Posturing . . .

STEVIE LOVES UNIFORMS. Maybe he should visit and stay there, and take Airshow with him, too, come to think of it.

Priorities . . .

STEVIE THINKS PANDAS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PEOPLE, even those who have walked 1,600  kilometers.

On a positive note . . .

INHABITAT reports that clever young people exist, with an article you should read, by Morgana Matus, "17-Year-Old Builds Algae Biofuel Lab in Her Bedroom to Win $100K Intel Science Talent Search Prize".

Sara Volz

Dimmit . . .

THE WORLD'S A MUCH brighter place when you're not too bright for it, according to the folks who make MinusIQ | The pill to lower your IQ permanently.

Future perspectives . . .

THE CRASH AND BURN of the GOP in the US election can be seen as the consequence of the neo-con Dubya regime, which leads me to wonder if future historians will see Dubya as the Mr. Bean of the GOP: the Man Who Made It All Fall Apart.

Seriously, post-WW2 American conservatives had the whole world, in spite of Uncle Joe's best efforts. Uncle Joe had incredible advantages, the unbelievably pervasive espionage penetration of every important area of America being foremost.

No foolin', even though Uncle Joe had Dirty Harry, aka Harry Dexter White, on the inside, at the Oval Office level, it it still went all pear-shaped in the end.

Benn Steil has a fascinating article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS, "Red White: Why a Founding Father of Postwar Capitalism Spied for the Soviets" which you should ponder.

In July 1944, in the midst of World War II, representatives of 44 nations gathered in this remote New Hampshire town to create something that had never before existed: a global monetary system to be managed by an international body. The gold standard of the late nineteenth century, the organically formed foundation of the first great economic globalization, had collapsed during the previous world war. Efforts to revive it in the 1920s proved catastrophically unsuccessful. Economies and trade collapsed; cross-border tensions soared. In the 1930s, internationalists in the U.S. Treasury Department saw a powerful cause and effect and were determined to resolve the flaws in the international economic system once and for all. In the words of Harry Dexter White, a then little-known Treasury official who became the unlikely architect of the Bretton Woods system, it was time to build a "New Deal for a new world."

Harry even helped Uncle with a set of printing plates for the Occupation currency, which was paid for, ultimately, by the US taxpayer. The Allies put into circulation a total of about 10.5 billion Allied marks between September 1944 and July 1945; the Soviets likely issued more than 78 billion.

But capitalism prevailed because of capitalist innovations like the transistor and computers and fax machines and mutated into the Wall Street System we had when Dubya came along. And now, things are changing . . .

It's only money . . .

GAZILLIONS OF BUCKS of world debt, graphically created out of US Benjies for your edification by the folks at DEMONOCRACY. Click on the link for the whole compendium. Ya gotta wonder about the sustainability. Reminds me of Kipling:

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

The best of times, the worst of times . . .

MOSCOW, 1937: time of terror. The Atlantic has a fine article/book review by Benjamin Schwarz, "Moscow Under Terror". It's a wonderful description of a surreal environment with real horrors, and worthy of pondering.

Genrikh Yagoda

Yezhov and Stalin

Caution . . .