The magic of the private sector!

As most of middle-class India subscribes more and more to the notion that the private sector is the cure for all ills, cutting out politicians and fixing everything wrong with the economy and the world, it's worth reading this.

From the 'Bihar is not a state, it's a state of mind' files...

This is priceless! Well, actually, priced at 10,000 rupees, to be precise...

A salutary lesson for those who might be melatonin-disadvantaged and are foolhardy enough to visit Bihar - always, but *always*, ask the price first.

Decline and Fall ...

A decade or two, when Hollywood started embracing the notion that videogames could be turned into movies, without all that messy business of finding stories, getting good screenplays, character development and similar wasteful activities, it seemed like the bottom of the barrel as far as creativity in Tinseltown was concerned.

Ha ha. And ha again.

Turns out all of us were ignoring a rich and potent source of compelling narratives, with gripping tension and rich characters - board games. Yes, that's right - board games. Read this and weep.

Coming soon to a theater near you - Scrabble The Musical!

As it sinks in - Part IV

The more things change, the less they change.

Growing up in Calcutta, possibly the last place on earth where you will still find street graffiti that embrace Lenin, Stalin and other colossi of Communism, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the rapid unraveling of the Soviet bloc, one of the memes that you heard all the time was that 'Communism did not fail, because the Soviet Union and all its allies never achieved true Communism. If it were implemented in its pure form, as it's meant to be, it would never fail'. This line of course was both true and absurd, because it is unlikely that Communism will ever be implemented on any world in its 'pure' form, and the closer you tried to get, the worse it got and the more people wanted to get away from it.

This purity meme never quite goes away and makes for such strange bedfellows! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the latest variant, from that witless idiot Jonah Goldberg - 'True conservatism has not been repudiated with the election of Barack Obama, because George Bush's reputation as a Conservative is simply a Liberal (boo! hiss!!) smear - he's not really a Conservative, because if he were, we would have won the election, Conservatism would have triumphed and I would get free blowjobs every day'. At least, that's what I think he's saying ...

Because it's difficult to read such tripe without laughing your mid-morning tea through your nose, given that he's got a hard-on for 'reformers' who worship 'market principles'. Oh, that's right - that would be the same market principles allied to naked greed that have brought the American economy to its knees. But then again, you know what Goldberg's pals are probably saying on Wall Street - since everyone knows all markets are actually not perfect markets, if only we had perfect markets with perfect information, none of this would have happened. (And of course, as we all know, if frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their asses on the ground quite so much!)

The leading 'intellectuals' of the Neocon movement have always had an uncanny resemblance to a pack of monkeys throwing their faeces against a wall and howling at those who didn't appreciate their genius. After eight long years, it's good to sit back and have a belly laugh at their efforts.

P.s. He also promises to be the gift that keeps on giving, since he seems to feel that the person to rally the troops is that well known patriot, Rush 'I got my housemaid to enable my prescription drug addiction' and 'I dodged the Vietnam draft because of a pimple on my ass' Limbaugh! And the person at the head of this fearsome band of intellectuals and reformers? Why the person who makes Vlad 'The Bad' Putin quake in his boots every time he looks towards Alaska - Sarah 'Mediocre and proud of it' Palin! For once, it looks like we're going to be laughing a lot over the next few years ...

As it sinks in - Part III

Required reading. I'd read Joe Conason on this subject, as well as more about John Judis and Ruy Texeira way back when, even before Kerry lost to Bush in '04. 2006 and last week are beginning to bear them out and it will not make pleasant reading for those who went to sleep happy on the 3rd November 2004, dreaming of that 'permanent Republican majority'. In common with most other tenets of the Republican/ Conservative faith, the best years for that particular meme are probably in the past already.

The gift that keeps on giving - Part I

Bring back Sarah Palin! After all, if the loony element of the Republican Party, I mean the Republican Party, insists that she is the One, the True Saviour of Real Conservatism, who am I to disagree?
And since when do Real Conservatives have to conform to Socialist Elitist dogmas that distinguish between continents and countries anyway, huh?

As it sinks in - Part II

This is really worth reading.

