before i forget

The WB wants your feedback. If you are any good at any of this do give them a holla. We don't want to just be bitching, do we now?

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!

mental (f)loss

My boy Stamati linked me this site Mental Floss. He picked a bad day to do that. The first entry is about the Cosby Show and why the little girl is a little girl instead of a little boy. I hate TV. “Are you kidding me man? You send me a link on TV trivia? ME?!?!?! Have you flossed too hard?” FYI: most of the TV that I watch is C-Span.

Scrolled down and don’t mind it so much after all.

ARGHH, I take that back, I just went to the blog section and the top entry is a bonus (thank you SO much) quiz. Guess about what: The Office. The second entry is some stupid fucking quiz about nine actresses. Please forgive me not going there, and not adding flossing to I LIKE – not that my two readers care so much about what I do anyways.

How much further do I have to scroll on this site in order to actually find something interestingly intelligent, instead of mental masturbation? I mean it would have been reasonably funny to watch an oxygen tank explode through a little kid’s head (NOT!!!), but that video didn’t work.

I invite you to prove me wrong. Send me some links on Mental Floss that do not inundate me with inanity.

And please somebody tell me when my writing reaches fatuous qualities of similar proportions.

PS: Ok, I will go and get the magazine. Will let you know my exalted opinion later.

rannofo

The river Rannofo is in the south of India. Four tributaries pay their nasty tribute to this once mighty giver of life in a great churning mass of chemical processes kicked off by various reactive particles at the more aggressive end of the Periodic Table of Elements. The levels of pollution in the tributaries are not unusual by Indian, Asian or even global standards of water pollution. One of them, the Supar, is a muddy cesspool with the olfactory properties of one of those Yellowstone mud-holes, the ones that smell like a million stink bombs had been thrown into a vast vat of vapors-inducing vapidity by especially ugly redheaded stepchildren. The second one used to be called Viriditas, the Greening Power. Today nobody remembers why it was called Viriditas. It greens no more, and nobody remembers when people started calling it something else. The new name cannot be mentioned in polite company or in front of your mother. The third one is not really a river anymore. It is not a tributary in the natural sense, where water happily springs forth from a meadow in the high Alps, or seeps out of the ground in a swampy sweet smelling marsh with dragonflies buzzing and little birds flying lazy loops in the air. It used to be all that. But now its headwaters are the spouts of a mighty coal burning power station, that produces four Gigawatt of electricity. The financing of which was approved by the World Bank on Monday April 7th, also known as the day that humanity signed its own death warrant. The fourth tributary is on fire more days than not.

Originally, I set out to write this story as a metaphor of hope in the tenacity of humanity and our amazing ability to survive horrible situations. The four tributaries would miraculously clean each other up in this great churning mass of chemical reaction. I wanted to brush the cobwebs of my old mental periodic table, and come up with a process where this becomes reality. But now that I set all the ugly veritas down on paper, I don’t want to anymore. Because if I do, somewhere some idiot will take it as a metaphor, not of destruction and willfulness, but of some magical way that we will by pure chance happen upon, enabling us to pollute the living daylights out of our home planet and happily survive in a clean world anyway. Well, it won’t so I don’t.

Your little future Gandhi of the green movement will not bath in the soothing waters of the Rannofo (orig. ran-more-four => Ranmofo => mama would wash my mouth with soap, so => ran-no-four => Rannofo), and will not discover nature’s wonderful self-cleansing ways, and will not apply his newly found idea of green resistance the world over, and will not save humanity from itself.

Instead he will die of a large amount of chemically induced ailments at a very young age. His parents knowing the reasons for his death, but nevertheless powerless to stop it, will not be able to find recourse from the polluters. The polluters are the whole entire world, and how do you sue something like that? The financiers at the World Bank, the planners of factories, the consumers of products, the drivers of cars and the users of cloth driers. It is one giant tragedy of the commons, and that description has never more hit the last nail in our coffin right on the bloody head.

1 is a tragedy, 1 million a statistic

60 minutes

die qual der wahl

Interesting things are happening at my current place of employment. It seems the new goal is to motivate the little cogs in the machine instead of just chaining us to a big ox cart whipping us into shape with a cat o’nine tails. I am sure it has nothing to do with Google hiring away the best and brightest, to luxuriate in free food and massages while working 15 hours a day (they are just not very efficient I think).

In my prison building the fourth floor has been remodeled. It now has an open friendly feel to it. The walls are painted some other, more colorful color than Navajo white (the ugly eggshell colored mix of left-over colors used in most cheap rentals), the cubes are lower and one can actually see his work mates (Why anyone would want to see the assholes they work with is beyond me though).

