the defeatists!

Well, to begin with a downer...

I don't drink anymore. As a result, when I have a headache and shaking hands, it means I'm sick. I have slightly more money, slightly more scruples, and despite a serious problem -- unlike most people, I liked the taste of beer and whiskey right from the beginning, so I miss the tastes and textures -- have made the adjustment reasonably well.

But, if you're not a drunk, beer is a good thing. It is possible to brew nonalcoholic beer that tastes good, by the way -- Clausethaler is a bad example, but the Becks and St Pauli products are ok as is the alcohol free Paulaner. The best I drank in Germany was from a small brewery in the Spessart Mountains that I really enjoyed.

So, what is the old man babbling about? Well, Ethiopia. I actually had a close Ethiopian friend in Seattle named Joseph Roberts. Joseph is an interesting guy -- was one of the Ethiopian baby orphans in the early 70s when they were in vogue, and both he and his sister were adopted by a couple of British Academics on their way to Hong Kong. Classic Ethiopian profile, looked like you might imagine Johnson's Rasselas. Oxbridge Accent, Harvey Mudd trained scientist, Microsoft millionaire and one of the nicest and brightest people I've ever known. Retired and has a few oddball hobbies like taking care of the poor in Seattle and running some business in Guinea off and on. Had to show him how to polish shoes after he came back from one trip with some fairly expensive things ruined, he thought, by the dust he couldn't get out. Talk to an old soldier about how to clean shoes...of course, now that the boots are all rough side out, spit polishing will go the way of the bullet molds...

I asked him once why he hadn't gone back to Ethiopia to start his business, and he explained that the clan structure made it impossible for an Ethiopian who was not affiliated with a clan -- and since he was an orphan, he wasn't -- to do much of anything. He also talked badly about the way the French had left their territories, saying in effect that this was a case of the Marcus Aurelius mode, things so fucked up that his contributions however small to the people of Guinea were having a pretty good impact.

Ok, why am I reminiscing? Well, it appears some Bavarian fellow got tired of Merkel and the Osties ( East Germans who actually spend a lot of time lamenting the loss of the Stasi, Marcus Wolff, Soviet masters and brainwashing of children) and moved to Adis Ababa to open an authentic German Braueri, complete with a German trained Ethiopian Braumeister. I think that is kind of cool -- speaking of which, this is an authentic rural German summer drink that is a helluva lot better than it sounds. Take a good strong Pilsner and mix it with equal parts 7 Up and/or lemonade. I used to prefer it with lemonade and mineral water. Still occasionally will do it with an alcohol free beer, although most of them are either too expensive (German) or too weak-bodied to handle it. Called a Radler or a Radler-Weiss, it will while away the afternoon. 

Conscious and Conscience...

Paul Krugman should probably be Secretary of the Treasury. I don't think he'd accept it, or Commerce, or the FED, but he's probably the best example of a Conscious Economist with a Conscience operating in the public view these days. He's not a "maverick," whatever the fuck that is that's worth having. In the west, a Marverick was a steer without a brand. Steers are castrated bulls. Get my point?

Anyway, Krugman is a mainstream economist, in the tradition of Heller, Samuelson and JK Galbraith. He writes well, which is rare for an economist and guy who first got wealthy in the textbook writing scam. However, he has a rare gift for a Nobel Laureate in the dismal psuedo-science of economics. (All Social Science is Psuedo-science, in that the conditions can never be totally replicated and the results always have more than random variation, or else the experiment is probably rigged. However, that's a rant for another place.) He has some humility. Today's column is an exemplar, sort of...It's also an evisceration and a call to arms. He begins with humility...

He begins with a confession, and although he gives some credit, before damning the bastards for being corrupt, stupid, stupidly corrupt or corruptly stupid. I think those are the only available choices. Of course, delusional is another option...he skips that one. Blind and ignorant are also skipped. They are distinct possibilities...

