Ditat Deus

By Captain Fogg

God enriches: it's the state motto of Arizona. To some it surely suggests that the rich are the chosen of God and the poor and struggling? Your papers please.

My hypocrisy alarm has burned itself to a cinder over the last few days simply from the stench coming from our self-styled Libertarian friends from Arizona who have just given far more power to the State government than the Constitution allows and reduced constitutional protection from the power of law enforcement provided by that constitution -- a step away from Libertarian principles that even the notorious Glenn Beck balks at.

Anyway, if God has enriched Arizona in any way, the government of that stolen state has done a great deal to cheapen its claim to being a part of a free country and to impoverish its moral status as well. Perhaps taking a clue from the Texas school board's redaction of American history, Arizona has decided that no courses taught in its schools may give students the impression that they belong to a persecuted minority.

That's right, the Navaho have always had it easy, no one ever gave a black man a hard time and the state itself was never taken by force. It's now official.

Squid's Fortnight

by Nance

I live in a pretty spot and May is a luscious month here at the beach, but, ordinarily, I try to be as far out of the area as possible for all of May.  This year, with a wedding looming, we're staying put for the month and driving VERY carefully.

It's time for the annual Hog Invasion on the south end, followed immediately by the annual Metric Bike Rally on the north end, to borrow a couple of terms from the rich lode of biker slang.  It goes without saying that I'm entirely hip and in the know on these matters and, obviously, so are you, so I won't spare the jargon. [For the unhip, there'll be definitions at the end of this post. It might be more fun to try to pick up the meanings from context and photos.]

At one time, the motorcycle events were referred to as weekenders, but both events gradually turned into fortnighters as more and more riders tried to get here ahead of the pack.  Since there's usually only about two fortnights in a month, that pretty well shoots May for the locals--at least for the ones who don't own hotels, restaurants, or bars.  Some creatively named bars only open for the month of May; my all time favorite raunchy bar name is Suck, Bang, Blow, but The Beaver Bar speaks volumes.  Many of those business owners rake in the bulk of their annual income when the motorcycles arrive.  The rest of us have successfully campaigned for noise ordinances and helmet laws, which harshed out the rebel experience for many attendees, who preferred to ride without brain buckets or mufflers.  So we've pitted the retirees against the business owners and thrown in a half million sunburnt, liquor-swilling, Hell's Angels wannabes. We could give lessons around here on how to divide a town against itself.

Riders and vendors have both taken the drop since '08, when more than 500,000 cycle tourists swarmed the beach,  swamping the city and county services.  While attendance has declined, there are still enough bikes, booze, and babes headed our way this weekend to make a trip to the grocery store a potentially life-altering experience.  Outside the city limits, where I live, the new laws don't apply, so it gets very sporty on the roads for drivers.  When I'm traveling at 45-60 mph in my car and am overtaken  by 25 or 30 unmuffled four-cycle engines in the hands of drunk and bareheaded riders, I have a tendency to fluster a weensy bit.  People die on these roads each Rally season; I keep hoping no one will choose to perform a high-speed drop in front of my Passat wagon.

A Sporty is a Harley Sportster, the classic, lighter weight model (DH had one of these when I met him 34 years ago). The guys seem to prefer the heavier Hogs these days and the women sometimes ride Sporties, but there'll  also be plenty of road couches, Goldwings, and geezer glides clogging up the local slabs. Some bikes, like the custom job with sidecar shown here,  are nothing less than beautiful.  Bikers, on the other hand, aren't known for their beauty; they have a tendency to look a little leathery and not terribly clean. Bugs in the teeth, both smooth-style and crunchy, can detract from looks and are a bigger problem when helmets are eschewed...so to speak.  And it's hard to tell how old a biker is.  This fellow reminds me of a biblical patriarch, if Abraham had worn tats and colors. 

In between laughing ourselves silly at the sights, DH and I worry about the utter lack of protection most Rally riders prefer.  They think those of us who travel in cages when we're cruising don't know how to live right.  They look at us in our wagons and see squares; we look at them, many with nothing but t-shirts between their skins and the pavement, and see squids.

Some riders need to wear more clothes just to keep from offending everyone else, which has given us a wicked, be-ashamed-of-yourselves million dollar idea:  The Biker Suit.  Sort of along the lines of those Sumo wrestler suits people wear for keg parties so they can get drunk, run into each other on purpose, and fall over--only these suits would actually serve the purpose of putting abundant padding between the biker and the slab (rhymes with _____). 