As it sinks in - Part I

While I am going to go down that 8 years overdue glass of champagne tonight, it's worth reflecting bit by bit on exactly what President Obama means. It means a great chance to reverse the slippage of the Supreme Court into total wingnut territory, as Glenn Greenwald summarizes here.

Bipartisanship? No thanks, not just now...

Hardly Socratic, but an interesting exchange of emails on a morning where everyone is waking up to a new dawn.

It was provoked by my Facebook status update, which read: ".... is happy. Very very happy and watching Fox News, loving the sight of those blowhards spin and squirm, still lying as the ship sinks below the waves!"

NW

I think your Facebook status smacks of schadenfreude and is another indication that the pendulum will now swing to the other extreme -- right-wing hubris replaced by left-wing lunacy. So much crowing, so much "good riddance to the Republicans." Is this the much-boasted of Era of Change? Already the Democrats are licking their lips about how their majorities in Congress have kicked the Republicans in the ass and will help them drive their own pork through. I bet the left-wing base (like you) will turn a blind eye to the depredations of their own side that are sure to follow.

I hope I'm wrong.

What a pity more people don't read Kipling these days. He wrote the Recessional during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the very pinnacle of the British Empire. It's sobering reading, and perhaps the left-wing, now that it has secured that much dreamed of victory and is puffing out its chest, should take seriously.

Here it is, in case you haven't read it: http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Kipling/Recessional.htm

God of our fathers, known of old-- Lord of our far-flung battle line Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine--Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,Lest we forget - lest we forget!

Me
Today at 2:22pm

Sorry boss, I don't agree. If the likes of DeLay and Palin were still in power, they would not be reading Kipling to each other. (She probably thinks he's some European Communist, which would at least make him laugh in his grave) The exact reason Cheney and Bush were able to ram the public up the fundament is because liberals have always tried to find the middle path and woke up too late to the transformative nature of the American right wing at this point. Read the preface to Krugman's The Great Unraveling. If you have a Republican party that is already saying the real reason for their loss is that they were not 'conservative enough', that they didn't attack enough and that Palin was the best thing about them, then trying to be conciliatory to them is like offering mediation to a wounded rattlesnake. You cannot fix the economy, the energy crisis, the Iraq war or the healthcare crisis by trying to be conciliatory to Limbaugh and gang. Wait and watch for the speed with which they go on the attack - the modern Republican party is now little more than a cancerous growth that is only capable of being in endless opposition.

And frankly, I think it's way past time that liberals stood up and displayed some spine for our beliefs. Why the fuck are we hampered by perceptions of some pockets of left-wing extremism when right-wing extremism is pervasive, all round and so aggressive and refusing to admit even a chink of reality through the window? Did you see Limbaugh or Coulter backing off a jot during the Clinton years or the Bush years? You shoot the mad dog and throw a bone to the good ones. If the Obama administration decides to play nice they will find their entire legislative agenda in deadlock in 30 days.

They have not been elected to play nice - a black man with a suspicious name has wiped the floor with a white war veteran. If they have to implement the change that the voters are asking them to, it will not be done by playing nice. These changes have to be rammed through - if the Republicans stand in the way, and all the signs are that they will, they should be roadkill. Two years from now, if Obama is not able to show the legislative accomplishments that he has been voted in for, the excuse can't be that I was nice to the Republicans, but they wouldn't play ball.

I really think you should read that Krugman piece - he talks about how Napoleon took all of the European empires by surprise because everyone believed that all his extremism was just talk and that once they got to the real business of ruling, he would moderate himself. Then he drew the parallel to Bush and the current Republican gang, who pushed harder and faster to the right than the Democrats ever thought was possible and therefore, while the Democrats believed the rhetoric about bipartisanship after 9/11, Rove, Cheney and co simply got a better grip on the knives and pushed them in harder between their ribs. That kind of stuff has to be burned out of the system, not by talking nicey-nicey.

