Reagan re-run

Hitchens/Slate

"""""It was extraordinary that, in Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan was dealing with a man who knew that the Soviet Union could not sustain the arms race and a man who was out of patience with the satraps of East Germany. To Gorbachev goes an enormous share of the credit. But if I run the thought experiment and ask myself whether Walter Mondale would have made a better interlocutor in 1987, I cannot make myself believe it. This does not involve un-saying any of the things about Reagan that his admirers would prefer us to forget. But it does acknowledge the distinction between a historic presidency and an average one. Reagan's friend Margaret Thatcher once said that the real test of her success was the way that she had changed the politics of the Labour Party. By that standard, the legacy of Reagan in permanently altering the political landscape is with us still.""""

sabado Gigante

smackdown--Hitler vs Stalin

Snyder/NYRblog

""""In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people—tens of millions, it was often claimed—in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations. ....""""

Ayn Rand, looter

(via Alternet)
""""Ayn Rand was not only a schlock novelist, she was also the progenitor of a sweeping “moral philosophy” that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor but the lackluster middle-classes as well.


Her books provided wide-ranging parables of "parasites," "looters" and "moochers" using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor)...."

Chair-person Arianna

at Davos...

""Davos 2011 is off to a great start. I've been surprised how little talk there's been in the cafes and bistros about Barack's State of the Union speech. I heard it aired here at 3 in the morning--I was...sort of busy at the time --but most people here are rarely asleep at 3 am (a Davos sleep challenge would be, well, a major challenge -- more on that in a bit). Plus, everyone who's anyone at Davos has an iPad, laptop, or mobile phone (and often all three), so it wouldn't be hard to watch a replay, like if we really cared. But it doesn't seem to be on peoples' radar screens, as like their favorite ski runs or investment seminars, or the party schedules were."

""At a reception hosted by Yale President Rick Levin, I ran into the Chamber of Commerce's CEO Tom Donohue and asked him what he thought of the speech. "It bored the crap out of me," he said. "What didn't you like?" I asked. "With gasoline prices headed to over $4 a gallon, and profits rolling in" he replied, "there was no reason to demonize US oil companies." And a big-time TV producer, who asked for anonymity to protect his chances of ever playing basketball with Obama, was focused on the president's makeup: "It was simply dreadful," he told me. "He looked so yellow, it was like he was jaundiced. It was so bad, John Boehner looked natural by comparison." But other than smatterings, not much post-speech chatter.""""""

Exit, golden gate

not for the squeamish.


(and..... not a recommendation)

""And remember that the term Rational was intended to signify a discriminating attention to every single detail and to do so with due diligence; and that Equanimity is the voluntary acceptance of the things which are assigned to you by the common nature; and that Magnanimity is the elevation of the intelligent part above the pleasurable or painful sensations of the flesh, and above that poor thing called fame, and death, and all such things. If, then, you maintain yourself in the possession of these names, without desiring to be called by these names by others, you will be another person and will enter on another life. For to continue to be such as you have hitherto been, and to be torn in pieces and defiled in such a life, is the character of a very stupid person and one overfond of life, and like those half-devoured fighters with wild beasts, who though covered with wounds and gore, still plead to be kept to the following day, though they will be exposed in the same state to the same claws and bites. Therefore fix yourself in the possession of these few names: and if you are able to abide in them, abide as if you were removed to certain islands of the Happy. But if you shall perceive that you fall out of them and do not maintain your hold, go courageously into some nook where you shall maintain them, or even depart at once from life, not in passion, but with simplicity and freedom and modesty, after doing this one laudable thing at least in your life, to have gone out of it thus.""

(Marcus Aurelius)

sabado Gigante

...Asuras

Feast day of St. Thomas

Vo-lar-ay
From.... the Field guide to Flying Saints

Distinguishable features:

Wingspan: 1,89 m
Weight approximately: 105 kg
Range and distribution: Italy
Color: black and white tunic
Special features: an ox, a star or sun or with pagan philosophers at feet.

Suits-R-Us

The Most Business-Friendly President Ever? By MIKE WHITNEY

""On Tuesday, Barack Obama made the case for easing regulations in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The article, titled "Toward a 21st-Century Regulatory System", was accompanied by a caricature of a scissor-wielding businessman slashing-away at red tape, a symbol that is revered among anti-regulation zealots. In the opening paragraph, the president praises free market capitalism ("the greatest force for prosperity the world has ever known") and Wall Street ("vibrant entrepreneurialism is the key to our continued global leadership") while taking aim at the "burdensome" restrictions that prevent speculators from maximizing profits. Even by the administration's abysmal standards, the article is a new low, which is why the WSJ editors mockingly critiqued Obama's op-ed as "one of the greatest policy walkbacks in American history". Here's a clip from the text:

"Sometimes, those rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs......Over the past two years, the goal of my administration has been to strike the right balance. And today, I am signing an executive order that makes clear that this is the operating principle of our government.

