Dancing Days

     Feeling like the world is pulling me in several directions at once.

    I feel like crap.  My sinuses are throbbing.  My eyes hurt.  I am tired. My left ankle is sore.  My right shoulder still hasn’t completely recovered from whatever the hell I did to it a week or two ago.  Physically I am spent, and yet…

That's me on Clarinet

     I feel good!

       I got a call for a possible temp to hire gig a few hours ago.  Again someone found my resume on-line.  I will not jump for joy and say I FOUND A JOB! because I haven’t, but this is the best opportunity I’ve had in a while.  $2 more per hour then my last temp gig, if it happens.  Now I looked up the company on-line and looked for scams and complaints in relation to them, but found nothing but one person saying they had been shorted a $100 bonus.  And whom would I be temping with, should this short term gig come through?

     Xerox.

    That’s right, a company I worked for from 1990 to 1994.  But if they pay, and they want me, I won’t turn my nose up at it. 

     And yet I feel like crap.  There is more sobering stuff going on with me, positive but sobering.  I called a place today to get the ball rolling on bankruptcy.  I called the wrong place…or the right place, but at the wrong time.  They gave me a phone number for the New York Bar Association, who will refer me to a member of the bar in good standing after which I call the company I called today and get the counseling I legally need before I can attempt to declare bankruptcy.

   I spoke of my feelings about the extra hoops I must jump through in the Rhino Nuggets section of this blog.

   I paid the rent today… or more appropriately, the landlord picked up the rent check that I wrote yesterday, today.  I went shopping.  Spent $900 today between the two.  Things have to move fast for me to feel in any way secure about my future, because the money is disappearing quickly.  But I must have patience.

    No money coming in.  Bills sapping resources.  Tired, feeling ill.  Possible job coming through though, help with keeping the predators creditors at bay as well.  Good and bad today, just like every other day, the good and bad just had greater contrast than usual today.

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   Yesterday’s speech by President Obama, in it’s entirety, from Youtube’s White house page. 

      

    You might dislike the President’s call here, especially in the financial pickle we find ourselves in, and this is an ugly war regardless (is there any such thing as a pretty war?, and if so how?) but tell me, what serious choice did he have?   Yes we end up propping up a corrupt Karzai government here, but where is the good alternative? Can you seriously think of one?  I have heard a ton of people say this is the wrong thing to do, but none, NONE,  have offered a reasonable alternative. 

    I am not sure there is a reasonable alternative.  There is an American problem in Afghanistan, there needs to be an American solution.  But just because there will be an American solution, doesn’t mean it will be an American solution that all Americans can get behind.  This situation was a crap sammich well before the current Administration got it’s hands on it, did you think he was Harry zarking Potter, and he was just going to make the bad crap go away with a wave of his f****** wand?

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   That’s it for me.  Later!

Today’s nuggets, by Marcus Aurelius, Via wikiquote:  All that is harmony for you, my Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for you is too early or too late for me. Everything is fruit to me that your seasons bring, Nature. All things come of you, have their being in you, and return to you.

Take heed not to be transformed into a Caesar, not to be dipped in the purple dye, for it does happen. Keep yourself therefore, simple, good, pure, grave, unaffected, the friend of justice, religious, kind, affectionate, strong for your proper work. Wrestle to be the man philosophy wished to make you.

Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.

Sunset In Afghanistan

Who says I don’t love America?   A big picture before I take a look at the big picture.  I didn’t get this pic from my usual source, I.E., Wikipedia commons.  I got it from another fine wordpress blog (hope he doesn’t mind), head over and take a look.  Seriously, go take a look for me.  I haven’t read much of it, went over just looking for pics, maybe i missed some hella content.  Drop me a line if you like what you see there.

Thanks!

An anime Sarah Palin?  The Gun…the Wink.. the bimbette thing… Seems fairly Palin-like.   Ahhhh, who cares, there be important stuff going on out there….

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Kabul

 

30,000 new troops in Afghanistan, says President Obama, in a speech at West Point.  Bad news there, but not a surprise.  If it gets the job done, meets the objective, and we have an exit strategy, a realistic exit strategy, I can get behind this.  I don’t want to have troops there, but if it takes 30,000 American troops 2+ years to properly train the Afghanis so we don’t have to stay there in a holding action that’ll take an additional decade, which was an actual option to my knowledge, and then bring our fine men and women home, then I am fine with it.

Very Unbush-like.  An actual exit strategy.  Very UnBush-like, fixing a mess that someone else left.   Our president has had to add tens of thousands of troops already to shore up an already deteriorating Afghanistan.  The situation is still bad, but this move is meant to stabilize the problem well enough, to make it the afghanis problem, so we can get on with our lives.

And we can get on with the job of actually killing Osama Bin Laden.  That being one of two main points of the original exercise in Afghanistan, even though Rummy screwed that up by letting OBL through to Pakistan due to his own skittishness.   The other main point being to fight the Taliban, who were as much the enemy as Al-Qaeda.  We got rid of some of them, but they retreated into the mountains.  The job the President is doing here is to keep them in check, by strengthening the Afghanis so we don’t have to fight them ourselves.

For those of you with short memories, President Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq (which isn’t happening fast enough) and ramping up the war in Afghanistan and the war against Al-Qaeda.  I will be happy when this whole thing is over, when we can say we are done there.

And there is no victory here.  None.  Victory would be the death of Osama Bin Laden, and the destruction of Al-Qaeda.   Osama is a question mark, he will eventually die,whether we get to him before time does, is part of an uncertain future, but Al-qaeda, they cannot be defeated, not at least in a traditional military sense.  There is no one place that you could take that would give us the victory.  There is no WWII type goal.  No Berlin to besiege, no Tokyo to firebomb.

We are firefighters, they are 1,000  fires. There is no victory against 1,000 fires, you put out one fire, and go to the next one, work until the job is done.   The big question now is one of cost.  How do we pay for this?  That is a question I cannot answer.  We’ll find out soon enough.

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That’s it from here.  Later!

Today’s nuggets, Via wikiquote: Let us learn our lessons. … Never believe any war will be smooth and easy or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events… incompetent or arrogant commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprise, awful miscalculations.  Winston Churchill

War is not a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided. Philip Bobbitt