Me
Today at 2:24pm

P.s. Remember why Clinton was not able to do anything about healthcare reform? Because he tried to get the Republicans along and they declared a jihad on Hillary and him. To repeat that experience once again, in the name of cleaning up the political culture would be rampant stupidity. Remember what the Republicans said about bipartisanship when they came to power - another name for date rape, according to Grover Norquist. That's what they really think - forget all the 'let's all get along' crap that will be coming out now.

YES! YES! YES!

8 long years; 8 long years we've waited for this!


What's the only thing that can make this any better?


Watching Fox News and hearing a panel of lying bloviators say that they want to take a nap for the next four years! Yes, please - make than forty and I'll buy you the pills.

Listening to a loony right wing radio talk show host say that the reason they lost is because their candidates were not right wing enough. Presumably he wants to put Palin front and centre for the next election - I say, go for it! Put Palin and Limbaugh on the same ticket and watch the GOP emulate the Titanic!!

'Sit down, boy!'

This article from Dana Milbank in the Washington Post is more revealing and more repugnant than you'd think on first reading. And even on a first reading, there's plenty to loathe in there.


Re-reading the bit about the good ole 'folksy' folks who used a racial epithet towards a black cameraman, I found the 'Sit down, boy' comment to be the perfect summary of the entire Republican camp's reaction to the notion that Obama is about to hand them their ass on a platter.


(Did I mention she's 'folksy'?)


How dare he? How dare an 'uppity' black man threaten to beat their senile, hypocritical refugee from an anger-management programme and the vapid smile who's emptied her head and filled it with right wing cliches? He better know his place and 'sit down'.


(Oh and did I mention, she's 'folksy'?)


As the race threatens to swing further and further away from them, the nasty wing of the Republican Party - which, b.t.w *is* the Republican Party in its entirety today - will reveal just how desperate it is and just how low it will go. Well, we always knew it would go as low as possible - the only curiosity is in finding out how deep this year's sewers are.


(And by the way, did you hear, Palin's 'folksy'? I'm still waiting for the media to call her out on this schtick of spraying insults and epithets while using the vocabulary of a 10 year old and pretending that lack of intelligence is 'folksiness'.)


As for 'independents' and people who find 'Palin interesting', here's a mirror - take a good look at yourself.

Gail Collins in the NYT - must read

While it's nice to see the media at long last cover the Presidential Election like they should - i.e. call a lie a lie - this is one of the best and funniest pieces I've read recently. It's Gail Collins in the NYT. I'll try not to put the whole thing here, but it's difficult when it's so uniformly good.

“The people of Ohio are the most productive in the world!” yelled John McCain at a rally outside of Youngstown on Tuesday. Present company perhaps excluded, since the crowd was made up entirely of people who were at liberty in the middle of a workday.

.....

And when McCain took the center stage, they were itching to cheer the war hero and boo all references to pork-barrel spenders.

Nobody had warned them that he had just morphed into a new persona — a raging populist demanding more regulation of the nation’s financial system. And since McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long.

Really, if McCain is going to keep changing into new people, the campaign should send out notices. (Come to a rally for the next president of the United States. Today he’s a vegetarian!)

.....

(I was laughing out loud at work at the last line there.)

.....

“We’re going to put an end to the abuses on Wall Street — enough is enough!” this new incarnation yelled, complaining angrily about greed and overpaid C.E.O.’s. Slowly, people begin to peel out of the crowd and drift away. Even in these troubled times, there are apparently a number of Republicans who think highly of corporate executives and captains of high finance.

....

It was a rather jumbled message, but the new story line was firm. The fundamentals were not things like employment rates or trade statistics. The fundamentals were the workers.

We are the fundamentals!

And, naturally, the humble, hard-working fundamentals are good. Who could doubt it? Was Barack Obama trying to say that he didn’t think the American working man and woman was good? Was this the sort of thing they talked about at those fancy-schmancy Hollywood fund-raisers? Which, of course, John McCain hates. Give him some hard cider and a log cabin, and he’s happy as a clam.

But wait! The fundamentals are in danger! At risk because of “greed.” Which John McCain was shocked to discover has been running rampant in the canyons of Wall Street.

......