This order requires that federal agencies ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth. And it orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. It's a review that will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules, the result of tinkering by administrations and legislators of both parties and the influence of special interests in Washington over decades......""

WSJ? WTF?  WoW? WFT. WCW. WWF? WOC! WSD. WUF. WOE. WXW

Might I remind you Mr. Spade....

that you may haff the Fal-kon but vee certainly haff you. .... ...

""It's terse. It's polished. There's crime.

It's never been published - until now.

Fifty years after Dashiell Hammett's death, a national mystery magazine is about to publish a long-lost story by the father of the hard-boiled detective novel, and fans are giddy with excitement.

The story, "So I Shot Him," is one of about a dozen of the San Francisco writer's pieces that were never printed anywhere. Word is that, unlike many works authors choose not to publish, this 12-page thriller is high-quality and complete.

Andrew Gulli, managing editor of the Strand Magazine, stumbled across the piece while poking through Hammett's papers at the University of Texas at Austin. He's featuring it in his Feb. 28 issue"....

Hammett/SFGate
Mo'NoirPhunn

My Old Phlame...
ah can't even rememburr her name

Google Ice Cream

The Schmidt-ster replaced by Page-ster. Communist--Pagan-network-News
HuffPo

"""Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be leaving the CEO's office and founder Larry Page will be stepping in. The question is whether this is a signal from the Internet Goliath that Schmidt's missteps and misstatements about online privacy are no longer company policy.

It's not likely Google will embrace the "Do Not Track Me" mechanism suggested recently by the FTC, nor abandon its business model of collecting as much data about us as possible to serve us up to the highest paying advertiser. Nonetheless, there could be subtle changes in the Page era that put our privacy back in the minds of Google engineers."""""

sabado Gigante

J.Cash/Hurt

Ask not what the Reptilians can do for you....

but what you can do for the Reptilians.

"""Is Barack Obama really a shape shifting reptilian humanoid from a far away galaxy bent on the enslavement of the human race? According to David Icke, who claims on his web site that most
world leaders come from a line of reptilians originating in the Alpha Draconis, Barack Obama is most likely a blood drinking shape shifter bent on progressing the New World Order. Icke's reptilian theory makes the claim that reptilians plan to control humanity and other civilizations through fear and negative emotion, a food source for the reptilian...."

Shapeshifters in the house, y'all

Charts-Co

Wrong Numbers/TheEconomist:

""""MEASURING things is hard. Counting mentions of them is easy. Google’s new search tool Ngram Viewer lets users find out how often a word occurs in the millions of books the firm has scanned. It also helps analyse the salience of abstract ideas—corruption, say—in different languages and places (see chart).


Lots of new numbers will be grist to the mills of those who compile international rankings. The hunger for crunchy comparisons of everything from venality to brainpower is huge and growing, not least among media such as this newspaper. It is tempting to try and pin ideas down by turning them into figures. Such measures can be handy. But they have serious flaws.

             ngram for..." copacetic" and "wallabies" 


The quality of economic statistics is often dubious in developing countries, for example. Figures are often only rough estimates and revised often and extensively. Inferences are risky. The latest version of the Penn World Tables, the best source for such numbers, has Equatorial Guinea’s GDP growing by 4% annually between 1975 and 1999. The 2002 version put the rate at minus 2.7%. The country may thus have been sub-Saharan Africa’s slowest-growing economy—or the second-fastest.


At least teachers have drilled generations of economics students in the limitations of GDP data, even if the public and politicians give them undue weight. But experts too can be fooled by “synthetic” indices combining several related measures into a single number which are often used to back broad claims. For instance, an index may rely on data on a few rather narrow items, such as the number of convictions for certain crimes, but claim to measure something broader, such as the quality of a country’s legal system.""""

Al-Speak

"""There is a scream emanating from Arizona that is reaching down the block, across the street, up the boulevard and into virtually every household in America.

We hear it in Granada Hills and Van Nuys as clearly as they hear it at the source - a Tucson plaza where Jared Loughner sprayed 9mm bullets into a crowd, killing six and injuring 13.

