Steal this Greenhouse

Here are two books that you should never read at the same time, unless you have your pitchfork parked next to your nightstand and you know your Congress WoMan's address. Of course most of us rather reach for their Smart Phone before even getting out of bed rather than an instrument of revolution and shitshoveling. So that you may not have to waste your precious status update time slot, I hope it pleases you for me to share why you should just keep on doing just that.

Your outrage at the end of the world is better spent when the world is actually ending and no more smarty panz phones are around to inform the hundred's of our closest friends of the impending doom. Of course that means that all those amazing FB driven revolutions in the middle east will sizzle in an electronic wasteland. Shame that, great while it lasted. But democrazy only gets dropped on your head like cluster bombs if you got oil. And so I urge you to keep on telling me how your breakfast bagel tasted.

Griftopia, aptly named, the only thing missing in the title is "Fucking (Griftopia)", just to prepare the reader for liberal cuss word sprinkling. If someone would write a tome to counter-match Atlas Shrugged, they should start by reading this. I have imbibed a couple of reads about the recent financial implosion but this one takes the cake, which we will all soon be told to eat.
As a summary: Rich bastards get richer, implode the financial system, get money from poor people to save their crazy schemes for world domination, funnel those monies to offshore tax free profit centers, and leave poor people to pay back the resulting debt amidst a plethora of tough choices supported by the biggest presidential Uncle Tom in the history of class warfare.

The Flooded Earth, also aptly named, does not need a fucking title improvement. If people still read books in 100 years, they will take this one and beat themselves over the head with it. Or burn it on your gravestone (if burning of fossil fuels isn't so completely outlawed to prevent even this small symbolic gesture).
As a summary: Humanity keeps up its insatiable desire for stuff and fucking and dies under a mountain of itself and stuff. Direct cause of death: rising seas that swallow up not only our fairest cities but also inundate our best agricultural lands with salt. You think this is farfetched sci-fi opera stuff? Over 50 % of humanity lives in cities, and how many of these are on the ocean? How much does water have to rise for Florida and Holland and Bangladesh to be under water? How would you move a city? How long before the greatest fruit and vegetable garden in the history of the world is under salt water? Did you like looking at New Orleans after Katrina?

What do these two sweet dream inducing bed time reads have to do with each other: Rich people blow one financial bubble after the other, create a system of resource distribution that is in their favor and in that of acquiring ever more stuff. Poor people pay for this over and over again, until all the land is used up, all the rivers are swollen, the fish are gone, the ocean is dead, and once fertile land is under salt water. At which point rich people evacuate in their Hummers to their Mountain Retreats that they paid for with the tax money that rescued their behinds during the last financial meltdown, and debate how foolish all these poor people were not to prepare properly for this very obvious end of the world scenario, which could have been averted were it not for poor people's basic stupidity.

problem solved

Dr ÜB just gave me a brilliant IDEA to solve all the problems we currently face in this world. Every human will donate 1 dollar. That will put together about 6-7 Billion. The way the value of my house has been dropping because Palin's Joe Sixpack signed an ARM and Paulson made 600 Million of his dumb behind it should be easy to find a cheap piece of land. We buy this land with the donation and park all the ignorant , foreign-hating, greed-promoting, money-stealing, lie-telling, religion-loving, teenpregnancy-having, dinosaur-with-human-living, environment-polluting people there. Where they can then continue their merry dance of subprime intelligence without bothering us the hardworking, honest, tolerant, progressive, green paragons of humanity. We can then live in peace and enjoy the fruits of our labor, without having to subsidize and bail the dumbasses out every 10 years.

Here is my bankaccount # *&%@^$^$ (ok, you didnt really think I was going to post it here). We just gave Henry "the money shredding machine" Paulson 700 Billion. Whats another 7 Billion for a truly good cause? You trust me, dont you?!?

et tu, henry?

Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury this world’s financial system, not to praise it.
The evil that men do lives on for years.
The good is oft interred with their bones.
Let us do different.
Let us bury their evil alongside their stones.

Henry Paulson is an honorable man.
Let no man stand before me and question his rightousness.
He has brought you the spoils of golden wars,
The bounties of his conquests were yours to devide.
Yet he asked no reward, but to share some of his righful gains,
To be primus conservationist inter pares.
Is he a bad man that he wants the same golden wings for his friends?
As he wanted for your endangered birds of prey?

Let no man stand here before me and proclaim,
That Henry Paulson’s ambition was not,
The envy of your heart.
That his reward in gold was not,
Gladly paid to him.
Him, the pride of this nation and her system.

‘The Hammer’ you called him
When you admired his strength of conviction.
When you loved the shining brilliance of his leadership.
When you would have been extatic with joy at,
Walking in his borrowed shoes for one moment only.

What is a little treasure, used to reward those that lead us?
Where is your charitable spirit that your praise so well?
Are you so petty that you hold against those,
What your own greed lusted for most?
Are you so short of memory that you forget those,
Who you followed to this exhalted place?

