Rafael, Someone You Should Know

A little bit of injustice has settled in our midst. Not the grand "fightin the man" kind of injustice, but rather a miscarriage of honor. For those uninitiated, Rafael Peralta, USMC, threw himself on a grenade during the battle for Falluja back in 2004. Other service members have since been awarded the Medal of Honor for the same actions since. A final ruling was issued last week and the recommendation for the Medal of Honor was downgraded. Some are saying it's because Rafael was an illegal immigrant, others are saying the medal was downgraded because he was already wounded. What nobody questions is that Rafael loved his adopted country and the Corps with a fullness most of us cannot fathom. The true issue here is that Rafael loved the men he was with so much that he couldn't bear the thought of them being hurt when he could do something about it. So he took very deliberate action that resulted in his own death, and allowed every one of his team mates to survive. If you've ever served in a capacity where you place your life in other people's hands and they place theirs in yours its the kind of commitment that brings hardened, grown men to tears. The least we can do is accord such commitment a place of honor, which is where you come in. Sign the petition. It costs nothing and you won't get on somebody's mailing list. This is one of those times it's easy to do the right thing.

God speed Sergeant. "Day is done, gone the sun...."

Ares

Fall

Welcome to Autumn. I can't find gas for my car, the stock market is melting down, there's a clown's theater of an election going on, and all I can think is "Damn the weather sure is nice". Here's to that first robin of Autumn.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Marmot Monday

Why We Fight

Unfunded

So this week brings word of yet more pension fund failures. This installment is brought to you by Cobb Our-S***-Doesn't-Stink County, Georgia, and the state of Nevada. (Okay, Nevada hasn't tanked yet but there's nothing to check its demise.) Let's be clear, these are not failures of the market. These are failures of the people that manage these funds. There's a four word term I want everyone to practice repeating: Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Get familiar because they're going to write your checks one day. For some reason public sector fund failure doesn't bother me as much a private sector one. After all, there's only so much you can do with government financing. But when a big fat company like United Airlines simply doesn't make its fund payments, causing it to fail, and then goes running to bankruptcy and passes off it's fund to PBGC, that's criminal with malice and aforethought. Bonus round: The United CEO got $37 million in stock and bonuses upon the company's emergence from bankruptcy.

PBGC's increasing load piggybacks nicely with the US Government going into the mortgage business. (Aside note: My understanding, and I could be wrong, of the Freddie/Fannie failure is that it wasn't their bad loans but their inability to continue packaging and reselling their debts. Some guy named Ponzi first came up with that idea.) Dovetailing with this theme congress is setting up to see who can give the biggest handout to the domestic auto industry. Because we really need subsidized Tahoes and F-250's. Behold, the era of small government is upon us. To those that argue for the privatization of social security I say what's the point? Athena, where was it you read a few years ago where someone described the US Government as the world's largest insurance company with guns?

The terrain is changing beneath our feet. Without much in the way of public consent and little in the way of discourse the fundamentals we've counted as solid are being renegotiated. Thirty years from now, when the academics and pundits sit down to write histories of the days we're living now, we are going to be excoriated for hubris. In the mean time, mom better get to work on a Plan B.

Ares

Feelin a Little Fred

Fall must be on the way because I'm starting to dig into existentialism again. It gets as regular as the leaves turning with me. The pause that finally comes with the break in the weather allows a pullback and some meta inspection. The only possible explanation for digging into Nietzsche in early September is that I'm trying to will a change in the weather.

Anymore I'm finding a bit of fascination with the concept of the Ubermensch. The whole idea got hijacked by Adolf and twisted around by a bazillion amateur thinkers thereafter. Fred wanted humanity to redefine itself upward outside the constricts of the church and without resorting to nihilism. The industrial revolution, and the resulting shrinking of the world that occurred with the telegraph/telephone and steam engine, drove a lot of people out of eons of spiritual comfort zones and into a low grade mania. Fred saw where this was heading, nihilism and war, and tried to call a flag on the play. He called the first 50 years of Europe's 20^th century from the cheap seats. But he was just a philosopher, and a dense one at that. They paid as much attention to philosophers then as they do now.

