government; we do not. We're not where we are at because of Barrack Obama; we are where we at because of Alan Greenspan, Phil Graham and the election of 1994. Clinton supped with the devil and as perhaps the most sophisticated politician of the 20th and 21st centuries, used a long enough spoon that we didn't hate him as much as we should for rubbing brass cleaner on parts of the safety net. However, Obama is a political science savant -- he gets the governing part, he just doesn't get the political part. He'd be great in a Parliamentary system. He'd be like Churchill, clawing his way back into power when the other side overreached while doing the Tony Blair thing when in office. But, in our system, he forgot about the political reality -- as President, the world goes topsy turvy every two years when the Congress changes. Instead of audacity and thinking big about politics, he decided to focus on a three corner offense and a zone defense. And, he's where he is not because of Nancy Pelosi -- he's where he is because of himself, and Harry Reid.

Of the two houses, it was more critical to maintain the House than the Senate. The House is where the action is; the Senate is not. While more involved than Lords versus Commons, the filabuster and general rules of order in the Senate favor the minority unless there's a super majority. But, the House can create all sorts of havoc, and then the Senate has to stop it. Or the President has to veto it.

In a Parliamentary system, a vote of no confidence is pretty simple -- start defeating bills and the whole mess gets redone in six weeks. The Irish can go to the streets, cause panic and dismay, and something will happen. Remember that the roots of the IRA and the roots of the struggle in Ireland has a strong anti-capitalist branch...here, we've been stupid most of the time. The Republic feel in Rome not because of the populares but because of the overreaching of some of the optimates. Caesar and the boys of the XIII Legion just found it all ripe for picking, kicking and rolling over on its back...

Absurdity time...armageddion time! (Update because I can...)

From Matthew Yglesias via Krugman, Laurence Meyer, a former Fed governor exposes something amazing...

"The content of his assertions sound completely insane, and yet to the best of my knowledge are 100 percent true:

There’s also another tradition that began to build up in the late seventies to early eighties—the real business cycle or neoclassical models. It’s what’s taught in graduate schools. It’s the only kind of paper that can be published in journals. It is called “modern macroeconomics.”

The question is, what’s it good for? Well, it’s good for getting articles published in journals. It’s a good way to apply very sophisticated computational skills. But the question is, do those models have anything to do with reality? Models are always a caricature—but is this a caricature that’s so silly that you wouldn’t want to get close to it if you were a policymaker?

My views would be considered outrageous in the academic community, but I feel very strongly about them. Those models are a diversion. They haven’t been helpful at all at understanding anything that would be relevant to a monetary policymaker or fiscal policymaker."

I just read an article that was recommended on Linked In as a "entailing of the bank cartels." Turned out to be not so much...the article was by one of the leaders of the Austrian School of Economists, and celebrated the downfall of John Maynard Keynes. Well, the guy who wrote the article died in 1995. "Timothy Leary's dead....and so is Murray N. Rothbard." Rothbard should be read, as should Keynes. Schumpeter. Ricardo. Adam Smith. But, read with a grain of salt...things have changed, and when a positivist fanatic like Greenspan confesses that his fundamental assumptions were wrong about regulation and banks and interest rates and human nature, a critical thinker needs to be more critical.

I disagree with the fundamental premise of the article, that Keynes has been proven wrong or irrelevant. So do the current crop of topeconomists like Paul Krugman.  As I said, the article is actually very dated, since Rothbard died in 1995 as the Austrian School was triumphant and driving Gingrich and the Republican congress.  Keynes was pretty much ignored during the Reagan, Bush I and II and later Clinton administrations due to the influence of the wing-nuts of the Republican party who were advocating oddities like tax cuts during a war. Although in theroy, Keynesian thought has been vindicated in the recovery from the "Great Recession," it has really only been applied around the edges. The limited successes of the stimulus spending have been due to the timidity of the amount invested. The monetarist versus fiscal divide really has stayed on the side of the Austrians -- unless something changes radically with Sumner's departure, we'll probably stay stuck.

TARP didn't do much for troubled assets; the rapid return of most of the money to the federal government is not necessarily something to celebrate. Like it or not, we are a consumer driven economy, and if consumers aren't working and aren't able to access money to purchase, then there's not a lot of space to grow the economy. Which works well, I guess, for social media that depend on out of work and sub-optimally employed folks to read, review and hope as the pieces come in.

I'd love to see an uptick in manufacturing and construction. If there's a lot of work building infrastructure, then there are going to be a lot of purchase orders for concrete, steel, asphalt, copper wire and heavy equipment. More design work for engineers, more construction work and on and on, down to more sales of roach coach cheeseburgers and coffee to people working by people working.

Banks doing especially well and finance companies doing especially well is a terrible leading indicator. Banks and financial services should, in a healthy and growing economy, probably lag the other sectors. They haven't and that should be troubling to all of us.

Paul Krugman is Eric Claption

We’re told that we have no choice, that basic government functions — essential services that have been provided for generations — are no longer affordable. And it’s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases.

And the federal government, which can sell inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04 percent, isn’t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure and our children.

But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.

In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.