This place
That rewards the lie
And punishes truth

Shall no man wonder how we wrought,
A consequence of action well deserved for all.

zoellick makes me regurgitate my own vomit

Why is the World Bank in the news so much this last week? Especially internationally and energetically running around the globe, giving away money, and asking for more funds to lend to the developing world? Building power stations, demanding more support to subsidize rising food prizes and generally appearing as good global citizen numero uno. And why is the WB telling you at the same time that the US economy is going down the tubes and that the rest of the world will follow. No, this is definitely not the carrot and stick strategy. No, it's not the WB telling you that you are so far up shit creek, that only the latest technocratic babyhawk, who accidentally happens to happily row by in his shit dingy, can pull you out of the putrid cesspool of international finance. What is surprising about this is, that Zoellick thinks the WB's main task is the fight against world poverty, when little old me thought they are responsible for it.

I get sidetracked. So why is Zoellick, my knight in shining armor galloping around the globe on his steel-horse? Why is the shit stuck to his boots appearing to be marginally if not magically cleaned off by a recent stint at Goldman Sachs? After years of being a good Bush clan henchman, suddenly a clean little boy is presented to us as the savior of the masses, worried about their caloric output and intake. Ah, that's right, Wolfowitz is out and Zoellick is the new Bu-shite at the helm of the WB. We need some PR, and fast!

No time to waste to throw some money at the poor brothers, never mind that debt servicing cost the third world 540 Billion USD in 2006. Let us increase the high-risk loans (not at all similar to ARMs here) to high-risk debtors, asking for high-risk premiums (no, not like ARMs either), and suing them if they do not pay up (well, taking their planes or ships - when they land in our ports trying to sell their meager harvest at our subsidized dumping prizes - because we don't want their mud huts). Did you know that the surviving Rwandans are at this moment paying of the machetes that were used to chop of their sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters limbs one by one (financed by and now being payed off to Credit Lyonnaise; produced, sold and shipped by China)? I know this is completely unbelievable, falls under the term "odious debt" and if you do not believe me => JFGI. I for one would prefer to spend the US Offensive Budget on debt relief as opposed to buying cluster bombs for Israel.

It doesn't strike me as strange at all, that when I first heard about Zoellick loving the 4 gigawatt power station in India, I immediately and instinctively was overcome by overwhelming nausea (the German "Brechreiz" is so much more descriptive of this condition). I had not been tracking Wolfowitz's Fenstersturz, news such as this is hard to track in the US, nobody reports it, and so I thought Zoellick was just a footsoldier. Now my lily-livered liberal soul is, if not surprised, at least and unfortunately justified in its disgust with the status quo yet again. What really annoys me is that I do not see an article such as this in the NY Times or anywhere else for that matter (www.marx.com doesn't count). Here is today's front page of the times:

Tasteful, eh?

And do not dare to tell me that I should go to the WB myself and change the system if I am so disgusted by it. You know just as well as I do that one such as I is not allowed into those hallowed halls of world corruption. In order to enter, one must first sell one's soul then cut off one's own cojones and generally cease to be a human being - all done voluntarily of course. Which would usually make me pity the babyhawks, but since they induce eruptious, uncontrollable vomiting, I do not. I get tired of having to clean up my keyboard and computer monitor after each article that I read.

manifesto of the enraged

"Freedom is nothing but a vain phantom when one class of men can starve another with impunity. Equality is nothing but a vain phantom when the rich, through monopoly, exercise the right of life or death over their like. The republic is nothing but a vain phantom when the counter-revolution can operate every day through the price of commodities, which three quarters of all citizens cannot afford without shedding tears."

This comes not out of the Favelas of Rio. This is not a call to arms in the shanty towns of Kibera. It was not spray painted on the mud walls of slums in Istanbul or Mumbai. You will certainly not find it in Communist China, that place makes a farce out of the brotherhood of labor.

You would have to travel through time to come across it, yet how much truth would the hungry of our day find in it still? How meaningful would it be to the mother who can not feed her children in Manila? Where is my Red Priest today? A few billion people are looking for you. The Haitians of the 21st century would follow your fiery oratory as their ancestors appreciated their freedom from the French yoke. As long as bread accompanies your words of steel you shall reign over the Republic yet.

Jacques Roux, where are you?

zoellick makes me vomit in my own mouth

Please see my post a little lower. Somehow “I told you so”, just doesn’t say it right. There was hope; as usual it was a false hope, that maybe my future would be considered. Unsurprisingly, the fat cats and the big hats think only of their checkbooks, which I am sure aren’t fat and big enough by any standards. And the bastard Zoellick dares to try disguise it by saying that he just wants to hook up his poor brothers in India with some power. How many solar panels can you buy with four billion dollar? In case you are trying to answer that question; it does not matter, because that would mean decentralized energy production, which is not under the control or part of the profit scheme of Herr Zoelick and his henchmen. Ergo, it won’t happen.