What does any of this have to do with anything? Not sure, but I think all of this is my own personal flight from idiocy. A little too much time among my fellow man, and a viewing or two of Idiocracy, and I start digging into the deep thinkers so I can tell myself I'm not like “them”. Athena and I have a rhetorical question we've been asking each other for years: What's the prize for being smart? Okay, maybe her and I aren't that smart, but there's some blatant self-awareness at work. What's the reward? Anymore I see some virtue in being a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. The further you seem to get from vice, habit, routine, and entertainment the more intractably complex things appear. Fred could have used a beer and some Cartoon Network. Might not have thunk himself to death. (Or visited the hooker that gave him the clap that eventually killed him. In the context of that I always thought it would have been deliciously ironic to put All to Human on his gravestone.) Taking a bit of my own advice I think I'll crack a Sam & see if Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is on.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Marmot Monday

Marmot Monday

Couch

I know this picture has made the rounds, but I still laugh every time I see it. The good news is that the army has new camouflage. The bad news is that it only works if we invade grandma's house.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Living the Cliche

So I finally had a quintessential cliche moment. Thursday I was on the treadmill, three sweaty miles into my five mile run. I was panting like a trout in bass boat and sweating like a fat man in Phoenix when she gets on the treadmill next to mine. We've all seen the type: Betty I'm-just-here-looking-for-a-boyfriend. (I know, this type also exists in the male of the species.) They're easy to spot, with their $200 workout fashion ware and hair done, spending more time looking around the room than at the treadmill readout. This particular Betty had applied about 3 liters of her cologne prior to entering the sweat deck. Her eau d'Phosgene made the air shimmer for ten feet around her. My eyes watered like I'd been tear gassed. I coughed like I'd swallowed a chicken bone. A spike of molten vomit made it as far north as the spot where my tonsils used to be. Compounding the damage was my breathing at double the normal rate due to the aerobic activity. I actually longed for the smell of a Chinese restaurant dumpster in the Georgia sun. The treadmill has a fan, which I quickly engaged. This simply introduced the mustard gas into my respiratory tract at twice the rate. If my alveoli hadn't been enduring the equivalent of a Dutch Oven I'd have offered a few choice words. Instead, I'm forced to resort to this forum. So Betty, consider yourself ridiculed and derided.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Nerd Test

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings...

Told you it was a nerd test. Like I said at the beginning of this blog, we're overeducated. If you don't know who Ozymandias is you can look here.

Ares

Enlarged Stupid

The last thing I want is for this space to be the home of the perpetually indignant. That said, I came across this piece in the Wall Street Journal and couldn't resist a trip to the soap box.

At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.

In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.

Wow. It's takes a special kind of suspension of reality and belief to convince yourself this won't backfire. Best case scenario: It ends up screwing your company into the ground. Worst case scenario: Crap like this brings down government intervention on a scale not previously envisioned by anyone. Or we could go big picture and look at this in a historical context. The last time corporate America treated it's employees with this kind of contempt was the first quarter of the twentieth century. How did that work out for them?

I finished The Fourth Turning a few weeks ago. Its a bit of a diffuse read, but the very short version of their thesis is that American history moves in waves. About every 80 to 100 years it goes really sideways and gets stretched to the breaking point. Do the math: Revolution & Continental Congress, Civil War, Great Depression, 2000 to ..... One of the big reasons the authors attribute to the above timespan is that everyone that was alive during the previous rupture is dead, so no one remembers how much it sucked. Scary thing about the book is it was written in 1997 and some of their short term predictions have pretty much come to pass. Things like this WSJ fiddling-while-Rome-burns article looks like another log on the coming fire.

