Still green

So it’s the 18th of November. The first seed catalog of winter came yesterday. And today i was working in shirt sleeves with a bee buzzing lazily around. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Tomorrow i’ll be out cutting Christmas trees and unless something changes drastically it won’t be anything like cutting last year. I can’t remember if i published that the evening after it happened, but it was within a day or so. Twelve months ago there was already close to three feet of snow on the ground.

I’m not complaining, last winter was hard. But round these parts you start to wonder if you’ll be paying for this weather with some lovely June snow. Ah well, nothing i can do about it anyhow. And tomorrow many trees will be slain for the sake of the baby Jesus, though conditions won’t be so dreadful that we sing:

Christmas tree, Christmas tree
Little baby Jesus made a hell for me

Street Smarts: I am very proud of me

I’ve got a mandate for the bastards

We’re quick to point out political corruption around the world. Afghanistan is corrupt. Iran rigs elections. Putin has his oligarchs. It’s all true, but rarely do we take a long hard look at the corruption endemic in our own politics. My esteemed colleague, Dr. Denny, recently penned an important post detailing Congressional corruption. Like so much of our nefarious behavior, it looks relatively civilized because we dress it up nicely. But we all know that our representatives are as crooked as any in Kazakhstan. We just call it “campaign finance”. We all know it’s a huge problem, one that’s slowly grinding our Republic into dust. We just can’t do much about it. What chance is there that the crooked politicians are going to straighten the mess out against their own, personal interests?

Well, i have an idea. Call it the Nelson Muntz Initiative…

Comments

Just a quick note…

I like comments. I like discussion. Depending on my schedule i may not respond immediately, but please feel free to leave your thoughts and i will happily respond with mine. Links are always appreciated: increasing knowledge is often best as a collaborative effort.

I’m a big proponent of free speech, so a comment will have to be pretty extreme for me to censor it (really, that’s highly unlikely).

Civility is appreciated and will be met with civility, even in disagreement. You’re free to be an ass here, but be forewarned that you’re dealing with someone who’s a very capable asshole in his own right…

Street smarts: Dr. Noble Price’s soup experiment

“The End of Poverty?”

“French Filmmaker Philippe Diaz, in an illuminating documentary opening in New York Friday, traces globalisation back 500 years to the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas. Diaz shows how the colonial North used the South’s resources to build its industrial base and how its continued control over resources, global trade and debt rules prevents developing countries from ending poverty.”

It won’t be coming to a theater within several hundred miles of me, but i’ll be keeping my eye out for the DVD release

“The title is a play on a book by economist Jeffrey Sachs – without the question mark – who, Diaz told IPS, ‘runs all around the world with Bono and these guys claiming that if we bring mosquito nets and fertilizers, it will end poverty.’”

“For example, Diaz is incredulous that Sachs’s book ascribes Bolivia’s economic failure to high altitude. He points out that 30 years ago, Sachs advised the Bolivian government to privatize everything, and today the country is essentially owned by foreign corporations.”

Read the rest at Inter Press Service

Walking like a pretzel

The National Security Archives at George Washington University recently published translations of Soviet Politburo meetings on Afghanistan. They are more illuminating than the combined words of America’s punditocracy that litter the nation’s editorial pages. For one, they probably reflect the administration’s deliberations with uncanny accuracy. For two, they are free of the domestic political maneuvering that editorial writers in the US seem incapable of putting aside. Reading them for their content and applying the words to the US situation requires letting go of the American exceptionalism that plagues our thoughts, but it is important to remember that such exceptionalism will be our downfall…so it’s best to dispense with that in any case.

Mikhail Sergeyevich applies the idiomatic phrase “…… vydelyvnet Krendelya” to Karmal. We could use it do describe Karzai, Obama, Clinton, McChrystal, et. al.. It translates literally as “….. is walking like a pretzel.” The figurative meaning is that someone is staggering and weaving like a drunk; that is, not being straight-forward.

Gorbachev on the end of the Cold War

Tear down that wall

Over at Exiledonline, there’s a piece on the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr. If you know anything about Mark Ames who runs the site (and previously built the best alt newspaper in history, The eXile), then you already know that it isn’t going to be a fluffy, feel good pile of nostalgic crap.

“It’s important on this anniversary to distinguish between two entirely different events: first, the fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989; and then German unification, on October 3, 1990. Americans often conflate the two into one process. But for Germans and those who were there, it’s a much more complicated story. The fall of the Berlin Wall became a poisoned memory for a certain set of Easterners, thanks to the events that followed that event.” [snip]

How the West Hijacked the Berlin Wall Revolution

Go read the rest, because ignorance is only bliss if you’re happy being stupid.

 

Street Smarts: Dance myself to sleep