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 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 decade long holding action, 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 troop 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

The Right Moves

       

      Has the Obama administration made the right moves to fix the financial crisis?  The answer to that is not clear cut, not by any stretch of the imagination.  Yes it has is the answer, if by yes you mean that it has made the best moves possible to shore up the system as best as possible, so as to make sure that our financial house does not collapse. No it hasn’t is the answer if you think that there need to be fundamental changes to the way the system is run.  And curiously, both answers are right.

     Without the bailout of the auto industry, the economy would be in much worse financial straits.  Past experience shows that once manufacturing sector jobs are lost, they stay lost.  Ask someone who used to work in the steel mills in Pittsburgh.  Without the auto bailout, GM and Chrysler would have collapsed and taken, between themselves and the ancillary closings of companies that had contracts for and worked with these two, an additional 3,000,000 or so jobs throughout this country. 

    Where would unemployment be if you added those jobs to the already swelled unemployment rolls? How much more deep would we be in the hole now?

     The stimulus has held or saved over 1,000,000 jobs, according to current data.  That is 4 million jobs that have been saved, directly or indirectly due to government intervention.  If you blame the President for the ills of this nation, be magnanimous and give him credit for not allowing the nation to completely fall apart, and keep things from falling completely out of control.

    So much for government as evil ogre trying to steal your freedom.

     Unemployment is very bad, but it has stabilized.  Don’t think so? Do you remember last January? Last February? When Jobs were being shed at a rate of nearly three quarter of a million jobs a month? Now I wouldn’t call us even remotely out of the woods just yet, but I think it is fair to say that this White House’s policies have had some effect.  Jobless claims in February had been on a high and steady upward trend for over six months, and since then, that number has slowly, but surely fallen month by month, from a high of over 650,000 per month in February to just over 500,000 a month last month, and that number looks to be lower than that when the numbers are reported on Wednesday, with the consensus range for that number being around or just under 500,000.  Before the great recession hit that number was generally around 300 to 350 thousand per month. 

     Not out of the woods just yet, like I said, but things are leveling out, and if this, the lagging indicator that it has been of the health of the economy, is leveling out, then that is a very good sign indeed. 

    Now, has the President been 100% on point economically? No, not even close.   

    If you make an analogy that this economic crisis is a house on fire, and we know who set the damned fire, then why haven’t the arsonists been arrested?  Why did AIG and Citigroup get the sweet deals they got, and why have we been left holding the bag?  I understand that these deals were signed off on under the previous administration, but is the current administration helpless? Does Goldman Sachs, and their ilk,  have their tentacles so completely wrapped around the fed and the government that we can no longer do anything to stop them from robbing us blind?

    I disagree with the calls for Treasury Secretary Geithner to resign, but there needs to be much stricter control of the business of investment, a much greater reigning in of both the fed and the wall street trillionaires who steered the ship of state into an iceberg. 

    And someone needs to go to prison for raping the economy.  Several someones.

     Capitalism works,  but unrestrained capitalism can be tyrannical, as we are seeing and have seen in this current crisis.  No one forces anyone to make bad investments or take risks, but wall street created an atmosphere where in order to make the most profit, more and more exotic instruments became the norm, and it ceased to be investing in companies and markets and became gambling.  Gambling is not investing and the entire market in recent years has become one giant casino, run by the gamblers, thanks to deregulation. 

    America was not created “of the gamblers, for the gamblers, by the gamblers”  The President needs to successfully challenge the powers on wall street and bring them to heel, make the government truly independent of them, and continue the work on the issue of unemployment before we can say that this administration’s economic policies are truly 100% on the right track.

    Then and only then, will America truly begin to feel like it’s on the right track.  Some, but not all, of the right moves are being made, in time that will show, I think. I hope the rest will be made soon, we can only watch and wait. 

   Recovery though, is inevitable, it’s just a few years away.  Be patient.

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That’s it for me.  Later!