Ares

Another Signpost

Local teenagers from the Hey Al Dubat area of Fallujah, Iraq, hang out during the afternoon near a Kentucky Fried Chicken July 16. Since the opening nearly seven months ago, the business has flourished and attracts many customers in the nearby area. (Official Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Chris T. Mann)

Just in case you needed another indicator that it's just about over but the shouting, there's now a KFC in Fallujah of all places. You know, the Fallujah where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was sawing off heads a few years ago. The Fallujah of Operation Phantom Fury infamy. The Fallujah where they executed, burned and strung up 4 contractors from a bridge, then danced in the streets. Bing West talks about Fallujah's reputation within Iraq in No True Glory. It was a nasty place even by Iraqi standards; their version of New Jersey. A lot of Saddam's thugs were drawn from there. And now they've got original or extra crispy with teenagers hanging around in front. Screw the political benchmarks. When Iraq gets its first indoor mall, compete with teenagers hanging around all day, it's time to bring the boys home.

One final thought. The picture below is from inside the Fallujah KFC.

A friend of mine went to Detroit a few years back looking at medical schools. He told me while he was there he went to a KFC in a really bad, "Oh Shit" part of town. This particular KFC had Plexiglas pass-throughs at the counter because the neighborhood was so bad. So using the KFC metrics, Fallujah is now safer the Detroit was 10 years ago. I'm gonna start selling "US out of Detroit" bumperstickers and declare a quagmire. Then again, calling Detroit a quagmire is redundant.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Atlanta Burn

What is it about this town in the summer that drives me under? There's something beyond the retardation-inducing heat, the diesel-tasting air, the nose-burning smell of piss, and the ugliness of graffiti-stained terrain. Maybe it's the collective rush towards idiocy. As usual, when the stupid gets too thick I head for the hills. This time it was literal, with a weekend foray to a cabin outside Blue Ridge. (At right Mrs. Ares ponders the distant hills from the deck of our 48 hour home.)

I call these Band-Aid weekends. Whatever's open in your head gets plastered over for a few days, just enough for it to coagulate. The older I get the less effective these bind-and-patch interludes are on my psyche. My relaxation genes are developing an immunity. The first instinct is to go farther away for longer, but I think that's just hitting the nail harder. Along those lines Mrs. Ares and I watched Into The Wild the other night. That poor kid read too much and worked up the ideal of getting away to the point where it drove him out where he didn't belong. (Reason #845 why I love Mrs. Ares: ½ way through the movie, when he's going on about wanting to get away from it all and go to Alaska, she says to me “He just spent too much time in Atlanta”.) No one in early adulthood should have unlimited access to Kerouac, Thoreau, and any Russian author. In my youth, upon relaying my discovery of Camus to Athena, she remarked to the effect that certain literature should have an age restriction.

I'm not sure what the answer is here. I'm mainly just spouting off at the keyboard because it's late and I can't sleep. Actually, I could sleep but I can't just yet. That's another day's post. As for this day's post, I'll give it and myself a rest.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Carbon Commercials

Commercials cause global warming. (Sorry I meant climate change.) That's according to a deep think pushed on the poor folks in Australia. While I think they were trying to be serious, I can't stop laughing. I have a vision of a hemp-wearing, Birkenstock-shod, tofu-eating, Kucinich-voting, (whoops, sorry Athena) trust-fund hippie, sitting in a yurt, turning off the TV during pauses in Lost. There's no source on the article, but I'm pretty sure it comes from the Department of Making Stuff Up, which is a sub-unit of the Ministry of Pulling Statistics Out of Our Ass. When I consider the current frenzy associated with environmental worship I think of the immortal words of John Candy in Spaceballs:"They've gone to plaid." I've posted it below (about 4:40 on the clip) just to remove the intellectual stink.

Ares

Marmot Monday

I think he's saying "Damn, it's hot!"

Ares

Amen

And "Its Not News, Its CNN"...

Athena

What We Call The News

Brilliant!



Ares

Marmot Monday

Locals Only Post

Whore!

For those from out of town, the whore in question is the one that is currently not a United States Senator. This is so pathetic it defies definition. Vernon actually had himself Photoshopped in with Barack for a campaign flier. This is the political equivalent of telling a girl you're terminally ill so she'll sleep with you. What's next? Vernon in one of those walls at Disneyland where you put your head through the hole so its on Micky Mouse's body? God I wish I had Photoshop.