Hey, somebody stole our idea!

 The prevailing joke amongst those opposed to turning the town over to bikers for the prettiest month of the year is that Harley riders are typically doctors, lawyers, and highly successful business folk.  The proffered proof is that the bikes are so costly to own, transport (or ride), and maintain, that those who are owned by a Harley (or BMW or Victory) have to have means.  So, what would you say:  doctor?  Lawyer?  Chiropractor, maybe?

Photo: D J Mick

Terminology:
Hog:  A big bore Harley Davidson.
Metric Bike: What Harley Riders call cycles made by foreign countries; for example,  Crotch Rockets or Rice Burners.
slabs: roads or pavement.
Suck, Bang, Blow:  A drive-through biker bar named after the processes of a four-stroke engine, including the intake stroke, the ignition, and the exhaust.  This leaves out the compression stroke, which would be step two, but who can count that high after so many tequila shots and brews?
Beaver Bar:  Gimme a break.
brain buckets:  Any sort of helmet, but particularly the type of half-helmet that is almost worse than useless.
drop:  What happens to a bike if the kickstand isn't engaged; also, what happens to an imbalanced and poorly controlled moving bike.  
high-speed drop:  When a bike is banked too far in a high speed turn, gravity goes to work.
road couches:  What you ride when you really should have hung it up about ten years ago, but you've got more money than sense.
geezer glides:  See road couches.
colors: Gang duds, like The Outlaws or The Hell's Angels wear.
cages:  Automobiles, to a biker.
squids:  Variously, as Squashed Kid; an overconfident biker with an attitude of invincibility and a preference for speed over skill; Stupid, Quick, Underdressed, Inevitably (or Imminently) Dead.
burnout:  Revving the bike to 7000-8000 rpm while slowly releasing the clutch, front brake tightly held. Back tire will melt and may blow.  One more reason you'll need that law degree.

Biker Bar Burnout

Drill until we drop

Perhaps a society such as ours has as finite a lifespan as the individuals it's composed of and I think I'm seeing the kind of memory loss and dementia in the American public that we associate with extreme old age. The aged body sometimes can't absorb sustenance very well and neither can the American public assimilate the things that make a capable and dynamic Democracy possible. a large part of our population, for instance, seems to think that the huge environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico means that we need to do more of what made it happen and in the same careless, unregulated way. Presumably a number of those live far inland and don't like seafood or care that the Earth is becoming less livable because these are still the "end times," but not all of them. Some just think that as long as their immediate, short term needs are met, the rest of the world can go to hell, and so it goes.

A recent poll shows that despite the total lack of evidence and the extreme unlikeliness of the scenario, nine or ten percent of Americans do believe Limbaugh's idiotic proposition that it was the "enviros" behind the drilling platform explosion, but the scary part is that 22% are "unsure." Amongst self-identified Conservatives, the number jumps to 44% who believe it was sabotage by liberals. The evidence to the contrary is out there, the evidence for it isn't out there, so either 31% are unable to assimilate it by reason of dementia or have no interest in the survival of the USA as we think we know it -- or Like many aged people, they've given up and are simply wandering in a senile, paranoid daze of denialism looking for their lost youth and vigor.

"Perhaps most surprisingly 21% of voters said the spill made them more likely to support offshore drilling,"

said Public Policy Polling director Tom Jensen. 55% of Americans polled after the disaster began, still supported offshore drilling, according to the same poll.

Am I pushing this too far? Is this really only more of what America has been doing since its beginning? We are, after all a nation that is happy to continue its war on drugs and embargoes on foreign countries that cause more harm than good; a nation that has had to struggle tooth and nail to overcome our vicious habits. Most of all we're a nation that always waits for a calamity before doing anything. What I'm afraid of is that this time the calamity we're waiting for won't come until we're a nation incapable of taking care of ourselves but a nation with a huge Army.

Teh Great Wall-Off Mexico

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. So when John McCain ignores the overwhelming empirical evidence of human history and insists that massive federal spending on a barrier will work this time, you know he's lost his mind.

Also: I'm trying to win a Netroots Nation scholarship, and all you have to do to help is click a couple of times.