The best thing about the new zeal to please us little cogs are the free cog vending machines on only the fourth floor. It is a veritable snack, drink and coffee cornucopia. In the beginning it was a secret. Not everyone was initiated into the Free Snack Brotherhood by ritualistic means. A whisper, a wink, a knowing nod would pass in the hallways. All but the Swede, who from 30 feet away, in our unfriendly cube world on the third floor would happily intone at jumbo jet decibel levels, “Pete! I see you been to the fourth floor again!” would try to keep it on the down-low. Needless to say that by now all four floors go to get their sugar kick on the fourth floor, leaving the cafeteria manager wondering why his crap food and sodas are not selling anymore.

As your favorite closet sociologist I draw several conclusions from this:

• My employer must be tripping by now. You may rely on the fact that they have secret productivity measures in place to see if the fourth floor cogs are more happily churning out more stuff. Now that the whole building (and probably some expats from the rest of the campus as well) goes there, these metrics are completely unreliable.
• It is much better to openly grab the free stuff, instead of feeling guilty about the sneak snack snag.
• The line to that little kitchenette is getting ridiculous.
• When people have the opportunity to choose from 30 free snacks, 20 free sodas and 25 different coffee mixtures it takes them much longer to choose than when they have to pay. When you buy your snack you will only take what you really want. But when you can slowly work your way through the whole selection, you take your time and consult your mood before choosing that yogurt coated raisin snack.

In any case, I love that we are getting free fruit at the entrance to the prison now as well. Suddenly I find myself eating apples, pears and bananas all day long. This is a nice win-win for the cog and the machine.

spousal matchup

Today I enjoyed watching speeches by the democratic presidential spouses. To make a long story short, I think Mrs. Obama is a skilled orator. She is self possessed, she has good cadence and she knows English much better than the current Prez, even though he is married to the first librarian. But putting her up against old Billy is like putting me in sumo ring with the current Yokozuna.

For that reason I think it would be fair to establish a handicap for presidential spouses. Similar to golf, where a player’s handicap allows all players with different skill levels to play against each other competitively this would level the playing field in the spousal matchup of 2008.

With that in mind I propose Bill Clinton, who after all is used to addressing the nation and the United Nations, to be categorized as a handicap -2. Which on the Illetschko-Volo Electoral Spousal Scale means that he may not use the letter L. This should put him on equal footing with Michelle Obama, who may use all vowels and consonants indiscriminately. So when she rhetorically asks the crowd “Why am I leaving my kids at home running around with my husband, running for president?” Billy Goat may only respond by saying “Goba cimate change is neary as bad as No Chid eft Behind”. With the successful adoption of this scale you can look forward to Mr. Clinton introducing his wife with “I woud ike to introduce my wife, Hiary…uhm. My wife Senator Cint… this is just not fair! My wife, the junior senator from New York.” It should add much needed levity to this year's presidental contest.

In other news, Bi Cinton compained heaviy about the imiatations of the ietschko-Voo Eectora Spousa Scae as impemented in this very bog. He obviously thinks it is a “Repubican Conspiracy”.

shoe size?

7 + 7 = 49

My piggy bank did not last long enough. I fervently believed in its goodness, as proclaimed by various relatives who would sarcastically drop a couple of pennies into it, reminding me that soon enough I would be wealthy beyond imagination, or at least able to buy that face-sized lollipop I had been craving.

Why is that important? Well, if they would have explained compound interest to me back then I would have had a happier chance at happiness through accumulation of base Mammon (also known as cash). As it stands it took me the view of a few adult years to understand compound interest.

However, my money is not the only thing that supposedly doubles every 7 years (I now have $ 2 to my name). My chance of contracting a deadly disease apparently increases at the same rate. By the time I reach 70 I will have a 2¹⁰ chance to grab some more or less tedious increase in entropy in the enclosed system that is me.

So if you play your cards right, your cash will double just enough every 7 years for you to afford the cure to the latest POS disease your vessel decided to run with when your telomerase shortened yet again. This will not be the case with me, because the doubling of the money has barely started while the doubling of the diseases is on its 5 iteration. I am banking on good genes and long telomerase.

Be that as it may, it fascinating that compound interest is on the same schedule as aging is programmed into our DNA. There must be some magical property attached to these coincidences. We need to bring back Alchemy, I hear Newton was quite taken by it. If I could just get some sage to explain to me that all of this has something to do with people dreading the seventh year of marriage I will start having children right away (So that I may have seven. And so that the seventh son of the seventh son will spawn some sort of godhuman, or at least turn water into wine and, in that order, gold into lead).

PS: In order to find out how this turns out, please get in touch with me in 7⁷ years. Call Bill Bryson if you need a translation of that number.

phoenix is a great place

Most people who visit the United States of America bypass Phoenix. Most Americans, people traveling to and from California, do so as well. While all of them probably think that the climate is unbearable and so they should not have to stop I would like to draw your attention to another fact of this dusty western town.