Ares

Tuesday Word of the Day

Ataraxia: "A pleasure that comes when the mind is at rest." Also, a state characterized by freedom from worry or any other preoccupation.

Something to learn, something to practice.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Fourth

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Two hundred years later it's still one hell of a mission statement.

Ares

Food Suicide

Holy Trans-Fats, Batman! Courtesy of Instapundit, a story about the Luther Burger: A bacon cheeseburger that uses Krispy Kreme donuts for a bun. WOW! Atlanta locals are familiar with the now-defunct Mulligans on the south side of Decatur. Mulligans had the world famous Hamdog, which is a hot dog wrapped in a beef patty and deep fried. The Hamdog takes it's place alongside the deep fried Mars bar and deep fried Twinkie as the Leaving Las Vegas of food. Again, wow.

Ares

Update: Further food research has led me to the Bacon Unwrapped website. This is an instant new favorite in the Ares household. Best quote: "The scent of barbecue permeates the air. And as you walk down the midway, people offer you free pork. Within 5 minutes of passing through the gates, I had a sausage in my hand. I like to imagine this is what heaven might be like".

Marmot Monday

We're All Gonna Die!

I feel a need to call a flag on the play. I came across this steaming pile of an article the other day and laughed out loud. “Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition, and healthcare border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage….” Yadda yadda yadda. They forgot killer bees and a new global ice age. The authors go to great lengths to beclown themselves. I have so many literal problems with this piece and conceptual problems with what they’re pushing that I don’t know where to begin.

We’ll just skip the literal issues with the piece and slap the conceptual a bit. Why don’t they just get it over with and plaster WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! in 68 size font. This is the angle behind just about everything that gets shoved in front of us these days. I’ve been harboring the hypothesis for some time that we’re going to look back a generation from now on the ’00 decade and cringe. No context, no insight, just a big pack of people bouncing from panic to panic. There is no mistaking that we’ve got some large issues in front of us. But this has always been the case and will always be the case. I think a short trip down memory lane is in order to provide some scope. Let’s journey all the way back to the mid 1970’s.

Athena was a precocious pre-teen. I was a paste-eating elementary school nose picker. The price of gas was irrelevant because it was hard to come by. What gas there was had lead in it so it was only a matter of time before it killed you. The president had been self-deposed over criminal doings to get re-elected. The vice president had done a perp walk in ’73. America had just finished laying 58,000 servicemen in the ground over the previous decade. The Khmer Rouge slaughtered upwards of 2 million people (out of 7 million in the country) and nobody lifted a finger. An earthquake in Tangshan, China, killed over 200,000 people in July of 1976. Earlier that year another quake killed 23,000 in Guatemala. Somewhere around 200,000 people died when Typhoon Nina hit China in 1975. Over a 24 hour period in April of 1974 148 tornadoes struck 13 states, killing over 300 people & doing a few billion dollars in damage. Millions of troops were still squared off in Eastern Europe, backed by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, 30 years after the end of a war that nobody called a quagmire. Speaking of nuclear weapons, tens of thousands of them were poised to launch on warning. (“Guaranteed to end civilization in 30 minutes or less or your money back.”) Over 30,000 troops remained in Korea on war footing over 20 years after the shooting stopped in war that is still officially under way. Curiously, nobody’s called that one a quagmire either. Food shortages were very real, and the world’s three largest countries couldn’t feed themselves through domestic production. Paul Ehrlich was trying to convince us we’d all die via the population bomb. While we were waiting to starve to death we’d freeze to death because the new ice age was galloping towards us. Oh, and the Fed had interest rates in the teens.

Do I need to go on? We look like ass clowns when we quail about the price of airline tickets, professional sports, polar bear peril. Memo to all media: STFU and get back to work. We’ve got things to fix and stuff to build and you’re not helping.