McCain has always, genuinely, believed in dismantling government regulations, and there he was, vowing to create new “comprehensive regulations that will apply the rules and enforce them to the fullest.” It makes you think that he’s trying to impersonate something he’s not. Or wasn’t. Or might not be. The image is getting fuzzy.

This week, while McCain’s chief economic adviser was telling reporters that it was wrong to “run for president by denigrating everything in sight and trying to scare people,” McCain’s ad people were unveiling a new spot announcing “Our economy in crisis!” and calling for “tougher rules on Wall Street” along, of course, with more offshore drilling. Mournful unemployment-line music swells.

I have absolutely no idea of how John McCain would handle a financial crisis if he were president. But on behalf of all the nation’s fundamentals I would like to say that he now has me ready to stage a run on the first bank in sight.

Excellent stuff! Please go read the whole thing and then pass it on. After all, it's not like the rest of the newspaper is going to make you laugh ... for a few years ...

The End of Empire - required reading

This book is essential reading, as is anything written by Matt Taibbi in general.

To take you back a bit, I first discovered him when he was reporting on the Kerry campaign in 2004, out of which came this excellent book - Spanking the Donkey. Required reading for anyone who, like me, woke up on the morning of the 3rd November 2004, wondering how the Democrats had managed to bollix up another election against Dubya.

But then, I became a fan for life when I read this piece of his, featuring The Moustache of Mediocrity, aka Thomas Friedman. Apart from anything else, I loved this bit:
On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

And there's more:

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

I know it's brutally unfair to him to say this, because it's been said of so many posturing typewriter operators with just a handful of brain cells among them, but if ever there was a successor to Hunter S. Thompson's mantle as an intelligent, outraged and raging chronicler of our strange and stupid times, it's Taibbi.

The book is a thoughtful and considered delve into some pretty strange avenues of American behaviour that are almost mainstream - as Taibbi says, far from coming to their senses and trying to figure out how to get the US out of the mess that their lying, thieving and downright criminal politicians have landed them in, the great American public seem to be chasing even stranger rabbits down even weirder holes. He doesn't even bother to add the obligatory positive ending last chapter - he lays it out like he sees it, and it ain't pretty!

The End of Empire - # 1 in an occasional series

One of my favourite hobby horses has been the impending end of the American Empire and how we would recognize it. It is an utterly unscientific and totally anecdotal theory, rather like one of those strange houses designed and built by eccentrics in their spare time, over decades. Without going into all the nooks and crannies of my reasoning, I usually hang facts on a framework of two or three basic points:

- All dominant civilizations and empires - Greek, Roman, Mughal, the Caliphate, British, Soviet etc - inevitably decline and fall. The inflexion point is usually not detected at the time and in retrospect, is usually found to have occurred around the time when common wisdom suggested its utter and total infallibility. 'The End of History', while looking like a particularly foolish statement of hubris for our time and which will damn Fukuyama to the laughing stocks of history, is not a new idea; even as late as the 1930s, a variant of it could be heard as 'The sun never sets on the British Empire'

- The rate of change is only increasing - while the Roman Empire lasted anywhere from 600+ to a thousand years, based on your point of view, the Mughal Empire lasted around 400 years, as did the British Empire and the Soviets found themselves slung out after a relatively brisk 70 odd years. Therefore, to suppose that the American Century is well past us is a perfectly acceptable hypothesis.

- The seeds of decline are varied and not necessarily external - while external events can precipitate dramatic changes, the rot is usually from within. The madness of the Romans had as much to do with their collapse as the Goth invasions; the Mughals alternated between fanatical religious fervour and world-class dissoluteness while the British empire crept up on it while the British empire was becoming an infeasible enterprise given the aspirations of its subjects and the march of the technology and resource driven American nation. The straws in the wind in America are beginning to accumulate - healthcare and the proportion of Americans without access to it at an affordable cost, the raging battles over whether or not Darwinism should be taught in school, the frantic battles in some sections to deny the impact of man's activities on the environment and the unsustainability of our current way of life, the use of Katrina by Republicans to carry out some convenient bleaching of the city's racial makeup, the seemingly ever-constricting grip of frankly loony evangelicals over the public discourse and the levers of power and the unshakeable belief that every war can be fought and refought till they are won. Even if they are lost. But with nukes next time.