Like the Phoenix, perpetually rising out of the desert landscapes next to Sky Harbor, this town rose out of the ashes. In 1940 Phoenix had a hot 65,000 inhabitants. Compare that to the explosive growth of Southern California in those days and one has to realize that it couldn’t have been all those beach bunny California girls and fruit picking jobs that made people move there instead of Arizona. Nope, you guessed right, it was the heat. You can fry an egg on the side walk here – at 8am. You park your car 2 blocks from work so that you can get the only shady spot available, and at lunch time you rotate parking spots with the shade. Roadrunners routinely run in front of your car, preferring suicide by tire to having their brains boiled – all you hear is a tired Beep Beep.

As soon as air-conditioning and Motorala arrived so did the people. And did they ever come. Every decade it seems as if this joint at least tries to break another population growth record. It is a human fungi spreading over dry land. From 1997 till now the Phoenix population has increased by 39%. That’s like Mumbai on Crack, at least for US Standards.

Its location is perfect, a town that can grow to its heart’s and boosters’ content, hardly any natural boundaries inhibiting its burb-mania. I still think that the only reason that they built their state capital here, instead of in a sensible place like Flagstaff is that there are no limits to sprawl here. Phoenix can look to LA and learn how not to build roads and freeways. It can pick up a thing or two of how to handle population spurts from cities all across the country. How to move the masses, how to cool the masses, how to feed the masses and how to house the masses.

Phoenix has indeed learned a lot from cities who have grown to its size much earlier. Do not take it for granted that crime is low here. It would have been easy for this town to degenerate into a lawless city state reminiscent of old Western Towns. Traffic is bearable, it’s not perfect, but it is by far better than at least 8 other metropolises in the USA. Love the Suns, so even the immigrants (Steve Nash) are kinda hip here. Higher education is somewhat lacking, but with typical USA enthusiasm for profits that will be remedied pretty soon. In the northern and somewhat cooler enclaves of the rich and the boobjobed one can even find a good cup of coffee on occasion. Forgive this town the heat, it’s not its fault and in fact it is outstandingly perfect for nine months out of each year. Not a cloud in the sky, the whole world wants to come and play golf here when its freezing everywhere else. Those baby-boomer snowbirds follow the warm weather south en masse. To summarize, this town is perfect for the way of life that most citizens of this country enjoy.

But damn the punk neighborhood planner jerk who sits in city council after city council, real estate development company after real estate development company. They should all be lined up and shot in their unimaginative gluteus maximus. They do not actually design anything. They ejaculate whatever is left of their never highly developed, now completely stunted creativity on a piece of paper – through their sphincter muscle! Style is the red-headed stepchild that Phoenix did not just leave behind at the last bus stop in New Mexico. They literally kicked the poor thing out on the street, reversed over it a couple of times to make sure it was dead, and then kept collecting alimony. You like to say that the 80s is the decade taste forgot? Well, Phoenix declared taste to be public enemy number one.

Every street, every corner, every mall, every shop in every mall, every person who works in every shop in every mall - they are all the bloody same! They look the same, they think the same, they talk the same. And they live in houses that all look the same. I don’t know why they bother buying a house. A house is supposed to be a man’s castle, something individual, not a carbon copy of his neighbor’s house. People might as well live in a termite hill for all the diversity in architecture here. They eat in restaurant chains that I have incorporated into one of those nightmares where you keep falling of a skyscraper over and over again; only I get served the same lame piece of artificial sushi before I wake up screaming. I call dining in this town regurgiteating. It all tastes the same, looks the same and the girls who serve the meal all go to the same titty surgeon. By all that you hold dear in life, please understand that regurgiteating is not actually a pleasant thing to do. Just talk to that cute Penguin from last year’s summer hit, or a cow. If you must know; you have throw up before you can regurgiteate.

This town had a chance. One of the greatest minds of architecture this country has ever seen decided to live here. Don’t ask me why, this was before air-conditioning, he probably hoped that nobody would follow him. But he did not just want to live here. He created a school of architecture, the brilliance of which only slowly emerges in our midst. Taliesin isn’t just the culmination of Frank Lloyd Wright's lifework. It isn’t just a school that architects the world over aspire to attend to this day. It not only incorporates living in harmony with the desert and ecology. It is also beautiful. I would live in it. And so would you. You would feel cradled in its protective arms. You would feel expansive yet close to nature at the same time. You would feel authentic. Food would taste ambrosia-like. Songbirds would sweeten your morning. Wine would run in the fountains and pools. Phoenix never cared.

