the defeatists!

He's baaaccckkk...and needed.

The generic concept of “The Union” might be big and on the big scale it might over-reach and when you look at it only in the largest context it might sometimes be as irresponsible as some of the smaller of the big corporations, when you look at what it really is – the collected drops-in-the-bucket of the individually powerless $18,568 teacher’s aide in Fond du Lac or the $23,559 traffic warden in Milwaukee or the $48,152 cop in Appleton, or the $22,233 radio sportscaster in New York in 1980 – “The Union” is the only protection you have when the drunken boss comes in to fire you because he doesn’t like you, or because he got elected on a promise to his puppet-masters that he’d fire you and everybody else like you so as to soften this country up to pit the urban middle class against the rural middle class so nobody’s paying attention as the corporations reduce everybody they can to subsistence levels while they take the collected drops-in-the-bucket of the mere thousands of bucks stolen from the fired or the de-unionized or the retirement-delayed, and turn them into more millions to stuff into their own pockets.

Hey, Keith Olbermann can be a smug pain in the ass; on the other hand, he's knowledgable, consistent to his principles and doesn't hesitate to piss off the powers that be. It appears that he has a problem I've shared, great bosses who have lousy bosses. His new blog is up and it's got some interesting stuff in it. If I had been his boss, would I have shoved him out the door the day we made the decision? Probably not --I understand why MSNBC might have been nervous about a prolonged farewell, Lawrence O'Donnell has done a decent job and Rachel Maddow has stayed on target. I have no fondness for Ed Schultz, since he brings his right wing radio host who became a liberal schtick to the air at a time I am looking for something to watch. On the other hand, 2-3 hours of TV news over dinner is more than enough for this Irishman.

Olbermann's initial piece is about the Wisconsin brouhaha, and the place of unions. Like a lot of us, he had a union card or two as he trundled through his career. And, since being in the union saved his job once when a drunken exec decided to fire him because he didn't like him and thought that Keith's argument with his direct boss was grounds for firing and some character defamation, he's invested.

I'm sure Keith Olbermann is still a pain in the ass to his bosses. I suspect that I have been one to my bosses; I'm fairly sure most of the contributors here have been difficult to control at times... However, while I pride myself on not bowing to any Moloch-like Wannabe Toughguy or Gal, there are times when I wish there were rules enforced by an agreement to protect people like me; at the end, our only recourse is to sue, and that's not good for your wa or your karma. Although, it can be lucrative and a lot of folks are forced to do so.

Here's another thought -- unions may have problems, but in a company versus the union argument, justice will probably side with the employees. There are times when union work rules result in some injustice, but for the most part, the scales of justice are very heavily weighted toward the employee and the employee's representative.

Taking a dip in the cleansing waters of ice cold intellectual purity

One of my brothers alerted me to this post over at IOZ. I was impressed, and I dislike Frank Rich's smarmy feel almost as much as IOZ, so it seemed like a reasonable thing to do to import the link and then cross-post my comment. Well, it seems like a reasonable and lazy thing to do. Visit Who is IOZ and check Monsieur's current bete noire...

My comment at IOZ:

I am always glad to take a dip into the cleansing waters of IOZ's thought. It's been stunning to me that Obama has been called socialist for embracing a number of positions somewhere to the right of JFK. Looking at the numbers, I find it equally amazing that materially, the world was far more equitable and hopeful in 1960 than it is today. There was a lot wrong, no doubt, but fellow alum's Michael Harrington's The Other America did get somethings to happen that were good for the poor. I think the problem is that the spiritual/existential/social is not directly tied to the material. Thus, a gay closeted man in 1957 might have felt more financially secure what with the social safety net and basic expectations of near lifetime employment; at the same time, looking at another guy could result in being beaten up, arrested and/or ruined by gossip and innuendo. I suppose the beating can still occur -- not being gay, I have no experience here; and, we all risk arrest anytime we step outside the police's acceptable range of deviance. Gossip and innuendo can still happen of course. So, basically, nothing has changed since 1956 except we're all in danger of being fired, dispossessed and driven to a life of migrant farm working in West Virgina...or some other fate that is merely a prelude to death.

