Blog Posts

Israel Jumps the Shark, Splits the Baby

By PeraclesPlease on Sun, 07/15/2012 - 10:12am |

Israel astounded international observers this week as former Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy announced in effect: "Israel never occupied nobody!" Imagine a President Romney asking Justice Scalia to provide a definitive interpretation of the Obamacare decision. The results could hardly be more unsurprising.

Fox, meet chicken coop. Chicken coop, meet fox. With Netanyahu assembling / stacking this committee of like-minded thinkers to come up with a way to prove their settlements were legal, they creatively fell back on familiar ground: the West Bank was already Israel's so they could build wherever they want anyway.

Anne Frank as Literature

By PeraclesPlease on Fri, 07/13/2012 - 1:35am |

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/289227-1

Brilliant lecture about history & development of Anne Frank's opus I ran across last night - including how much she re-wrote it her last year, how many pages went into it that weren't seen from the original, and from the speaker's view most important, that almost no one's given the book credence as literature in its own right, including a need to view its prose as creativity, not just a document.

25 year nostalgia: The Montreal Protocol

By PeraclesPlease on Fri, 07/06/2012 - 10:11am |

Imagine the 2 leaders of the world's Conservative movement agreeing that industry is destroying the environment, and taking decisive, concerted action to stop it.

That in effect is what happened in 1987 when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol, to ban CFCs, which took effect less than 2 years later and had drastically beneficial effects on the Ozone Hole. 

Of course it wasn't just conservatives who pushed this measure, and it was based on science that evolved over a decade, but from the view of 2012 it's still amazing. Now the conservative official line is that man can't really affect the environment, which rather than relying on the "6000" history of the world, simply denies confirmed reality of 25 years ago. Work across the aisle for the sake of the Environment? Pshaw. Rio? D.O.A.

John Roberts goes rogue?

By PeraclesPlease on Thu, 06/28/2012 - 8:16pm |

Roberts delivered a delight today.

Not only did he pull out a justification for the mandate, he did it in a way that still slams the overreach of the Commerce Clause, provides insight that it's fungible as a tax, and aligns with liberals for the first time in.... never.

It's tickling in one sense to see him acting as a real conservative - the mandate *was* an overreach for Commerce - by breathing, the government can make you buy *anything*?

The Mandate & Collusion: another Gangsta parade?

By PeraclesPlease on Mon, 06/25/2012 - 2:27am |

CMaukonen's nicely been tracking Taibbi & Yves Smith's effort on bank collusion on public bonds (transcript here), that stole money from every local initiative over how many years, audaciously justified in court by "the towns got a good enough rate". In their eyes, "market rate" = "bargained collusion rate", and since they're fair enough, the market just works. 

Imagine how messy it'd be if towns had to compete to get actual highest returns for their bonds? What's wrong with everyone giving hand signals to rotate the winners of bond deals between 3 veteran financial houses?

Sign Here: Obama Haters for Obama

By PeraclesPlease on Fri, 06/22/2012 - 6:41am |

Yeah, I'm rising from disrespect to contempt to despise.

Perhaps it's people telling me what I should do, but I think it's mostly his actions.

I woke up with one piece of judicial news and a non-finger-pointing assessment of our Supreme Court problem, and I was convinced: vote Obama, reverse Supreme Court.

A couple articles later, I revise equation: hold nose, sneer, vote Obama, pray the Supreme Court is enough.

Rmoney: Love in Bain

By PeraclesPlease on Fri, 06/15/2012 - 3:06am |

Sorry, couldn't resist.

9 out of 12 people haven't heard of Bain.

And you can be sure that of the remaining, a lot just think it was about downsizing companies in trouble, not gutting stealing the pensions & dumping the carcasses on the taxpayer (who didn't cover all the shortfall)

What a wasted opportunity.

Proof of Genetic Gender Difference

By PeraclesPlease on Thu, 06/14/2012 - 2:37am |

Recent scientific polling has shown differences between the sexes that can't be explained away by "nurture" vs. "nature" justifications or social upbringing. As this scores new technology that's never been used before, for entirely different benign effect, the resistance of women to its charms lends credence to a fully genetic model of inherited differences between the sexes.

As prelude (or foreplay, if you insist) to the rest of the analysis, the results first:

Timeline: 87,000 in Afghanistan

By PeraclesPlease on Tue, 06/05/2012 - 2:16am |

                Timeline

The President's going to end the war.

End of 2014, 2014.

13 years fixing stucco to a wall.

Still it all falls down, all falls down.

I remember when it was a little war,

Just 4 years ago

30,000 foolish souls

There to make a difference.

The only difference is 50,000 more souls

And a few who art in heaven.

But soon we'll have an end to this,

A newfound peace, newfound peace

Only drones remote controlled

And military police.

As they stand up, we can stand down,

Hair: Obama Punches a Hippie on Memorial Day

By PeraclesPlease on Tue, 05/29/2012 - 3:00am |

Ah yes, trotting out those tired old lines:

”You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor. You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated

No matter how many times someone points out the myth of hippies spitting on vets just didn't happen in any numbers, that the protests were aimed at the Pentagon, not G.I. Joe, the story just won't die.

Apparently Obama missed one of the major vibes of the period, trying to end the war, trying to keep our neighbors from dying for no good reason. Are the kids at Kent State included in the remembrance of Memorial Day?

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Defies gravity Can spit really far Almost touch my toes Can cut a fly's legs off with a beer cap from 20 paces Know how to say useless stuff and prattle on in a dozen languages Don't know when to shut up
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To be for or against the Plague, it's much the same thing. Fiddledee, how a body shure do get around - just 2 weeks ago I was in Mississippi and now I'm all the way to Tennessee... Eat or Be Eaten Better to be pissed off than pissed on.
Biography
Born in swaddling clothes (designer, of course) at the confluence of big waters, my first recorded words were "Dad, can I have the keys to the car?" Raised a Southern Pedestrian, my musical talents were recognized at an early age, leading to my being exiled to the shed out back with a stack of books that became my eddykayshun - advanced readin', writin' & ritmytick, creating a major quandary of "what will I do, oh what will I do?" (Gunslinger) As an old black man advised in song, "You Gotta Move", so move I did, traveling the byways sideways even a lot of driveways, picking up sticks and psychological tics, even movin' to Beverlee through a quaint misunderstanding of the seriousness of TV series, until finally I blew up so big the carry nation incarnation tarnation couldn't hold me no more, so I fixed my sights on yonder sitar, and like Queequeg and Paul Bowles and one of those abducted kids by the Pied Piper of Hamelin, I ventured forth to the larger world, pickin' and grinnin', doin' me some reckonin' and naughts from naughts, occasionally rightin', building me some buildings and wiring and just trying to understand the babble comin' out of people's mouths and heads, I finally ended up in what Rummy quaintly calls "New Europe", which ain't so new from what I sees, but that pit in my stomach from lack-of-moving-sickness finally disappeared, and instead I sit behind a whopping big desk stacked with missives from all the chiefs with big whampum around the world telling me "what's going on". Which seems like a load of boolshit to me, but I guess that's what keeps me busy and entertained now, separatin' the weeds from the chapstick. So my name is Perry Keys, or Peracles to you, and since my mammy always said, "say please and thank you", I added the please, but I'm holdin' back on that thankee until I feel you've earned it. But do welcome, and I hope we's a gonna have a real good time. It all starts with, "I wuz born a poor young white chile livin' in the South..." and we cycle through again, like Nietzsche and his infernal regurgence. So enjoy, and let's spin a spell...

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