Ares

Vermonted

Mrs. Ares and I went to the Green Mountain State last weekend. Let me start by giving a big-brained shout out to whoever decided Vermont should be known as the Green Mountain State. This is a branding genius on par with calling Georgia the Red Dirt State. All marketing labels aside, it really is a beautiful state.

As I told Athena, it's as though western Washington and Ohio had a kid named Vermont. Mountains, open spaces and water akin to the Pacific Northwest. Old houses and streets like you'd find in the mid-west.

Burlington, where we encamped for the duration, seemed rather overrun with hippies. I'm sure some of that had to do with the proximity of UVM. Still, there was an organic, if I may use the term in this context, sense of hippieness. The kids were a bit funny to my approaching-middle-age outlook. Lots of recreational facial hair, metal in various parts of the face, and lots of tattoos. Mrs. Ares referred to them as 'trust fund hippies'.

We also spent some time at the most-excellent Shelburne Farms. Shelburne is beautiful and probably what I'd like my farm to look like if money was no object.

Mind you, this is just the barn/animal area. We never even made it to the main house or any of the other features of the farm. Anyway, at the farm Mrs. Ares met Arthur, where it was love at first sight.

We may have to find a house with a bigger yard. I think there are cows in our future. Arthur was very good-natured considering he gets poked and pulled at all day by ankle biters that don't know any better. Aside from the hippies and bovines we ate a lot of great cheese, drank a lot of great local brew, and generally soaked in the place. (And for reasons to lengthly to expound upon in this space we didn't go near Ben & Jerry's.) As weekend getaways go we recommend the joint.

Ares

Cave Days

It's been too hot to leave the cave lately.

Sorry, working my way through a bunch of marmot pictures.

Ares

Marmot Monday

I got nothing, just been wanting to throw up this picture for a while.

Ares

Save Ferris?

U.S. Marine 1st Lt. Kathryne B. Schilling coaches a woman as she prepares to shoot a pistol during her training to become a Sister of Ferris, June 4, 2008, Ferris, Iraq. The Sisters of Ferris will inspect women for weapons, suicide vests, large amounts of cash and contraband at entry control points. Schilling is assigned to Combat Logistics Battalion 1, 1st Marine Logistics Group. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Cindy G. Alejandrez

Who knew Bueller had sisters in Iraq? I gotta dig into Wikipedia more often. I need find out who this Ferris character was and how they made it okay for women to have guns in an Arab society. Today its Sisters of Ferris, tomorrow its Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Wonder how long that burqa's gonna be around once Fatima there gets to take her gun home? Also gotta wonder how many women are gonna say no mas to a male-dominated culture after spending some time around American female warriors? All benchmarks on the road to creating a functional society. By the way, Sister, you're holding that Glock wrong.

Ares

Hell is Other People

Far and away my favorite existentialist quote. Sartre was a pissy, moody whining bitch (who boxed several intellectual weight classes below Simone de Beauvoir), but that single nugget of wisdom redeems him in my eyes.

Nothing like a day of wading neck-deep in your coworkers' neurosis to make you wanna take a mallet to the soft spot on the side of your skill. As I wrote previously in this space, even the a******* in your life have something to teach you. Today I was using my inside voice to yell at the heavens "WHAT IS THIS A****** TEACHING ME!" I felt a bit like George Costanza yelling "SERENITY NOW!", but with my inside voice. Old Siggy Fraud said "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". I think that translate across into "sometimes an a****** is just an a******".

The detached, internal intellectual that usually won't roll around in the stink posed a question in the midst of bashing my head against ramparts of stupidity. In your late teens and early 20s you crave sex and respect. By your late 20's you crave credibility in your chosen profession. In your 30's you crave competence and recognition of such. Anymore, I crave a Dick Proenneke life, spent in a self-crafted seclusion. A great number of people in my profession spend a large portion of their professional life constructing the Dick Proenneke exit of some fashion. While I acknowledge this very idea is occupying a larger portion of my psyche with the passage of time, I wonder what comes after this. Or will this be the defining obsession henceforth? I don't see an exit or an alternative. As you can tell, it was a long, hot day and the beer isn't doing anything for me.