When I seek clarity, I turn to Eric Clapton and Paul Krugman. Crusader AXE is not sure if Paul Krugman can play guitar, but he is the Economics Equivalent of Clapton with the Bluesbreakers -- God. It's fairly simple, and people who claim to believe in American Exceptionalism need to pay attention. If 90% of the money is in the hands of 2%, go where the money is. Roads, schools, power grids, infrastructure cost money. Spending money on roads, schools, power grids, infrastructure provide jobs. Jobs provide tax revenue. No jobs, no tax revenue. No tax revenue, no jobs, no purchasing. If the roads revert to gravel, no new car sales. If there is no electricity, no computer networks. Visit the local mall and find the mall manager. Ask them what happens if they lose power...for a week. No stores open. No jobs. Perishable goods spoil. Vandals break in and steal. Wild dogs run amuck on the food court. Zombies haunt the aisles...seeking brains and Ralph Lauren camisoles...

The idiots in charge of obstruction -- Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ben Nelson -- need to get off their dead asses and get their heads in the game. What exactly are they planning to do to govern?

Krugman points out clearly and lucidly why they need to and what they could do. I think it's time for the Democratic wing of the Democratic party to endorse things like a living wage, debt forgiveness for underwater housing, extended assistance to states, and some real draconian responses to those who move work off-shore to increase profit. Adam Smith's wine and needle analogy was correct in so far as it goes -- a world where the needle manufacturer could move to lower Abyssinia and have Rasselas manage the equivalent of an off-shore sweatshop never occurred to him as a possibility. Smith understood what Warren Christopher reminded us of in 1993 and we have forgotten -- American National Security includes and is inescapably linked to Economic Security.

Let the Nobel Prize Winner have the last word...

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of anti-government rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.

Yes, yes indeed we are, Ducky!

A liberal arts education prepares you to get angry at the oddest things...

I’m working on a screenplay now called “Grand Theft Pundit,” about gangs of outlaw columnists dealing drugs, running guns and saying rude things on “Morning Joe.”The role of me was going to be played by the late Suzanne Pleshette or Adrienne Barbeau, assuming there is a difference. -- David Brooks

But, angry in a coherent way. I haven't tossed a lot of Dulcinea Dowd's stuff up lately because I've been utterly pissed off by the world in general. It's more fun to make the Defeatists a music blog. The Bros don't care, on the rare occasions they regain consciousness from the stench of bicycle shorts and baby diapers. El S is fixing the webs, Agi is teaching his daughter the Lydian mode on his acoustic guitar, and Mr Fun is going to Phillies Games, even when he's not. Holier is long since gone off to a self-imposed metaphysical ashram, and Captain Capitulation is channeling Leibnitz. Me, I'm still on my own road, headed toward another point of view...

However, the oil gusher in the gulf is exciting some interesting things. The top kill method is interesting...although I'm a fan of pumping old tennis balls and tampons into the damn hole. Where's the goddamn Glormar Explorer when you need it? What this country needs is more secretive billionaires who dislike bathing and cutting their nails to serve it better. Anyway, my personal beacon of hope at the Times pointed this out -- we're being fucked over repeatedly by things we've never heard of and with acronyms that make no goddamn sense at all. And, when they do make sense, they make no sense -- I'm wondering how many Department of the Interior regulators and officials lost their jobs and , oh, I don't know, WENT TO JAIL over the orgies and snorting meth off the microwave thing. As Dulcinea points out in her lead ...

It’s unnerving, disorienting. A particularly noxious blend of helplessness, fear and fury that washes over you when you realize the country has again been dragged into a costly and scary maelstrom revolving around acronyms you’ve never heard of.

Our economy went in the ditch while traders got rich peddling C.D.O.’s and C.D.S.’s. Even many bankers — much less average Americans who lost their shirts — were gobsmacked by the acronyms, and scrambled to figure out how collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps worked.

And now a gazillion gallons of oil have poisoned the Gulf of Mexico, thanks in part to unethical employees at a once-obscure agency known as M.M.S. — the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service.

And it goes from there. Enjoy...Gail Collins and David Brooks have an ongoing dialogue, and frankly, I've avoided it because Brooks perturbs me. He's too smart and too well grounded in, what do they call it, oh yeah, reality to really mean the things he says and writes. However, today's piece makes me think I've been skipping something. Beginning by talking about Lost -- which I never watched, never will watch, and have no interest in at all, Ms Collins talks about how all the characters were dead and it was like St Elsewhere and a snow globe. Brooks said he's still trying to figure out how Adrienne "Swamp Thing" Barbeau and Susan Pleschette were different, which led inevitably to a discussion of the BP nonsense. Brooks and Collins don't get our current spate of righteous indignation demands from the punditocracy. He points out that unless the president has a degree in underwater engineering he hasn't told us about, the president needs to keep doing what he's doing. However, Brooks has taken on the Rand Paul approach, which I find interesting...accidents happen, risk is inherent in human activities, and when a risk filled enterprise goes tits up, we should react somewhat more appropriately than running around screaming at fate and coming up with wild draconian measures...Collins and Brooks disagree about the role of government oversight going forward, but they do so with good sense and humor. Collins steps into Dowd's dream with this insight --"Obama must have known, when he took office, that there was some agency somewhere — probably tucked away in the governmental attic — that was going to hand him a disaster. If you’d asked him to guess, I bet he’d never have fingered the Minerals Management Service..." and Crusader AXE has to agree. This is so Bush administration...obviously, the 2000-2008 really screwed over the government. Collins raises the issue of what to do going forward, and Brooks points out very well how we're basically screwed by the nature of risk, reality and the economy. "The fact that an industry with inherent riskiness sometimes produces catastrophes hasn’t really changed my view of the industry. Less offshore drilling just means more oil tankers, a more environmentally risky mode of getting our energy." Well, since about once a quarter I throw up Yeats' centre will not hold thing, I guess I can't argue with this...

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

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

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

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

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

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