Fear and Trembling in the Court

OK, so now I'm worried. I was willing to make some excuses for Obama's new support of offshore drilling; blaming it on previous administrations' infiltration of oil men into the department of energy and the drowning of environmental regulations, but if what I'm hearing about Elena Kagan is even partly true, I'm worried that we're going to have a more dangerous court, more friendly toward unfettered Presidential powers and willing to cut a wider swath through the law to root out nebulous, ever shifting devils and their agents -- making any accusation, any suspicion a de facto conviction without representation, without trial, without appeal: in some cases without anyone even knowing about it.

"Battlefield Law", said she to Lindsay Graham last year, should be applied to anyone we have a feeling is financing Al Qaeda and one's rights should not be read to anyone that might be construed to be a "terrorist" despite the lack of any real definition of what a terrorist might be. Vague definitions and accusations of shadowy connections leading to indefinite detentions without due process? Why have a court at all if we're no longer a civilized nation but a band of warriors on a worldwide battlefield?

Attorney General Eric Holder said on ABC's This Week Sunday, that even US citizens don't need to be read their rights if they're suspected of being involved in terrorism. Suspected is the key word here and in a time when everyone seems to be suspected every time they board an airplane, it's a scary word.

“I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception." Chopping a piece out of the Bill of Rights is “one of the things that I think we’re going to be reaching out to Congress to do – to come up with a proposal that is both Constitutional, but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face.”

I think it's worth mentioning that the most recent attempts at terrorist acts were hardly impeded by the reading of rights as the terrified terrorists , one of whose gonads had just been blow off, spilled their guts as fast as they could get the words out and when we're happy to torture people so thoroughly their testimony becomes invalid, what's going to change if we tell them they have any rights at all -- which, practically speaking, they don't. I'm afraid we don't either. It's certainly harder not to cry when reading about our forefathers' noble ideals about all mankind being endowed with inalienable rights when we're told that's just too risky these days.
It's always been risky and taking that risk has been one of our valid claims to greatness.

The last thing I expected or wanted from the President in the way of restocking the Court was another battlefield lawyer, supporting the degradation of our most basic American traditions and laws from gutless cowardice. We have more to fear from fear of terrorism, it seems, than from terrorism itself. At a time when the very concept of a government is so frightening to so many, I would have expected a selection with a more obvious commitment to taking the risk of Liberty and willing to face saboteurs without sabotaging our own freedom.

Poisoning Pigeons In The Park

By Nance

Monday scares me.  I'm one of the little people who doesn't understand the Stock Market, who has no business involved with it, but who finds her financial future, and thus the quality of her old age, bound up with and terrorized by that fickle, convoluted, unnatural, hair-trigger, Frankenstein creation of our infatuation with the promise that money makes money.

Monday might be a second chance to make a wise move with what I now pitifully still refer to as my portfolio; I was too paralyzed by fear in the summer of 2008 to know whether to hold 'em or fold 'em.  The pressure is on to be a little smarter this time around, following the past week's sharp declines and Thursday's petrifying plunge...except that being smarter seems even less possible, even more past hope now.  The only economic constants I've detected in recent years are that some folks will make money in wild market fluctuations and that I will probably be among their dupes.  I don't feel one bit smarter or better able to decide whether to stay in or get out.

I've assumed that somebody knows what happened last Thursday and what is likely to happen on Wall Street next week, but reading up on it today has just made an ass out of u and me.  Theories abound:  it's Greece and the bail-out implications for the EU; it was sabotage by _______ (fill in the blank with your favorite conspirator, party, lobby, or disgruntled fan of Blankfein); it was the bad news about unemployment rates hidden under the good news about job creation; or, most detached and cruel of all, a fat finger.  In the online money journals and news sources, I've encountered psychotic word salads that only leave me more confounded.  Take this example from The LATimes:

"We were in the midst of a pullback, we needed one, we got one," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at New York-based brokerage house Avalon Partners Inc. Cardillo said the choppy trading after such a drastic decline likely signals the market trying to find a bottom.

Stocks have been on a nearly uninterrupted upward path since March of last year, when indexes hit 12-year lows. Analysts have been predicting a correction for months, only to see the market bounce back after brief periods of decline.

Long-term market watchers actually welcome occasional pullbacks in stocks, saying that gives investors opportunities to pick up shares at bargain prices.

"We had the earthquake, we're now in the midst of getting the aftershocks," said Steven Goldman, chief market strategist for Weeden & Co. in Greenwich, Conn. "When the market's so close to new highs, it's difficult to have rallies. But when you're down 10 or 12 percent from recent highs, we can deal with uncertainty better."