Having said all of this, then, I spotted something in the New York Times today that really made me sit up. Given the carnage in the financial sector and the bloodbath going on, none of which contradicts my hypothesis in any way (especially given that I give it exactly 48 hours before some talking suits will pop up on TV to say that we should guard against the knee-jerk impulse to make regulation stronger as that would only harm the working man...), what caught my eye was rather surprising. It was this.

Let me extract some bits:

WASHINGTON — Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.

“One of our great exports used to be constitutional law,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had.”

Remember 'soft power' ? Defined as 'its ability to attract others by the legitimacy of U.S. policies and the values that underlie them'? Well, this is exactly what the NYT article is talking about - take a good look, 'cause the tide seems to be running out.

The causes cited in the article should not be unfamiliar to anyone who goes past the daily Britney-Paris Hilton-Sarah Palin crap in the news. The extreme right-wing conservatism of the Supreme Court, America's foreign policy being increasinly unpalatable abroad, the insularity of American courts and their unwillingness to accept foreign law, none of these should be stunning front page news.

What is certainly surprising, is to read a statement along the lines of this one: 'America is in danger of becoming something of a legal backwater'.

And who's the filthy, communist, terrorist-loving radical who said this?

Justice Michael Kirby, of the High Court of Australia!

Oh.

Election season again! Wa-hey!!

Yes, it's that time of the ... errr... four year cycle?... again! When money talks and bullshit talks even louder. Let's kick things off with a little taster of what everyone's favourite 'Maverick-who-panders-to-the-Loony-Right' has been up to.

You've heard of the Mortgage Crisis, you've heard of the Housing Crisis, but have you heard of the McCain Housing Crisis yet? No?

From CBS News' Dean Reynolds:

(CHESAPEAKE, VA.) - Barack Obama was handed a gift-wrapped package from John McCain on Thursday. Just as the Illinois senator has begun focusing on economic concerns with greater intensity, McCain made a comment that opened wide a gulf between him and the electorate he is wooing.

McCain was asked a simple question during an interview with Politico.com. Nothing tricky about it. No curevball this: How many houses do you and Mrs. McCain have?

"I think," said McCain, "uh, I'll have my staff get to you. I'll try to tell you about that."

Huh? Most Americans would certainly be able to answer that question, especially the ones facing foreclosure or mortgages that are ratcheting up. McCain's staff did get back as promised, saying the number was "at least four." Again, few Americans are in the four-house category. Even more embarrassing was the finding of an independent watchdog project, Politifact.com, that McCain and his wife, Cindy, own at least seven. Seven homes. Worth in the neighborhood of $13 million. Scattered across the country.

Now this was too good for Obama to pass up.

"If you don't know how many houses you have then it's not surprising you might think the economy is fundamentally strong," he said.

Within hours his campaign had surrogates fanning out bringing news of McCain's residential bounty to voters in every corner of the nation. A new ad was produced in record time to strike while the iron is hot. Over a shot of the White House, the ad concluded thusly, "Here's one house Americans can't afford to have John McCain move into."

And here's absolutely the best rejoinder clogging up those tubes on the Internets - superb stuff:



And did I mention that one of his key campaign slogans is going to be 'McCain The Maverick. He shoots himself in the foot. To support the troops. And for America. And because he's more patriotic than you. Not because he flip-flops on the issues. No-oh. Not at all'. Read this bit, again from CBS' Reynolds:

The McCain campaign cried foul, pointing out that Obama earned $4 million last year, which doesn't exactly make him a man of the people. But by McCain's own definition, it doesn't make Obama rich either.

Remember this from last weekend's conference with Rev. Rick Warren at the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.?

"Define rich," Warren said to McCain.

"How about $5 million?" McCain responded. The audience laughed. But nobody at the McCain campaign is laughing now.

And if you want a more sober take on the whole thing, as always, Paul Krugman continues to be on the money, as he's been for the last 8+ years!