Instead one ill-insulated McMansion springs up next to the other. 3.56 people living in 3000 sqf. It boggles the mind how ugly and wasteful it is. Henry Ford would probably think that this conveyor belt produced way of living is good economies of scale. I just want to vomit in your front yard. At least it would add a little color.

You say that the market has spoken. This is what people in Phoenix want to live in. This is what they want to eat, this is what they want to see and this is where they want to go shopping. I don't know who is guiltier in this chicken and egg puzzle – the buyers or the sellers. I am sure though that this architecture reflects on the people and vice versa. There is a symbiotic relationship between a human and the environment she lives in. A man becomes what he sees and that which he sees takes on his soul. Q.E.D Phoenix never really got rid of those ashes. Those feathered wings never took on their new shine of brilliant colors.

This bird is a lost cause. Short of turning all those stupid Home Owner Association hoods into slack and rebuilding it all from scratch nothing will help. It is like making a crater on the moon into something that you want to call Home Sweet Home. So instead of trying to make it look good, let’s do something practical and useful. Let’s put solar roofs on all those ugly abodes. At least if it is not that nice to look we could turn it into a mirror and power the rest of the United States of America with it.

nice sunday

Emily said that there is always one video from a trip that you will keep watching over and over. We agree.

reflection

Just looked at my last two posts and noticed that they are not the most feel-good propaganda. Really, I am not trying to give you a complex, it just so happened that I saw these two data points floating on the web. Now they might as well be linked in spirit as well as in location, on my grand world renown blog. The moral of the story? The people nowadays don't just want bread and games (to spell it out: McDonald's and Superbowl) for them to let you control them. They also want the freedom to be as wasteful as they want to be. So if you let them drive their Hummer to Mickey Dees and order large amounts of pizza and Soda on Sundays you are gtg on the surveillance business.

guilt trip

Because we don't get to see enough of this kind of Data in the USA. Not that we are all necessarily moral human beings, but if you do lay claim to such morality, you better start taking the bus. For more and to learn German go here.

how surveilled are you?

This should give my American readers pause. It gives me chuckles. Apparently our semi-communist , but definitely socialist, eurotrashy america-bashing heartlands of the EU never really knew freedom the way Americans did. It also explains why we are so jealous of America (must stop listening to FOX). Us Europeans of course have always known that it is an illusion that privacy in America is much more highly valued and defended than in other western countries.

According to this graph from The Economist (scale is 1-5, 5 being the least surveilled) Americans have less privacy then all EU countries except the Brits, but they like to spy on each other, and are only slightly better of than Russia and China.

Bloody hell, I just saw that ROMANIA, not even two decades after Ceausescu's execution, does nearly three times as good as the USA. Thats embarrassing. Not so much because it is happening, but because people in the USA are too dumb and arrogant at the same time to realize this and keep telling the rest of us, how they are trying just their absolute best to bring the joys of freedom to our poor, backwards, super-surveilled, un-free, undemocratic nations. And because they are feeling especially magnanimous they will throw a color TV in as well, since they know that us poor saps don't know what those are either.

franchise this

Stamati tells me of a business venture. It’s coffee. Not just any coffee. It’s Sonoma Coffe Café. Actually has a nice ring to it. You can get a franchise. The guy selling you the franchise tells you to do some research on franchising, see if you are fit for this kind of work, some call it indentured. Tells you to go online, to read some books. You think that's a reasonable thing to do. So do I. So you do. Apparently, the best book on franchising, and the coffee franchise rep profusely apologizes for this monumental lapse by the CPD (cliché prevention department), is unfortunately but all the more hilariously “Franchising for Dummies”. Seriously. No, really.

zis. i like

killing prudes

The freshly showered man enters the locker room – with a towel around his waist. The towel stays wrapped around his waist as he twists himself into a pretzel and pulls his boxer shorts over his knees in a supremely awkward manner (he had just worked on his Latissimus and Gluteus Maximus). All of this contortion to shield his oh-so-privates from the prying looks of men. Usually one can only witness the other species of humanity do this on the beach, but then it is a pleasure. Considering that the freshly showered man just spent 2 hours chained to so many machines in order to improve his masculinity it is indeed surprising that the best of such symbols may not be shared with other similarly equipped humans, even though presumably that’s where the competition lies.

The freshly trained man walks down a dusty road – with a machine gun around his shoulder. The machine gun comes off in a flash as he falls to the ground and fires a stream of bullets with supremely devastating effect (he just did the work of a citizen). All of this carnage to shield our private interests from the prying hands of humanity. Usually one can only witness this happen to those other, mediocre tribes, but then it is a guilty pleasure. Considering that the freshly trained man just spent 2 months in boot camp, chained to so many of his compatriots in order to improve our masculinity it is not at all surprising that we share this symbol with other dissimilarly equipped humans, because that’s where the competition lies.