Today’s nuggets, Via wikiquote:  I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk. But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.  Alan Greenspan

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.   John Maynard Keynes.

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.  Ben Bernanke

Tales of Brave Ulysses

     Pleasure before business. 

     Usually when I post these viddys, they get taken down by Youtube shortly afterwards.  Nevertheless I will make the attempt.  Cream live from the smothers brothers show in 1968.  Enjoy.

   

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    1,836 dead, 705 missing.  $90,000,000,000 worth of devastation.  Laid at the feet of the Army corp of engineers.  In federal court in New Orleans today, U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. ruled in favor of 6 plaintiffs, one business and 5 individuals, who argued that lack of oversight by the  USACE led to the flooding of the ninth ward and St. Bernard parish.   The case clears the way for 100,000 other claims, according to the bloomberg report.

   Many in the area have said that they thought that the reason  the ninth ward flooded was because of neglect by the USACE in maintaining the levee.  That I cannot speak to.  I am not from that area, and will not bash in either direction.  I will leave that to those who live there, and the dead and missing stand in mute testimony that whether the judge in this case is right or not, something went horribly wrong, and this, right or wrong, is the long awaited first step in a lot of peoples lives to help them get back what they lost that fateful day in 2005.

   Mind you, from what I am hearing, the judge is right to hold the USACE accountable here.  It was the corp that dug a navigational channel,  the MRGO (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet), a canal which was “designed to provide a shortcut from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico“.  This ultimately funneled the storm surge, made it 20% higher and doubling it’s speed, according to a study done by LSU. 

     Clearly not their intent, but you are responsible for what you do, regardless of you’re original intent. 

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     I’ve been talking to people again.  And you know that always causes trouble.  Drama seems to follow in my wake, no matter where I go.  This is just a quick run through of what was said between me and a few other people on face book, talking about the President. 

    I ran into a woman on-line who said Barack Obama is a Muslim.  AGAIN with the ass-clowns.  Claimed to have a viddy with proof.  Since I like to think of myself as open minded, I decided to watch.  And besides the one piece where the President, in a memorable gaffe, said he was Muslim while talking to  George Stephanopoulos, there was nothing in it which shows him to be Muslim. There were no other rea… Ya know, rather than tell you about it, I’ll let the viddy speak for itself.  Take a good look at what the right wing-nuts call proof that the President is a Muslim.

    

   If that is the absolute best you can do, you really do need to try harder.  This is weak from one end to the other and everywhere in-between.  Repeated playing him speaking a few words with the proper inflection for the language spoken isn’t proof of religion.  Having a Muslim father isn’t proof either.  The only spot where you could even come close to saying he says it is in the clip where he is talking to Stephanopoulos and misspeaks, and most of us have seen the entire viddy on that and have dismissed it. 

    Most, not all.   The wing nuts’ll hold onto any old thing that validates their beliefs.  But then again, I think most of us are guilty of that on some level at some point in our lives.  But not with this kind of tenacity.  She says this video is proof of his being a Muslim, and my not believing he’s a Muslim after seeing it is proof that I am in denial and called me stupid.  You tell me? Am I in denial?  Am I stupid? I’d really like an honest opinion from someone who hasn’t watched the viddy before whether it constitutes a proof of his belief in Islam or not. I don’t see it.

    She even asked me to prove a negative (silly rabbit), and said that he has said in “many interviews” that he is Muslim.  If anyone out there has anything on that, drop a link in the comments section and I’ll go over it and talk about it in a later blog.

     Oh, BTW, this discussion started with my wife saying she thought it was kinda scary that people on the right are selling bumper stickers and T-shirts in reference to the President that have a passage from the bible, PSALM 109:8 that reads:

“Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.”

     I think it’s anti-social and crude, but she seems somewhat concerned that it promotes violence against the President.  Which it does, kinda, but again, it’s a free country, and it’s only criminal behavior if you actually make threats or take a shot at him.