Did Cardillo and Goldman say here that they welcomed this week's dizzying descent because it lets those in the know feel in control? I am too far down the Rabbit Hole, now; I'm having the same kind of vertigo I get when I try to read a prospectus. I'd just begun to think that the prognosticators who pointed to the DOW line graph as proof that the bad times were behind us might be right. That'll learn me. Again.

In a conversation I had sometime in July or August of '08 with an acquaintance who professed financial smarts, I declared that I was so disheartened by the market's unrelenting drop, I didn't think I could bear to stay invested.  His response was, "Well, what do you think you're going to do with it, put it in a jar under the bed?"  That was ridicule, in case you missed it.  Another wag told me, "Oh, yes, cash is king now!"  And, still another, "This is the time to put every penny you can put your hands on into stocks!"  And, "It's all gambling. You should never invest what you can't afford to lose."

Here's a sure bet: there will be abundant and worthless advice available on Monday. My worthless advice: stock up on Mason Jars.  The smart money will be on the insiders at the expense of an entire class made up of vulnerable retirees and retiree hopefuls like you and me who were only hoping for peanuts on the dollar. They toy with us and our measly, hard-earned savings.  It'll be as easy for them to take what's left of our nest eggs as...um, trying to avoid cliches, as easy as...I draw a blank.  Jeez, why does this Tom Lehrer song come to mind?

Bossa Nova Bomb?

I struggle to understand why Brazil needs nuclear submarines. It's a country where the interior is extremely difficult to penetrate or control and where the coastal cities have horrifying slums controlled by gangs and where poverty is rampant. How real is the threat of invasion? How real is the desire to be the alpha dog of South America?

Of course one benefit of having nuclear powered subs is that the military can impose secrecy on the fissionable materials it stockpiles as fuel and in that secrecy can use it to make nuclear weapons. There are indications that this is just what they're doing or are about to do, with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expressing irritation at the US monopoly on nuclear weapons in South America and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

So why the hell does Brazil, it's recovering economy notwithstanding, need the Bomb? I suppose it's because it simply feels it can -- and with the US busy chasing its own tail, hell bent on self-destruction and anarchy, who is to say it can't?

Audacity

We're all aware that one of the rhetorical games people use to portray political opponents negatively is to call them name callers. A skillful user can frame any kind of protest as a hatefest and in our time, when the most vociferous denunciation of the sin of homosexuality seems to come from people who hire male prostitutes, it's not surprising that the angriest political protesters spend more time accusing others of the sin of anger. So the people out in the streets flaunting weapons and sometimes vicious signs make it a point to take offense at those "hate-filled" liberals who like to point out not only the misspellings, the sometimes amusing disparity between facts and their beliefs and often vicious rhetoric. "Look at the way they call us 'Teabaggers'" say the offended parties, foam on their lips still fresh from calling the President a Communist, Kenyan, Maoist disciple of Adolph Hitler. "Liberals are having a field day of hate."

What will they call me for pointing out that they were the first to use that silly term themselves? Jay Nordinger writing for the National Review Online has to admit it, but can't do it without repeating the calumny -- those liberal extremists like Rachel Maddow are nasty, childish name callers -- never mind that we "patriots" started calling them Nazis and Communists years ago for valid criticism of the Republican Administration: baby killers! Grandmother killers! America haters! Terrorist supporters! They should be more respectful or at least neutral.

Sure, there's name calling and there's name calling. Massive tax cuts intended to boost the economy were just that a few years ago, but now they're irresponsible and massive debt increases according to "Tea party patriots" ( to use the term that Nordinger insists we should use if we really were fair minded) and aren't I just a nasty name caller for pointing out the stunning hypocrisy? Isn't this just a hate site for publishing that? No, the Liberal Media like the National Review, controls the discourse and that is why it's become so nasty. By Liberal Media of course, I mean those terrorist sympathizers and Trotzkyites who want to grab your guns and turn your children Gay.

I'd hate to play poker with such people. It's more than just Botox that enables the propagandists and media manipulators and their candidates to say such things with straight faces. So when the Republican candidate for the Governorship of Florida comes on the air last night and with the flippant demeanor of someone explaining to preschoolers that fish swim and birds fly, tells us that "Obama thinks that more government is the solution to all problems."

