Felonious checks in . . .

Felonious Munk is pissed about the US debt. He's got a point, too.

Health tip . . .

Solidarity

Please join with people of conscience around the world at noon on Saturday, August 20 to support the people of Syria. I'll be joining my friends, film maker Azam Fouk Aladeh and theatre director Majdi Bou-Matar in the public square outside Kitchener's city hall. We will be raising our voices in support of the victims of a cruel regime and the good people there fighting for their freedom. Check out the Facebook group for more details.

One theory . . .

HOW IRISH DANCING appeared. Makes sense.

Bashar bashing . . .

SANDEEP DIKSHIT AT THE HINDU reports that Bashar Assaad is aware that

"some mistakes were made by his security forces in the initial stages of the unrest and assured an IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) team which called on him on Wednesday that efforts were under way to prevent their recurrence"

— they left witnesses. The outrage grows, but this seems below progressive care or concern, juding from column-inches, or whatever. Enter Stevie, who is at least making the right noises. At least the NDP or somebody could say something. If you live in the Ottawa area, go wave a sign in front of the Syrian embassy, make some noise.

Bashar is what Saddam wanted to be: a Stalin, a gray psychopath, ruthless, cold, calculating, without the addictive exercise of brutal caprice that reduced Saddam to the twisted-fuck status of a Hitler.

OMG . . .

CENTRE BLOCK reports that Stevie had a hissy-fit: "Less amusing translation of Brazilian article on Harper bathroom tiff". I can't believe this, this is so embarrassing. H/T Scanner, thanks.

Since Brazilian diplomats denied his request to speak to the press at the Presidential palace, Harper was already in a bad mood when he arrived for lunch. He demanded the shift in protocol at the lunch event, and locked himself in the private bathroom of ministro Antonio Patriota (Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Minister) while he waited for a reply.

Anarchy in the U.K.

Some thoughts and links on the riots across England:

• Not everyone in London is either a rioting, firebomb-throwing yob looter or an authoritarian "send-in-the-army" wannabe aristocrat. Some of them are good community minded people. Let hope these people get as much credit as they deserve.
• Sometimes you find insightful analysis in the most unlikely places.
• Not everyone was terribly surprised by this turn of events, indeed the causes have been evident for some time.
• A blogger's-eye view from the city as it burns and some thoughts on why from Red Penny. This bit in particular caught my eye: 

"Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."
Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’

Everyone will quite rightfully decry the violence, looting and mayhem washing over the U.K., and they are right to be shocked. But anyone who is surprised that there is suddenly social unrest in a developed country in which the disparities in wealth distribution and opportunities have  been steadily growing while youth culture has become centered around consumerism, heavy binge drinking and enforced idleness among vast swathes the underclass, where the moral authority of the police has been steadily eroded by the constant drip of corruption, racism, brutality and abuse of power, where the wealthy political class has coddled the upper middle class and thrown the rest of the population to the dogs --- anyone who is surprised simply hasn't been paying attention.

crossposted to the Woodshed

Perspective . . .

THE MEDIA IS A GREAT BEAST, for sure. Perhaps a monster, that casts forth false images? Or is that just some of the time? We had the Vietnam war on TV, nowadays, that kind of Cronkite/Murrow professionalism has mutated into FOX, Winchell's inquiring journalism into the hysterical slander of Rush Limbaugh et al.

Back in 1966, Frank Zappa pondered about the effect of TV news. One of the original raps, with Frank guitar. Oh how I miss that dude. Disturbingly prescient lyrics — 'watch 'em throwin' rocks and stuff'. Blow your harmonica, son.

The lion, rampant . . .

MERRIE OLD LONDON is having quite a time. Triggered by the apparent inability of the constabulary to deal with a minor street criminal without shooting him to death, the riots have taken a life of their own.

And it seems that the new economy in Britain has left a lot of people without a lot of future — and they're really pissed. The Washington Post article, "Looting, arson spread widely in London, as civil unrest escalates" is a representative report.

In the worst bout of urban violence to hit Britain in more than two decades, parts of London morphed into lawless no man’s lands. Most of a block in the Croydon neighborhood erupted Monday night into an inferno that incinerated the 140-year-old Reeves furniture store, a south London landmark. After midnight Tuesday, an even larger fire tore through a Sony distribution center on the other side of the city, in Enfield.