So, fifty years on all we've lost is hope. Existentially, that is...

On a totally unrelated note, glad to see that while IOZ still leads in articulate insanity and argument, you have some of the same admirers like Mac Cosmetics grace the site. I'm glad to see he contributes as much to you as he does to The Defeatists on-going dialogue with a evil and unhappy multiverse.

I do want to acknowledge that MAC COSMETICS also seems to read and enjoy IOZ. I recommend, MAC, that you visit Protean Wisdom, the Guys from Area 51 and of course, Shakespeare's Sister as well as Monsieur's site and ours...

Slowly recovering from a bad case of "Goddamn Motherfuckers!!!" Overload

HL Mencken: Not a single bigwig came forward in the emergency, though the whole town knew what was afoot. Any one of a score of such bigwigs might have halted the crime, if only by threatening to denounce its perpetrators, but none spoke. So Williams was duly hanged, burned and mutilated.

It's occurred to Crusader AXE that the Defeatists is sort of becoming a music blog based on whatever I'm listening to or being haunted by at the moment. This is certainly not the intention but probably inevitable with a boomer writer who has as many guitars at present as he's had cars in his lifetime. But, that's not why I post a lot of videos or music -- I do that because I'm trying to make a point in a lot of cases, unless I am in fact writing about music. While my brothers only occasionally write these days, believing Twitter, Facebook and Onanism to be more contemporary, we're still pretty pissed off at the bottomfeeders and general assholes that haunt the Republic.

Mencken talked a lot of the "boobs" who make up the mass of the people. I find this quote from Wiki really illustrative of what I consider a realistic view...

[D]emocracy gives [the beatification of mediocrity] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world – that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power – which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters – which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.

Obviously, he's calling out the equivalents of the Tea Party and the Republicans but he's also calling out the Democrats; deficit hawks and socialists; environmentalists and oil well drillers.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.  ~H.L. Mencken

Which, in an odd way, leads to my joy at the list of the US presidents published by Siena University in upstate New York and rank ordering them by "best to worst," voted on by a group of historians. OK, they rank FDR first -- makes a lot of sense. He followed someone who did nothing at best and at worst made things worse, despite his being a smart, compassionate and effective guy. As a human being and a statesman, Herbert Hoover was pretty impressive; as a president, he was a victim of the inability to see beyond his own convictions. The other Roosevelt came in second, which is interesting. While most Americans have an image of TR as the Bull Moose, the Rough Rider, the big stick guy, we forget that what he was primarily was an reformer--of the police, of government by implementing the Merit System, of industry, of business and industry. Third is Lincoln, which I probably differ with -- he should be first or second, but I can understand why he's not. His willingness to let the various diva-generals hang on and say silly damn things while doing nothing prolonged the war. The rest of the list of the top 10 are probably no more controversial although there is room for some quibbles. One interesting trend is that Eisenhower is on the list in the tenth spot -- he looks a lot better in retrospect, and did a lot that people forget. He didn't back Isreal, Britain and France in Suez; he led the building of the interstates; he got things done; he was prescient about the military industrial complex; and, he was about as normal a guy as you can find on the list.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
H. L. Mencken

The worst presidents are a totally different kettle of fish. They either did nothing in the face of challenges -- Harding, Tyler, Pierce setting up their successors for a life in interesting times--  or went out of their ways to make things worse --Andrew Johnson and GW Bush -- Johnson by allowing the compromise with Jim Crow while undermining Lincoln's legacy while Bush was so horrible that I find the truest and most ironic judgment on the current voices of the conservative movement and the whole eight years of Dubya to be Karl Rove's bleat that Tea Party Nation misses Bush. While PJ O'Rourke isn't Mencken, he comes close some times, and this sums up the worsts and why...

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn.  The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

At this stage, piling on Bush is being touted by the right as being an unreasonable attempt to avoid accountability, and the alliteration in that clause just happened. I personally don't think so -- as it was difficult for Bush to get a blowjob from an intern after Clinton, it's difficult to run a country when you've got two losing wars and an economy that is tits up and now starting to stink. And, for how long did the Reagan administration blame Jimmy Carter, who ranks significantly higher than Bush? Still, it does seem at times like a futile endeavor...best expressed in musically terms.

