Win On Diagonals

I hardly think the average American swaddled in unsecured and secured debt, most of it probably from medical expenses, or to float the grand dream of ‘realistic’ home ownership, gives a rats ass about the Federal deficit, or comprehends the truly signifigant components of this debt. I won’t write about the creative accounting that and the convenient lumping of certain entitlement programs that give a ‘we’re on fire’ impression of how entitlements need to be whacked off. I won’t go off the deep end with true cost and real beneficiaries of the disasterous turns capitalism has taken (particularly in US) since financialization of economy was set free to roam like a bull being confronted with a red dolly spinning in the center before a crowd of inebriated spectators, so happy for the conveniences of our modern life, that they bought the bullshit from both sides of the Wall Street Party.

Change the focus…..with all the western interventions at foot right now…seemingly to distract us (US?) from something else…(what might that be dear reader?)

It is worth recalling that most Afghans were pleased when the Taliban crapped out in 2001 and most Iraqis were glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein in 2003. But it did not follow that the opponents of autocracy were united, had real support or were less corrupt or more competent than their predecessors. Nor were Afghans or Iraqis prepared to see foreign armies determine who should hold power in their countries.

Pauci vident morbum suum, omnes amant

few see their own diseases , and all are attached to them

so no wonder…so much inter-’plaguing’ abounds

acknowledging constant error
knowing you are sick…sick?…
mind

whenas in conclusion
all are fools

Ob ventosae nomen artis

(to get a name for a worthless talent)

finding this quotation in one of the greater books to be more than congeries of such great quotations, but a masterpiece in itself (The Anatomy of Melancholy by Mr. Robert Burton) on a sweetly hung-over Saturday featuring hail bullets, extreme gales, and other tempest features, that have made venturing out on this 16th of April of 2011–unappetizing, was delightful. To think!!!! First the antiquity of this thought (not quite sure without looking it up…but–you know…glory days of Greek, or whenever exactly Seneca wrote….early common era….. (?) and finding it in this text from early 17th century. I had a conversation with E last night after seeing musical ‘Book of Mormon’ (excellent!) on subway. It dealt with this topic, that is, people with no talent making a name for themselves, the newest incarnations, the industry behind it, the painting it up, and packaging it out…. Thinking…how much remains the same, how much is constant and simply, but not so simply reconditioned with the times, inflected, emasculated, emboldened, or whatever the effect, the change, with the possibilities brought on with technologies, and taken away by technologies, as when certain technologies (using term with great broadness of meaning) render certain techniques of investigation obsolete, or push such techniques or ways of thinking about things, way to the margins, as they are now erroneously thought unnecessary because of new reliance and trust in ‘X.’ Anyway, just some wildly meandering thoughts borne of an amusement in re-appreciating the contiguous tissues of a certain awareness or critical awareness, about a certain topic, or idea, in this case, thoughts on those that make a name for themselves with no talent whatsoever…

rambly roo……out and over

a few gut wrenching facts on that most horrible of oxymoronic terms… friendly fire…..

“The number of casualties [ie. killed and wounded] associated with friendly fire has often been stunning. One French general estimated that approximately 75,000 French casualties in World War I were caused by French artillery fire.

“An estimated five per cent of [US] Vietnam casualties were attributed to friendly fire. During the first Persian Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, 23–24 per cent of US fatalities and 77 per cent of American vehicle losses were attributed to friendly fire.”

Another military military scholar, Kenneth K. Steinweg, wrote a paper, Dealing Realistically with Fratricide (Parameters, Spring 1995), estimating that 10 to 15 per cent of US casualties during the 20th century were caused by friendly fire, which equates to between 177,000 and 250,000 casualties.

Historical examples of friendly fire are so prevalent as to be characterized as normal rather than exceptional. In some cases, friendly fire was the result of inexperience and inadequate training.

For example, in 1643, during the English Civil War, poorly trained and inexperienced parliamentary infantry organised in three lines attacked a heavily fortified building held by royalist troops. Instead of the forward line firing first and then retiring to the rear to re-load while the next line in turn fired, all three fired simultaneously, effectively eliminating the front rank.

A particularly bitter case came right at the end of World War Two when RAF pilots flying Typhoons attacked four German ships in the Bay of Lubeck in the Baltic Sea, believing them to be carrying escaping SS officers.

The Typhoons sank the ships and then, under orders to spare no one, spent an hour strafing the survivors in the water, only to find later that they had machine-gunned about 10,000 Jews from the Neuengamme Camp in northern Germany.

Becky is on the bye bye..poory Becky I”ve always had a tender spot for Beck, partly because of his deep roots in the mulch of American nutdom, fertilized by the powerful psychic idiom of rebirth and redemption.

His mother and her lover drowned in Puget Sound, off Tacoma iwhen beck was 15. He says she was a suicide. He also says he was on booze and drugs from 16 to 31, when – through one marriage and out the other side – he eschewed the suicidal path of his fellow Washingtonian Kurt Cobain and joined AA. He left the Catholic Church and became a Mormon.Mormon! Sing Becky Sing Pecky.

Glenn Beck says his intellectual development was nourished by close reading of Nietzsche, Hitler, Billy Graham and Carl Sagan. Why not add Carlyle? He started his Mercury Radio Arts Company in 2002 and in less than a decade was earning $23 million a year with a big national audience.

Hitler taught him the uses of fear, and also the total irrelevance of criticisms that the fears he touted were phantasms from some distant time – the Sixties, the Thirties, the early Twenties, all patches of the twentieth century when the Left had some heft.

To us Americans in the late Nineties and current decade, maxed out our freakin credit cards, with negative equity hup the wazoo….. amid a political culture swerving relentlessly to the right, Beck endlessly promoted the conspiracies and looming threat of a left in this country which in reality has effectively ceased to exist. Bye Becky!

Thanks Alex….breaking it and bringing it down!

Harvard University’s male graduates in that same year (the heirs and assigns of Woodrow Wilson’s small class of persons deserving of a liberal education) took up careers as high-end traffickers in the drug of debt. It’s a lucrative trade, up to the standard of the cotton export from the dear old antebellum South.