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

He then does a marvelous job summarizing how we got where we are, and belling various cats. He remains somewhat hopeful, although guardedly. The welfare of the Republic and its future now rests on the ConservaDEMS who are perfectly capable of going DIXIECRAT on the mess and refusing to play. Do a Liver-man on the whole deal. (Does Joe Lieberman have a place to sit in the caucus after that display this weekend? Do Connecticut voters have access to the recall? Why is Ben Nelson still a Democrat? Seriously, there could easily be a third party in the Senate. The far right nutcases, the hypocrites, and the Democrats. Lieberman and Nelson and a few other sellout to insurance and banking and financial fat cats would be a great starting place to sell out on the road to a new economic serfdom...if we were to dig up JP Morgan and Jay Gould, we'd be better off than today.) However, Krugman takes off the gloves and lays into the conservatives in their bizzaro world and that alone is worth the price of admission. Which, since it's on the webs, is really just time. A shame, I guess but still...

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Frankly, as a guy who prides himself on having that understanding, it can be damn near fatal. None the less, Krugman nails it, them and us -- we the people elected those idiots -- and leaves the denouement to the imagination. Back to the future...barter. 

Note to self: There is no such thing as a small ammunition fire...

While I'm pretty sure that we'll never know a lot more than we do now about the Russian debacle/fireworks show/ etc., we need to recall that this is kinda, sorta something they seem to do periodically. And, shudder a bit. I've spent a lot of time around ammunition and demolitions, and it's rare to have a bunch of that crap just blow up. Screw up, and it'll happen in a heartbeat. Don't screw up, pay attention and the stuff is pretty safe.

Now, of course, that's American ammo and NATO ammo. The Russian crap seems to blow at a moments notice. We have a minor vent at 3 Mile Island and the world ends; that was and probably is a daily event in their weapons and power industry. The reason why this is worth more than a giggle is simple -- Nukes are just as flakey. You don't need a detonation to have issues with nuclear arms--all you need to do is drop one and break the casing. Happens more frequently than anyone will admit...hell, soldiers, airmen, sailors are human beings, and Murphy will bite given half a chance.

So, then we look at the various loonies around the world who want Nukes, or have chemical weapons or just piles of ammo sitting around untended. The whole fucking third world is one big ammo dump, waiting for someone to not pay attention and short circuit a pile of electric detonators they temporaily stocked on the dynamite because, well, they were due for their mid-day prayer and hashish break.

 

Exiled to Manitoba...say wha?

Mennonites rose to political power and fell to womanizing and corruption (one of them, a celebrated Mennonite race car driver, was exiled to Manitoba, so grave were his perversions).
(AXE comment: What sort of horror would you have to create to be exiled from pestilential and oozey Paraguay to Manitoba? Take showers? Brush your teeth? Not marry your cousin?)

Well, ok....when you decide to muse on Paraguay, Nazi paradise and garden spot across the Rio Plata from Buenos Aires, we gotta smile here at Defeatist Central. I have never had any desire to visit the place...but, there appears to be a couple of strong trends there. Graeme Wood's piece in The Atlantic makes me wonder if it's worth considering as a place where trends go to die...For some reason he compares it to Australia, and cites one of the Utopian movements that tried to take off there -- New Australia.

A few years later, renegade Australians arrived just outside Asuncion and settled a commune known as New Australia. They founded their settlement on strict separation of races, sharing of property, teetotalism, and family values. They quickly erupted in conflict over just about everything, and within a few years New Australia disbanded. Utopian principle: Teetotalism, marriage. Reason for failure: An Australian colony founded on teetotalism?

However, the concept of  Mennonite race driver Orlando Penner exiled to Manitoba really needs explanation...and would be a fuck of a Randy Newman album concept. Or the Three Tenors, except there's only one left, and he isn't looking all that great. Still, it's a thought. And a tourism concept -- Paraguay, where hope comes to become not hope! Paraguay, like Uraguay with pee! Paraguay, gateway to Beggary and Ruin!

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...if Australia's magic was to take bonded criminal dross and transmute it into civilization, Paraguay's was to take freely-settled cultural and religious aristocrats and reduce them to beggary and ruin. It is where pretenses to civilization came to die...

Republican Yuooot Movement

Am I the only one who finds the new Republican "Yes we can have no ideas" movement as ludicrous as the Democrats implying that they aren't going to allow Democracy in Pennsylvania but intend to force Arlen Spector down the throats in a form of Dickboarding? I'm going to reserve comment on Spector but listening to the three wise men of the right - Cantor, Romney and Jeb Bush -- babble on even for a few minutes induces fits in rhesus monkeys.