MERSA SPREAD BY COWS AND SEX AND SEX WITH COWS...

Sometimes, you just want to know more...FAIL says that the headline is too long but if the purpose of the headline is to make you want to read the rest of the story, well, shitfuck...

Intellectual Content and stuff...

From a serious site where I write under an assumed name...

Complex, Complicated, Chaos

 

The Second Coming By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 Soldiers should probably never turn to poetry as a way of explaining reality – the life of a soldier is ultimately based on fairly simple things. Yet, reality is quite a bit different, and the reality that we navigate today is pretty much one thing if only that –NOT SIMPLE.  This makes the easy solution not so easy as we might like…

A recent series of articles in the NEW YORK TIMES have pointed the way to at least grasping the problem.  David Segal’s article on the complex versus the complicated in the May 2 Times Week in Review provides a really superb picture of   how bizarre the world can become.  And yet, human beings are hardwired to prefer the simple to the complex…

Segal’s article cites the McCrystal Rosetta Stone, the spaghetti PowerPoint that explains how Afghanistan got so screwed up and how to fix it. As the general pointed out after looking at it, if we can understand it, we win the war.  Of course, we don’t understand it – our logic tells us that if we can find the right axis, the right spot to leverage our power – combat, intelligence, economic, diplomatic, anthropological – we can change the entire complexion.  However, our logic may be letting us down; there may be no single spot to exert leverage;   we may have to simultaneously exert leverage in different levels and directions or in some alchemical sequence to win, or at least not lose or at least, not lose too badly.  I suspect that much like Colonel Harry Summers famous understanding of Vietnam, we won’t understand it until it’s over, and we’ve had a chance to figure it out.

The Magic PowerPoint as shown in Elizabeth Bumiller’s Times Article on PowerPoint

Segal’s article address the root of our issues in some ways – we are limited in our ability to learn. There are lots of examples – I was recently watching a marvelous video from the New Orleans Heritage and Jazz Fest of Susan Tedeschi and the Derek Trucks Band playing an old Junior Wells and Buddy Guy song, Little By Little.  As a musician, I was seriously taken by the playing and was trying to figure out just what she was doing – at one point, she took her left hand off the guitar and shook out her fingers, then took her pick in her right hand and put it in her mouth and then played a part of her solo with her thumb and fingers for a measure or two – then she took the pick out of her mouth and continued playing. Never missed a beat, never hit a wrong note. ( If you haven't listened to it yet or watched it, well, it's the post before this one. Not gonna post it again. Here's another one instead...

Ok, what happened there? Nothing that doesn’t happen a lot to guitarists – their fingers cramp slightly. Susan’s been playing smoking blues guitar for a while now; guitarists are vulnerable to carpal tunnel as well as typists, clam diggers and welders. Same probably with the pick – the dangers lie  in ignoring what happened or in placing entirely too much significance into what we observe.  Sometimes, a cigar is just a good damn cigar…and sometimes, it explodes.

The problems we face in understanding the world and then doing something are compounded by the problems of the complicated versus the complex.  At first, I thought Segal was just playing sematic games, but after a few seconds reflection, I realized that his insight was pretty profound.  He points out that some things are complicated – I understand how the internal combustion engine works, sort of; I have no clue how to rebuild the fuel injection on my 2008 Mustang GT. Actually, I’m not even sure I can find it – but, I love that car. I had a 1989 GT that had an engine I understood really well ; you opened up the hood and there it was. It didn’t have antilock brakes or traction control, and was a bitch in everything except dry pavement.  In fact, there was one corner between my home and Fort Lewis that always guaranteed a fishtailing slip slide and away, regardless of road conditions or speed or how I handled the clutch or what I was doing with the gas.  The car was too complicated to drive there but I could probably repair it if I needed to; the new one is far less complicated to drive, but impossible for me to repair if I need to.