Gangs of youths roamed one south London neighborhood while carrying molotov cocktails, the BBC reported. And widespread looting was reported in the west London borough of Ealing after a shopping mall caught fire.

In a way, it's the legacy from Maggie, the Iron Bitch, and the de-industrialization of Britain. When things get that frustrating, a lot of people don't need a reason to go on the razzle. This is not a new observation, it was pithily expressed by Earl Vince and the Valiants over 20 years ago: Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight.

Interestingly, it seems that the razzlers are using Blackberries to organize their creative mayhem. According to The Telegraph in a column, "London riots: how BlackBerry Messenger has been used to plan two nights of looting":

During the Arab revolutions earlier this year, attention focused on Facebook and Twitter, but for the looters and rioters of Tottenham, Enfield and Brixton, the communications tool of choice has apparently been BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). It appears to have acted as their private, encrypted social network over the past two nights’ violence.

RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones are very popular among inner city youths on both sides of the Atlantic. The devices themselves are typically cheaper than Android models and the iPhone, particularly on pay-as-you-go packages. But it is software that central to BlackBerrys’ success in this market.

BBM is an instant messaging application, allowing users to communicate in a similar way to text messaging, but effectively for free, as traffic is exchanged via the internet. According to analysts it is replacing text messaging among young people.

Stevie colors . . .

JUST SAW HIM on CTV News. With TV-news contrast, someone said it looked like a DuPont product.

Sound advice . . .

Continuity is good . . .

LAST WEEK, a friend bought a new Canon inkjet, and hooked it up to his Mac with OSX 10.3 — and it wouldn't run until he upgraded to 10.31 or whatever. He's not alone, MS Vista provided lots of non-compatible hardware problems, too, so I wouldn't want people to construe that I was Mac-bashing.

That being said, on the whole, MS has done an amazing job on continuity over some 23 years. Don't believe it? Check out the video. Ah, old autoexec.bat and config.sys and win.ini! Great song. I miss Reversi, great game, I don't miss VGA and 360k floppies.

He figured it out . . .

"I FIGURED IT OUT" from Jamestown High School The Pajama Game March 2010, delightful, wonderful song. According to Wiki, The Pajama Game is a musical based on the novel 7½ Cents by Richard Bissell. It features a score by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. The story deals with labor troubles in a pajama factory, where worker demands for a seven-and-a-half cents raise are going unheeded. In the midst of this ordeal, love blossoms between Babe, the grievance committee head, and Sid, the new factory superintendent.

In today's economy, there is something touchingly innocent about this scene.

In the real world right now, the UAW is trying to survive, going into negotiations, probably with Ford, first of all. Problem is, all the Asian-owned non-union assembly plants not only don't care (UAW drives have not worked), but they hope that the UAW pulls the trigger, so they can grow market share, while Ford or GM or Chryco can't build cars. My guess is that the UAW will play nice, but never underestimate the power of churlishness.

It's catching . . .

HIV

MEDICAL XPRESS has a disturbing report: "First large study to find HIV epidemic among gays in the Middle East". HIV epidemics are emerging in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa among men who have sex with men, a term that encompasses gay, non-gay identified homosexual men, and transgendered and bisexual men.

"The Middle East and North Africa can no longer be seen as a region immune to the HIV epidemic. Based on multiyear analysis of thousands of data sources, we documented a pattern of new HIV epidemics that have just emerged among men who have sex with men in the last few years in several countries of the region," said Ghina Mumtaz, main author of this study and senior epidemiologist in the infectious disease epidemiology group at Weill Cornell Medical College-Qatar.

The study reports that rates of HIV infection among men who have sex with men vary across the region but have already exceeded 5 percent, the threshold defining concentrated epidemics, in several countries such as Egypt, Sudan and Tunisia. In one area of Pakistan, the infection rate among men who have sex with men has already reached 28 percent. Moreover, by 2008, transmission of HIV via anal sex among men was responsible for more than a quarter of reported cases of HIV in several countries in the region.

28% infection rate? Yikes! There has got to be severe social stress, considering the social milieu.

Be your own boss . . .