The only Yuooot in this gang is probably Cantor; can you say Callow? Hi, I'm Eric and I'll be your server tonight. If my enemy is making a major speech, I'm not at a Britney concert. However, being the Yuoot! in a Yuooot movement is dangerous work. I've found myself in that location throughout my career. Isn't all that much fun. Usually, you're being set up. One place thought I was "too radical" when I tried to keep them from being sued; the other one said they all loved me and that I was going to be groomed for the next gig, but I was too young to be the guy in charge--despite having led the idiots for the last 9 months and balenced their books and starting to build a reserve and a strategy. Six months after I was gone, they'd alienated people who were working with us, the new ED had run roughly in baseball cleats over their by-laws and they were calling to ask my advice on how to fire the guy. Who had fired me...I was not quite 50 at the time.

Real yuoot movements involve a form of defenestation, which literally describes throwing somebody out the window into a pile of shit or a compost heap. This is nonsense. The Republicans are now the party of "Say wha...You didn't say that." Michelle Backman, Big Momma Palin and that bird brain from California along with Samuel Whatzashitkop, aka Joe the imposter and Rush Limbaugh represent the worst ideas in a cacaphony of drivel. These clowns are really going to have problems getting their act together. Ron Paul was brilliant on Rachel's show this evening. I don't agree with him on much except for the Peace, Love, Absolutely Free stuff, but he took Newt Gingrich and the rest apart this evening. br>I'm a little biased of course; but, this is what these guys are doing and it's sad. Wait until the colostomy bag shatters all over Nancy Reagan's parquet floor. Jeb Bush is far more competent than W, but despite the brilliant Adamses that followed JQ into politics and public life, no other family members tried it. The first two weren't all that great, and Adams6 was a winner because of a crooked deal. In retrospect, Poppy B seems incredibly competent compared to Forty-3...

So, if we do it, it's ok...but if you do it, because your religious mubojumbo is outside the Greco-Roman-Jewish tradition

Well, then you're fucked and you're going to hell! Ratzinger's hits just keep on coming.  His priest says a prayer, and God gives you a baby, or transubstantiates some  stale wonderbread and left over Chablis into cannibalism, or cures your sore throat by slapping some candles against your neck or...or...there's just such a wealth of magikal nonsense in Christianity, and particularly Catholicism that I'm overwhelmed. But, if your priest-figure makes an image of you and blows on it to help you breathe, well, that's just not going to work and is a sin. Got it...

Declaring victory and going home

In the days of my youth, I spent some time in Panama and Latin America. I participated as a staff NCO and briefer on a mission called Operation BlastFurnance, where the US Army, the Bolivian Army, the DEA and associated other folks went after the Cocaine Industry in the jungles of Bolivia. Total clusterfuck in many ways -- my fondest memory is having to monitor the Medevac of a platoon of soldiers who came down with...wait for it ...brucellosis. Seems that they had been told not to drink any milk products because the Bolivians didn't pasteurize their milk. However, nobody said anything about the ice cream...

So, this is just precious. Frankly, I'm surprised it took this long for Morales to do this. As people who follow the AXE's rantings know, I'm very anti-drug and have advocated for years the establishment of bounties on drug dealers as being rabid scum lower than weasels on the evolutionary scale. However, the best way to fuck over the criminals is to decriminalize the damn stuff. I don't advocate recreational drugs, dipshits, but I don't advocate transfat, tobacco, alcohol or sugar... But, I do advocate taxing all of that shit. That's a reasonable, left-libertarian approach.

Bastards...or Banker's Dream

Well, money talks and bullshit walks... all over the people of the Isle of Sark... Tell me this isn't the dream of every Steve Forbes, Bill O'Reilly, lunatic right, Richard Shelby-esque asshole. Yup, jingo Joe the plumber and the Barclay Brothers are flipsides... Since the Barclay boys own a lot of tourist stuff, I'd say a boycott -- a fine Irish tradition -- might be in order, particularly of the stuff in England, the Ritz in London and Telegraph.