I have to be in awe of his training, self control -- the sheer dishonesty of his audacity. As he was speaking, of course, one of our time's greatest ecological disasters was and is poisoning vast areas of the Gulf of Mexico and soon to poison a good part of the Atlantic ocean and all the sea life -- and all the result of taking government mandated safeguards out of the equation: the sum total of the Bush energy policy as written by BP and Exxon and Halliburton. When BP drills elsewhere in that oh so socialist world, they have to use a device that would have prevented this spill, but thanks to core Republican policy they got to save $500,000 and cost us untold billions. God only knows what the final cost of this disaster will be or how many decades it will take for the Gulf to begin to recover.

But there you are, I'm indulging in "hate" again when I should listen to Rush and accept that man made disaster is "natural" and after all, oil is part of nature and it's a liquid just like water and nature itself wants the oil cartel to make billions and billions and billions -- far more than it wants us to be healthy and prosper. I do try, but as they tell me I'm a liberalcommiefascist, it can't be easy to rid myself of that ugly old hate and go along with the flow.

"Hey Fun Boys, Get a Room!"

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Adios for a week (Don't worry, things can always get worse)

By Arthurstone

I’m as fervent a capitalist as anyone. That said I am not afraid of government (though I’m mindful of its endless inefficiencies) nor am I in thrall to the idea of self-correcting, efficient markets. When they ‘correct,’ it costs me a lot of money. Their ‘efficiencies’ add to the number of crackheads in my neighborhood. The co-mingling of ‘laissez-faire’ capitalists and government is a hideous mutation well described by Naomi Klein in ‘The Shock Doctrine’ and now playing out in Greece and soon to come to a theatre near you in Spain, Portugal and other EU countries who have chosen to put the interests of their citizens ahead of predatory bankers, investors and global enterprises as encouraged by the good old US of A.

Pre-natal care and maternity leave? Labor unions? Workplace safety rules? Pensions? Universal medical care? Comprehensive and accessible educational opportunities? Support for the arts? Investment in infrastructure? Environmental concern? Affirmative action? All expensive and all hindrances to unfettered capitalism and the enormous benefit to the most predatory, greedy and selfish members of our society which accrues through unethical (if not illegal) investor practices, credit swaps, short selling, TARP and other bail-outs we fund in lieu of spending on the common good.

And while we’re at it let’s not neglect that grand daddy of all American obsessions. The great American pastime itself. The thing we never seem to tire of nor ever seem not to be able to afford:

War!

There’s always time and treasure to devote to ‘defending’ out interests. That defending our interests currently takes place several thousand miles from our borders and involves ‘enemies’ who have not attacked us is beside the point and not without historical precedence. While it’s the Afghans and Iraqis turn in the barrel this go round don’t forget that in last century it was Filipinos, Hawaiians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Iranians and a host of others who paid the price for having the audacity to question our ‘national interests’. Interestingly enough, our ‘national interests’ so often seem to require satisfaction within the borders of other sovereign states. Such is the burden we must bear. Empire never did come cheap.

My business has suffered the past couple of years. I own and operate an art gallery dealing in contemporary painting and sculpture. No one knows better than I how ‘unnecessary’ what I do actually is. Compared to bankers bundling toxic mortgages, computer whizzes counting keystrokes and inventing new pop-up ads and methods of tracking me in real time and marketers turning every lifted toilet lid I encounter into an advertisement, I’m keenly aware of the insignificance of my contribution. The impulse to tell a story, paint a picture, write a song, carve a block of wood or throw a pot is interesting in a puny way but pales in comparison to the far more important impulse to ‘earn’ vast sums of money.

And I’m okay with that.

So Sunday morning my lovely wife Marianne and I are off to Akumal on the Yucatan peninsula for a week of reading, cycling, snorkeling, sunning and eating. It’s my gift to Marianne on her birthday. Measured strictly in financial terms, probably, I can’t really afford to go right now. Business is at the same level as it was in 1994, the third year of operation. And it’s a real struggle right now. But I figure I can’t afford not to go. My Father died last year, Mother the year before. We all ended on good terms and one wise thing (among a great many) Mother told me was to enjoy this while I can. And I still can. I’m 58, healthy and have a little saved up. In the great scheme of things, I’m essentially a lottery winner compared to so many far less fortunate.

And I choose not to let the bastards whining, kvetching, complaining and mewling about our current state in the US get me down. Most of us (and certainly many of those making the most noise) have far more than our share and are, through the accident of our birth, among the luckiest people on the planet.

It’s a big world out there and we as Americans too often forget that simple fact.