This is not all that dissimilar to the problems in Afghanistan, or Iraq. Desert Storm was relatively simple;  retaliation for 9/11 was relatively simple; everything since Tora Bora and Secretary of State Powell’s speech to the UN has been complicated. All the attempts to wrap them up in catch-phrases or slogans or talking points have contributed solely to background noise. It’s complicated and we have yet to agree as to what we’re trying to do…which adds a helluva lot of complexity to a complex situation.

It’s worth digressing to health care reform and the Tea Party Movement.  Although I can feel a great deal of sympathy for these folks,  the various nonsensical things that have come out of it alternately amaze, amuse, or plain piss the old Top Sergeant off. The health care mess is incredible and has been for years. For a group of people to complain about “Keeping your government hands off my healthcare” is to complain not just about the Medicare or the VA or the Tricare that so many of them have; it’s to complain about the FDA and standards for hygiene and sanitation, and new devices and medicines funded by the National Institute of Health or the Center for Disease Control.  Of course, the best solution is some sort of single payer system or single schedule of fees and reimbursements; what we are ultimately talking about is not a bureaucrat taking your temperature, but a bureaucrat approving a funds transfer to your doctor. Which is what insurance companies do, or actually, try not to do.

Another place we the complicated versus the complex is facing us while laughing evilly is in the Gulf of Mexico and the whole issue of off shore drilling. Every time someone tries to make the reality reduce to a catch phrase – The Wetlands! versus Drill Baby Drill! – we get bit. Compromise between positions is impossible, so it might help to stake out new positions. President Obama tried to, and then complicated technology bit him on the ass. While it appears that British Petroleum might have avoided this with a few more safety features and better blow off valves and more redundancy, the fact is they didn’t. There’s a balancing act between safety, cost, environment and energy going on, and our failure to see the complexity of the issues while lost in the complications and the catch phrases will haunt us and our grandchildren. (Actually, having no children, it will haunt your grandchildren…)

Segal points out that there is a conceptual difference between complicated and complex.  Trying to reduce the complicated Yin and Yang of Afghanistan Strategy to something simple, A+B=C, is to miss the point in a world where A+B=F9*Dog or some other absurdity.  However, defining goals and objectives in simple terms, establishing order in the face of complexity, is critical. The solutions are not simple, but the goals should be.

It’s really as simple process. Take a big hairy goal, like “Ensuring that all Americans have access to healthcare that is affordable, effective and efficient,” and figure out what that means. The statement is simple, the complexities are huge.  Do I, as a citizen, have an absolute right to Viagra if I need it? Shudder to think of the complicated issues that need to be defined.

But, if we don’t define the damn things, we’re ultimately screwed.  That wire diagram for Victory in  Afghanistan exists for lots of reasons, most of them bad. However, the situation it describes is real – and for every situation we get into that evolves to that point, there’s a concrete failure to deal with complexity first.  It’s one of old Stephen – Highly Effective Everything – Covey’s first Seven Habits. Begin with the end in mind; define what good is; describe what success looks like. Then we can argue about the techniques to get there.

Undoubtedly, McCrystal was being ironic and honest in his comment.  The problem is that before we figure  the sonofabitch out, a lot more people will die and many more ill effects will loose upon the world.  If it seems at times like anarchy, it is. The anarchy of reality…

 

For your listening pleasure...

Listen to this, and then check out Wolfgang's Vault...Since I am basically in a vicious, uncommunicative mood, this thing which is one of my favorite Stones things anyway, says it all for me...Mick definitely was a great harp player when he wanted to be. Probably a better harp player than vocalist, actually...Now he's the front man of his own tribute band...

Why doesn't Walmart or Target have ads like this?

You be the judge. However, I'm really not sure about the form these folks are using in the jump. I know they're trying to do something to advertise their store, but the exit from the aircraft is lousy, and I'm not sure about the aerodynamics of their form will free-falling. I also gotta think that the body oil could result in chute slippage when the ripchord is pulled and the chute deploys. However, here's to airborne wet dreams...

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!

Cross - Marcelo Cross DVD Live Uruguay Rare - Click here for more amazing videos
...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...

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? 

"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.