AH, THE JOYS OF THE OWNER-OPERATOR. The freight biz has changed over the last 30 years; railroad freight declined, and humongous 18-wheelers took over. With the advent of cheap PC's and bookkeeping software, the corporate accountants realized that they could get rid of all the fleet driver jobs and capital acquisition costs: enter the "independent" owner-operator, who gets to finance that $150,000++ tractor and worry about maintenance costs, like, say a new clutch for the Fuller Roadranger 13-speed transmission (depending on the rig, a clutch can run from $1,500 to $3,500, just the parts cost — then there's "Re & Re", aka labor, on top of that).

Well, like everything, life appears to be getting tougher. JALOPNIK's Dan Hanson has a thoughtful piece, worthy of your attention: "What you don’t know about the truck driver you just flipped off". Why should you care? Depends on how good you are with "situational awareness" — it's your butt, do check your six before you wish you had.

Everything you buy at the store and everything you order online moves by truck. Planes and trains can't get it to your house or grocery store. We are dependent on trucks to move product from the airport and the rail yards to the stores and our homes.

Every day, experienced and qualified drivers give it up because the government, the traffic and the greedy companies involved in trucking have drained their enthusiasm for this life.

They take a job at a factory if they can find it, and are replaced by an inexperienced youngster dreaming of the open road. This inexperience leads to late deliveries, causing shortages and higher prices at the store, and crashes that lead to unnecessary deaths.

Times change. It seemed a little more human, before the accountants got at the industry.

Piles of debt . . .

IN STACKED $100 DOLLAR BILLS, that's what 1 trillion dollars looks like. KLEPTOCRACY has other interesting examples of the problem.

THE DAILY RECKONING is a thoughtful site devoted to finance. Its founder, Bill Bonner, is somewhat disturbed about the current state of affairs, in his piece, "The Great Correction…5 years On, Part III":

Of course, it should be obvious to everyone by now that the real problem in Europe as well as America is debt. In Europe, government debt is a problem. In America there is government debt plus household debt. Both are problems. America has about as much government debt as France – about 5 times GDP when you include unfunded pensions and health care costs. But America also has huge household debts.

• • • •

From a low of 31% of GDP after WWII, private debt rose to about 300% at the top of the credit bubble. You know all about that, so I won't bore you with the details. But at the present rate – about 5% per year – it will take another 32 years of de-leveraging before debt is down to a more comfortable level.

• • • •

Since 2000 do you realize how much the US private sector has grown? Hardly at all. Zero.

And how many new jobs have been created? I’ll give you a hint. Think of a number with a hole in the middle of it.

And how many more automobiles do we sell in America? In fact, we sell nearly a third less than we did 10 years ago.

And how much more are our stocks worth? Adjusted for inflation…not a penny more.

How about houses? Again, adjust for inflation and the average house is worth less than it was in 2001.What kind of decade was this? It was a lost decade. And it looks like another 3 decades will be lost – unless something happens to speed up the process. How? When?

Like Omar says, hard times in the land of plenty.

So fine . . .

STILL LIFE WITH ACTIVE DOGS

If you've never seen this, you are in for a treat. The video link on the PBS site is for US-resident PC's, but the page is worth checking out for more detail on the artist. But thanks to YouTube, here it is.

Living in Stalinist Prague, Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, a young artist named Paul Fierlinger was angry, depressed and rebellious against the political regime where the Communist government had been in power since the end of World War II.

In STILL LIFE WITH ANIMATED DOGS we meet Roosevelt, Ike, Johnson and Spinnaker, the canine companions who helped shape Fierlinger's evolution as an artist and as a man.

in which i yell at a co-blogger

fuck yeah, edstock, damn straight. why... to hell with those pesky rules of engagement. more renditions! more! more black ops, more incursions, more drones blowing up children and weddings and the elderly, we'll just call those fuckers taliban insurgents or better yet, human shields. booyah! who knows, we might even be killing some actual bad guys along the way. and isn't that an interesting point because with the way things are going in open and accountable land, we really don't know and we won't soon find out. it isn't like our political class are much inclined to tell us the truth.