Ares

Athena Caveat

Slight difference of opinion here at A&A: I happen to like Christa, and especially snarky Jordan.

Sorry to be MIA for so long, but between walking four miles a day (stress management, anyone?) and then catching the world's nastiest summer cold (I felt like an extra from Stephen King's The Stand) I just haven't been feeling the blogging spirit.

Meanwhile, here's one I've been enjoying lately...

Love ya, miss ya, mean it...

Athena

Andromeda Strained

Michael you whore. Mrs. Ares and I just donated three hours of our lives we’ll never get back to a ‘reimagination’ of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain. This thing left no short cut uncut and no cliché undisturbed. And before I forget, here’s a little tip to the producers from Jake Jackass in Snotbubble, Georgia: If you want me to take your scientists seriously then don’t cast the girl that played Kate on Drew Carey as a surgeon. I can’t unthink her decade’s worth of penis jokes and toilet humor.

This thing is poorly designed to play on all your fears. It’s got a little something for everyone. There’s the terrorism angle, the black helicopters tease, the pandemic monster under the bed, the monolithic-omnipotent government and its associated goons, the mother-earth-is-our-god-and-technology-is-evil meme, and finally that soaring X-Files tent that has taught two generations of Americans to distrust government in all its forms. Evil, dark, ubiquitous cabals are the recurrent theme and the parting visual.

The original (book) was a brilliantly conceived story. Crichton had a gift for taking complex, scientifically-laden ideas and presenting them in an accessible and entertaining format. Remember this is the guy that brought us Jurassic Park and was the original father of E.R. Not a single DNA strand of his storytelling craft was evident on this festering piece of crap. Please, to all that have seen the latest incarnation of this production, please check yourselves into detox by at least renting the original movie. Or, if you prefer cold turkey, read the book.

The new version of Andromeda Strain reminded me of the difference between original Star Trek and The Next Generation. The original, for all its cheese, was fairly tightly written. TNG ‘ran home to momma’ in the form of computer generated graphics and special effects. The original story stood perfectly well on its own. Not content to let a classic stand, this new version became a message movie. Next they’re going to remake Congo where the apes that aren’t killed by global warming are going to become mutants that kill all humans.

Ares

Atlanta's Math Problem

Short aside here. Came across a little stubbed toe of an article in the Urinal-Constipation about Fulton County reassessing value of some commercial properties downtown. The biggest chunk out of corporate ass is the new Ernst & Young building near the Aquarium. The property tax bill goes from $96 grand to $1.2 million. (Holy millage rate Batman!) Here's a tip to the deep thinkers at Fulton County government: You might not wanna raise the taxes 1200% on an accounting firm. They'll turn their army of Poindexters loose on you to the point that you'll owe them money when they're through. Not that I'm disparaging the folks at Fulton County. Any group that can make Dekalb County look cosmopolitan has my admiration. There's a nifty little chart at the bottom of the article that shows in numbers exactly how much Fulton County is trying to kill business in downtown Atlanta. Poor city of Atlanta, they almost had the pee smell problem solved and now this.

Ares

Thank You Just Doesn't Cover It

As the boys at BlackFive would say, here's someone you should know.

Ares

Matrix

Lest things start to look too serious in this space we've added some content to lighten it up a bit. Bravo Zulu to the folks that came up with this one.




Ares

Speaking of Known Unknowns

Athena and I have been having the discussion about government accounting playing hide-the-salami when it comes to liabilities. Specifically, the coming deluge of pension system obligations. Again, we're no experts, but it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see the craters in the road ahead. In an odd showing of competence the New York Times laid this out pretty well last Wednesday. As if to piggyback on the theme the city of Vallejo filed for bankruptcy yesterday. Why? "....the cost of ballooning public safety employee contracts"

This is not mystery math. A high school freshman with a calculator can look at X number of employees with X number of years of service retiring a X percentage of annual salary and compute accordingly. San Diego actually had a bit of a dust up about this a few years before their pension system led them into bankruptcy. A city councilwoman had the audacity to suggest the system was out of balance. Her reward was fellow councilmen recommending her for psychological evaluation. I think her new last name is Vindication. This type of flapping incompetence is one of the reasons I'm not a "lifer" at my current employer. We're just starting to climb this hill. More to follow.