     But it is wrong regardless, even if it isn’t illegal, it is immoral to use inflammatory language like this against another person.  It isn’t the Christian thing to do. Christianity is supposed to be about love your neighbor.  The crap spouted here isn’t Christianity, it has nothing to do with being Christ like, or even being a good person.  It is an easy way to get away with anti-social behavior and hiding it in a religious context, every bit of it.  Her calling the President a Muslim, the whole psalm 109 thing, all of it.

    What can I do, though? I have to fight this whenever and wherever I see it.  If I allow ignorance to flourish, I am personally to blame for anything that happens as a result of that ignorance.  And like hell will I allow that to go unchecked.  Hell no.

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   More music before I depart.  I haven’t had a chance to play guitar yet today, so some joyous guitar music for you. From the master, Andres Segovia.

    

Today’s nuggets, Via wikiquote:  Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education & free discussion are the antidotes of both.  Thomas Jefferson

As it is necessary not to invite robbery by supineness, so it is our duty not to suppress tenderness by suspicion; it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.  Samuel Johnson

No real reason for it

           Boy, ya gotta love this guy.  An idiot whom we all know and think is a complete loon is at it again.  I won’t name the douche-wad, click the links to play spot the asshole, but if you click here or the other link, and watch the viddies, you’ll see why I call this person an idiot.  The only reason I won’t give his name is because if I say his name and tell exactly what he did, I lend credence on some level to his clearly unscrupulous stupidity.  Any man who would use a rape analogy the way he used it here seems to me to be a man who would say anything just to keep his name in the papers and keep his name circulating in the press.

    An attention whore.  If I wanted to listen to an attention whore, I’d have my head examined, no one needs that kinda shit in their life.

  I don’t mind political dissent, but when it takes this form, it ceases to be political dissent, and becomes personal abuse.  Which I don’t mind either, but call it what it is, say you’re an asshole if you’re an asshole, don’t hide behind politics when you spew yer stupid. 

    Here’s some more joy about the assclown.

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    As i put this viddy in here, I am still watching it.   So no commentary on it.   Maybe I’ll comment on it in the Rhino nuggets section after I’m done watching and listening to it. 

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    I have a “why the f*** not” story for you today.      For those who think that America is corrupt and evil, stop that!  I just found a curious and interesting piece of news.  There is a group of people called Transparency International, which charts corruption in the form of  what they call their “Corruption Perceptions Index” which is a measure of domestic, public sector corruption that draws on over a dozen different expert and business surveys and reflects the  perceived levels of public sector corruption in a given country.

     The United States is the 19th least corrupt nation on earth according to transparency international, this year and in truth we have never finished out of the top 20, but have yet to crack the top ten. There was one stated reason for concern about the United States, and that is a perception of the public that the congress is the institution most affected by corruption.   On top of that, The United States, though finishing in a respectable second place in the Western Hemisphere, came in second place to….Canada.

  Ouch.  American Hosers and your evil legislators!    LOL!

     New Zealand is, according to these surveys the least corrupt place on earth, followed by Denmark, Singapore and Sweden.  Zimbabwe is moved up 20 spots on this list, from 166th to 146th place, and that probably has as much to do with the positive influence of Morgan Tsvangirai as anything else. The most corrupt nation on earth, for the third year in a row is….. Somalia! Afghanistan made a game try for last place, but it just wasn’t meant to be, I guess.

   To be 100% serious though, this is after all a perception index created with business surveys. Don’t know what there agenda is, if there is any, and as a consequence I don’t know how serious you can really take it.  I really want to find out about this, but I don’t have time in this space to look up the surveys they used for this piece right now.  I’ll see if I can find the time to look into it later, and see if there is anything to this, or if these people are just bullshit.

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  That’s about it from here. Later!

Today’s nuggets, via wikiquote:  Virtue runs no risk of becoming contemptible by being exposed to view, and it is better to be despised for simplicity than to be tormented by continual hypocrisy.  Seneca The Younger

 Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.  Marcus Aurelius

Final edit 1:16 am 11/18/09