 
 

...I'm living in an empty room With all the windows smashed And I've got so little left to lose That it feels just like I'm walking on broken glass...

No way this ends well for one person -- Sarah Palin. Bill Mahar said it well last night -- "She goes from being Mayor Whastit, population 7000 to Governor of Alaska, population San Bernardino." I'm not entirely sure about how I feel on this one, and the whole qualifications thing. Just looking at the Republican side, who was more prepared, Bush or Reagan? Who was the more effective President?  However, this pick is odd on so many levels -- I'm just a dumb Irish guy from upstate New York who had to join  the Army to get his first pair of shoes, but what the hell?  Was it about pandering to women?  Gail Collins doesn't think so. Much...

It is conceivable that some people will think John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate because she is a woman. I know you find this shocking, but I swear I have heard it mentioned.McCain does not believe in pandering to identity politics. He was looking for someone who was well prepared to fight against international Islamic extremism, the transcendent issue of our time. And in the end he decided that in good conscience, he was not going to settle for anyone who had not been commander of a state national guard for at least a year and a half. He put down his foot.

I'm not sure what the hell this is all about -- since she's red meat for the base, what with the intelligent design mandated in Alaskan Zoos, drilling for oil any place any time any how, being pro-life (and in her case, living it herself with  her own family, which is a fuckofalot more meaningful than most babbling on the subject by both sides), pro-gun, pro-global warming, pro-third rate education through home schooling and so on, good chance she's was selected as an ideological soulmate...for Tancredo or Brownback. At least when she does the requisite hunting photo, she's look natural and probably drop a fucking elk with one shot. And, to steal a line from an old biker joke, she can probably suck start his snow mobile...

Crusader AXE has never been sure about the whole Washington Insider-Outside nonsense. Make Barney Frank VP, and he'd probably get a lot more done in so far as the VP gets things done. Collins points out that MacDemenia has never thought highly of the position, so maybe this is a bone both to the base who still aren't sure about him, and to all the little ladies out there. I just think it's an example of silliness and cognitive dissonance. I envision her huddled in the basement of the Naval Observatory, freaked out by all the crap coming at her. Is she capable of learning the job? Sure. Is she capable of putting up with the noise, the congestion, the nonsense, presiding over the Senate which is her only constitutional job, the travel, the demands on her family from the First Dude through the kids Dee, Dweezy, Dose, Dip and Track? Does she really want to? Probably not. Frankly, I see this as a continuation of McCain's somewhat disjointed approach to everything -- maybe he's dreaming of some hot woman on woman action with Sarah and Cindy while he and the first dude go trap shooting or something?

As for her, well, I think I'd probably enjoy having coffee with her and the First Dude. She's a lot more authentic a human being than what we're used to. I don't know if she violated her oath of office when she fired the cop who wouldn't fire her brother in law after he tasered his 11 year old daughter. But if she did, have her pay a five-dollar fine for littering and give her the Medal of Freedom. I seem to recall that McCain's concerns about domestic violence really were more along the lines concern for the lasting impact on the perp's career. Joe Biden pushed it. So, maybe Sarah should run as Veep with Biden.

Frankly, the worst thing that could happen to this woman is to win. I'm pretty sure she'd find the experience about like this one, only without the company of Hugh Laurie and John Malkovich.

Eurythmics sélectionnée dans Musique

The gooks are taking our oil...err...Iraqui Oil!(Grimmace) Good for them...

We really aren't very good at imperialism, are we?  As I recently explained to someone who use questioned my choice on something after soliciting feedback, Wwell, if you ask people for their opinions, you kinda have to pay attention to what they say." Since we're allowing Mullah Malaiki and the rest to have opinions, we have to listen to what they say; if they are a sovereign nation, they get to do what we want. But, I'm sure Cabal Haliburton of Dubai is burning the ether with satelite calls to their Man at the Bethesda Naval Observatory, deep in the cavernous bowels of the super secret bunker in the super secret mansion demanding answers. What do you bet Dick Cheney is making like Jim Carey in "Series of unfortunate events" and throwing stuff behind the scenes.