It boggles the mind, to know that locally produced and used renewable power is possible, viable and just bloody smarter, than pumping out four gigawatt of power via burning a lot of coal and shipping it from one end of a country to another. California Edison is about to install 6.5 Million SQF of Solar panels on commercial buildings in Southern California. That power feeds directly into the grid, no need for mile long cables that loose power and cause cancer. What does the World Bank do? Thinking of your welfare is certainly not it. Maybe they need an Austrian at the top, instead of a babyhawk.

Do you know how much water a four gigawatt power station uses? I don’t, but I bet you anything in the world that the fat cat’s cousin is already rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the profits from selling water to poor Indians because the naturally occurring water is sucked up by his cousin’s power station.

Do you know how much CO₂ belches out of the smoke stack of a power plant like that? I don’t, but I am telling my friends to sell their beach front property. It’s a good thing I don’t have any Bangladeshi friends, because I would just have to tell them to go &@%$ themselves, like Zoellick just did, since their whole country is so low that it qualifies as beach front property. Except it ain't a beach you want to be on. They recycle your crappy scrap metal on it. I guess the alternative for them would be to just move on out, get themselves some property on Fifth Avenue, start lobbying their local congressman to build more power stations in India and China, hope that increased entropy in our climate system will not affect us on our fair and far away shores, and wait for Armageddon. Oh, I forget, they don’t have any money. I guess it's back to option one, “You and your children can go &@%$ yourselves!”

“Zoellick, are you familiar with the term Armada Storms?” I know you are not, so JFGI baby!

1776

Anyone ever read any David McCullough? I just read his book “1776”. I am partial to Mr. McCullough because I really enjoyed his biography on Harry Truman. From the couple of history books I have read in my short and brutish life I find his words the most accessible.

So this book deals with the beginning of the revolutionary war of the USA against the Evil Empire. It does not deal with the whole war, but only with the events from the siege of Boston, to the evacuation of New York to the battle at Trenton at the end of 1776. Mr. McCullough is a very popular describer of American History, he does it in a fresh and nicely disguised patriotic manner. You don’t even realize his bias, which is fine, since he probably does not either. Those brave Americans always faced the greatest odds, had the worst equipment and the most gallant of them all was his Excellency, Mr. Washington - God’s humblest servant - a man made of benevolent granite whose only foible was the correct construction of his home. If Mr. McCullough were British his work would unleash a physical revision of history.

I ate it up, there is nothing that gets me going like a well-rounded heroic epic of underdogs making good. But let’s just say we take all of the odds that the American revolution faced in that first fateful year at face value. What the reader must conclude then is that America is a nation born of war. With little means to defend what it thought to be its inalienable rights, with few men to stand up to the greatest army in the world, with even less equipment for those men, with no money to pay the peasantry so called to arms and with military leaders that surely had no clue as to the intricacies of killing and maiming as many of their opponents as possible. It is utterly beyond me how the Brits didn’t just absolutely massacre the Americans in a really short amount of time. The situation was so bad that at the end of the fighting season of 1776 there must have been somewhere upward of 40.000 redcoats around New York State and roughly 7000 American Soldiers, most of which had no shoes and the rest was sick to death, hungry, hadn’t been paid in months and shouldn’t even have been called a militia. So here is a collection of peasants with no protection against New England winters, no bullets, no intelligence (as in spying) and no leaders yet still they manage to somehow hang on. And in the end they triumph over what was supposedly the greatest army of all times.

This helps me realize why this country is the most secure in the history of humanity, yet the most insecure in its own mind (Chomsky). It was born form war, and it sucked at it. This hasn’t changed much over the last couple - three hundred years. The USA still likes to go to war, and she still sucks at it. The intelligence in both spying and plain strategic brainpower is still horrible. Mr. Washington had no clue what the Brits were doing, and neither do the modern Armed Forces. Usually we, the population, need to give our representatives and military leaders quite some times to get knocked about a bit in order to learn the lay of the land. And even then it is not to be taken for granted that all that firepower will guarantee a victory over those originally proclaimed to be easy prey bad guys. Don’t get me wrong, nobody is as excitable as my current country men when they think a good cause is on the horizon. They are just a little stupid when it comes to understanding who is holding that good cause up, and to what end. So in order to make up for sucking at fighting and strategery this country shoots up steroids like Roger Clemens. Rightly, they figure that if they can not compete in skill and motivation they at least can be twice as big as the other guy. Which of course only works a little bit, because if you are not good at kicking ass, and primarily rely on being grossly large, there remains the thought that there always is a bigger dude out there somewhere. Hence the perceived insecurity.

So lest you wonder why the USA is so easily aroused, consider that she was a child of war, like the last two generations of Afghanis, and that seemingly every weakness and strength of character and skill can be traced back to the Revolutionary War.