what's the rule of law worth if we have to abide by it's limitations? what's the use of having an enemy if we can't get right down in the blood and filth and shit and roll around with him? why have an enemy at all if you aren't going to make yourself just as evil and nasty as you think he is?

somehow the moral superiority of wasting anything that moves, from the safety of a drone's remote control, escapes me. playing the tidy, distant killer with villages is different than attacking a tall building, how, exactly? how dare those corrupt children and their feckless parents insist on living in their homes and being so brown while they do it. fuck 'em, fuck 'em all and call it schadenfreude! that'll make every treaty, covenant and law our fightin' boys get told to shit on an acceptable loss. that'll make every incursion into a neighbour state's territory just a dandy thing. who fucking cares that any one of those attacks and raids and whatnot could be viewed as an act of war?

hell, we had an old villain to kill and his porn to steal. none of that take him alive shit, none of that bring him to trial shit. we got us a spectacle to stage. we got our fat old chests to beat, like a pack of impotent silverbacks, trained in the finest of armchair conflict.

and hey, let's not forget that scourge sweeping our very shores, oh fuck edster, best be climbing under the bed before the honour killers getcha. there's been what, thousands, right? hundreds then... okay, okay tens... well, a handful probably. all right, actually thirteen cases since 2002 and this form of widely advertised domestic violence is the worst thing, on earth, ever. right edstock? because unlike the vanilla spousal abuse and homicide that is carried out with banal regularity across this great land, this crime features the muslims. and here they are, the very rarest and worst exemplars of their faith, not being held to justice at a pace acceptable to you. sweet fuckin' jeezuz, they've got some nerve being tied up in red tape in the system, someone alert the bigotsphere! i feel your pain guy. you aren't alone either, you'll find a shoulder to cry on with the five feet of hatred and the small dead souls bunch.

where edstock, oh fucking where is the outrage for non-muslim canadian women being murdered by their spouses and exes at a rate of one every six days? where are the names of those killers on your rolodex of breathless scorn? where is the horror and sensational headline for the 582 cases of known missing or murdered aboriginal women in 2010? why, maybe that good ol' homegrown misogynistic slaughter is more tolerable than that other kind of slaughter on account of guys called mo being the enemy.

582 in 2010 vs 13 since 2002.

i'm sure all the clinic bombers and doctor shooting religious fanatics fancy they're upholding some insane honour too. i'm confident the obsessive, jealous spouses, boyfriends and exes that are beating their average, western wives and girlfriends right fucking now are feeling pretty entitled to possess and to judge and to punish. well at least we can be thankful they aren't called mohammed, right ed? 'cos then it would be a problem.

fuck you and your not so concealed bigotry edstock.

Nacht und nebel . . .

Tooba et al.

NIGHT AND FOG — and invisibility. What's up with Mo and Tooba? Along with their prize son Hamed, they felt the call of "honor" — and four women drowned on the night of June 30, 2009, Zainab Shafia, 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, all sisters, as well as Rona Amir Mohammed, 50, their father's first wife.

TWENTY-FIVE months later, and the silence is deafening. That's justice in Ontario, it seems. But considering how Dalton plays fast and loose with legalities, like failing to publish laws in the Ontario Gazette BEFORE authorizing the police to use 'em, I guess this is par for the course. Can't seem to find any information about any trial or sentencing.

Putting holes in Osama . . .

THE NEW YORKER has a detailed account of the planning and activities that culminated with Osama's acquaintance with a couple of .223's — Eugene Stoner would have been so pleased. The article, "Getting Bin Laden", by Nicholas Schmidle, reads like a Tom Clancy oeuvre.

Interestingly, to the distress of the feckless, corrupt Pakistanis who are either unwilling or incapable of dealing with obstreperous Muj, it seems that the US SOCOM outfits do these midnight rambles all the time. Compared to the stumbles and fumbles of abortive rescues and raids in the past, it appears that SOCOM has its shit together, so to speak.

This was one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night.” He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.” On the night of May 1st alone, special-operations forces based in Afghanistan conducted twelve other missions; according to the official, those operations captured or killed between fifteen and twenty targets.

Like SOCOM says, "we own the night". This can be frustrating for those who love a heaping helping of schadenfreude. Anyway, here's an appropriate sound track, with the inimitable Mick Taylor and Keefer at their best.