It is a scream of outrage, horror and grief that encircles images of the grinning 22-year-old madman who did the shooting, a congresswoman who fights for her life and a little girl who died.

They have become symbols of the moment in America that has inscribed itself into the journals that keep our history, the tale of an aberrant Don Quixote quest to right a wrong that was never wrong in the first place. They, and us, are the victims we scream for. ....""

When he's on (o tal vez sobrio, ese) Martinez out-scrawls a few dozen blogs worth of hacks (and most of the LA Times apparatchiks as well). Shades of Saroyan...

sabado gigante

Freedom/Hendrix

blame Nietzsche?

Loughner/Nietzsche....Feeney/Slate    

""The attraction of Nietzsche to socially maladjusted young men [such as Loughner] is obvious, but it isn't exactly simple. It is built from several interlocking pieces. Nietzsche mocks convention and propriety (and mocks difficult writers you'd prefer not to bother with anyway). He's funny and (deceptively) easy to read, especially compared to his antecedents in German philosophy, who are also his flabby and lumbering targets: Schopenhauer, Hegel, and, especially, Kant. If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that you're a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, I'm a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the loser. Like you, Nietzsche was misunderstood in his day, ignored or derided by other scholars. Like you, Nietzsche seems to find everything around him lame, either stodgy and moralistic or sick with democratic vulgarity. Nietzsche seems to believe in aristocracy, which is taboo these days, which might be why no one recognizes you as the higher sort of guy you suspect yourself to be. And crucially, if you're a horny and poetic young man whose dream girl is ever present before your eyes but just out of reach, Nietzsche frames his project of resistance and overcoming as not just romantic but erotic.


If you're a thoughtful and unhappy young man, in other words, why wouldn't you want to read someone who seems to reflect both your alienation and your uncontainable desire back to you as masculine bravery and strength? Indeed, there's something in every book you're likely to pick up—some enticement of form or content or both—that addresses your horniness/alienation and flatters you in the pretense that, though you have no formal training and are actually kind of a crappy and distracted reader, you are doing philosophy."""


Mo' Nihilistic phunn with the Moustached One to be had here ...

and here...

und hier

Serious weapons

Quigley/Counterpunch

""Question: How does a mentally unstable man who was kicked out of school and had run-ins with the law buy such a serious weapon?

The weapon reportedly used in the mass murders in Tucson was a serious weapon - a Glock 19, semi-automatic pistol, with an extended magazine. Some weapons like that were illegal to sell in the US from 1994 to 2004 under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. It is now legal to sell and own them. The National Rifle Association reports there are tens of millions of assault weapons in private hands in the US.

The federal background check for people purchasing such weapons only prohibits selling such weapons to people who have been legally determined to be mentally defective or found insane or convicted of crimes. This man had not been found legally mentally defective or convicted so he was legally entitled to purchase an assault weapon. In Arizona he was legally entitled to carry the weapon in a concealed manner.

The US has well over 250 million guns in private hands according to the National Rifle Association. That is more, according to the BBC, than any country in the world. In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States according to the Brady Campaign.

Does the US really need tens of millions of assault weapons and hundreds of millions of other guns? We already put more of our people in prison than any country in the world and we spend more on our military than all the rest of the world together. How fearful must we be? ""

the Pale Criminal

your monthly Nietzsche update--

""Ye do not mean to slay, ye judges and sacrificers, until the animal hath bowed its head? Lo! the pale criminal hath bowed his head: out of his eye speaketh the great contempt.




"Mine ego is something which is to be surpassed: mine ego is to me the great contempt of man": so speaketh it out of that eye.




When he judged himself--that was his supreme moment; let not the exalted one relapse again into his low estate!


There is no salvation for him who thus suffereth from himself, unless it be speedy death.


Your slaying, ye judges, shall be pity, and not revenge; and in that ye slay, see to it that ye yourselves justify life!


It is not enough that ye should reconcile with him whom ye slay. Let your sorrow be love to the Superman: thus will ye justify your own survival!


"Enemy" shall ye say but not "villain," "invalid" shall ye say but not "wretch," "fool" shall ye say but not "sinner."


And thou, red judge, if thou would say audibly all thou hast done in thought, then would every one cry: "Away with the nastiness and the virulent reptile!"


But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them.


An idea made this pale man pale. Adequate was he for his deed when he did it, but the idea of it, he could not endure when it was done...."

Krugman on AZ shooting

ClimateOfHateNYT:

""""It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence."""