Ares

Known Unknowns

From the "No Shit, Sherlock" files comes this deft little booger of insight. The Washington Post has discovered that there's no real logical or economic basis for the explosion of oil prices. "The market is once again searching for a new equilibrium" said a report from Goldman Sachs. The equilibrium referenced is not the usual market forces of supply and demand, but rather the break point where people are moved to violence or outright theft. Around the Ares and Athena campfire we call this a "because we can" application of pricing.

I'm certainly no economist or expert on commodities valuation, but something has definitely changed in the last decade. There appears to be a heard of investment capital that has moved from commodity to commodity. The unifying thread in the movement is that the commodities are staples that consumers have little choice about consuming. It started with an intensive push for deregulation of portions of the power industry in the 90's. This resulted in criminal-level graft in California. (A sitting governor was deposed and the state was economically knee-capped at a cost a few indictments and hand slap fines.) This was followed closely by the absurd run-up in housing prices. Housing will have to retreat quite a bit further before it will be affordable to the average American again. Now we're a few years into a speculative frenzy concerning oil. The hedge fund alarmists have constructed a theater of imagination where any uttered disturbance is cause for increase in price. Favorite examples of the past few years have been rockets fired at oil tankers, forecasts of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, a rebel attack on a refinery in Nigeria, and any statement by anyone in Iran. None of these actually result in a supply reduction, but the the downrange facts have no place among current shakes of the Magic 8 Ball. Overlaid onto this decade has been the price of health care. Because, really, your only option besides paying is dying.

This is capitalism at its absolute worst. This carnivorous heard of revenue harvesters is consuming its own flesh. A cursory examination of the first 40 years of the 20th century bears out an excellent example of what predatory capitalism will reap. Aside from stretching society at the seams it brought down government intervention on an epic scale. The longer the current incarnation of that period persists the greater the chorus will be for intervention, regardless of reasonableness. Bear in mind that I'm an avowed capitalist when I say I don't have a problem proposing that the government nationalize the oil industry. The waste and abuse of applying civil service and congressional oversight to the energy industry would be a welcome change from compulsory contributions to epic racketeering. (I defy anyone to ethically justify hundred million dollar bonuses.) The longer this persists the more people are going to pushed into the arms of those that offer radical solutions. (Including mine. Thankfully I'm just Jake Jackass with a blog instead of a policy maker.) This has the real possibility of contorting the entire system to even worse ends. I don't know what will fix it, but like everyone else I can see that its fundamentally broken.

Ares

Changes

Been a while since we've changed the linen over here. I'm trying to see what this pig of a blog host site can do. More subtle changes to follow, including the subliminal advertising for donuts and beer. If you hear cursing from northeast Atlanta it's just me trying to get the code to do what I want. I believe the correct acronym is PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.

Ares

Battle of the Hot Dogs

It's hard for me not to love Drew Carey. Not only is he a pop culture anti-hero, with his less-than-slim waistline and coke bottle glasses, but he's also a pretty smart guy. Of late he's taken up the cause of combating stupidity via video spots on reason.tv. He tends to ask some pretty basic questions that are difficult to answer without retreating to sound-bite banalities. One of the best thus far is his latest, which is about a street cart hot dog vendor in Los Angeles that got busted for selling bacon wrapped hot dogs. (And got 45 days in jail. Holy nitrates, Batman!) Drew seems like a natural spokesman for bacon wrapped hot dogs.

Ya know, I'm just spitballin here, but if the Libertarians were serious about fronting a candidate with some distance they'd draft Drew. My friend R is constantly lamenting the perpetual flaccidness of the Libertarian Party. He's got strong recognition and comes across as a regular guy. Best of all, he's got nothing to lose. For those who laugh at the idea I would direct you to the Reagan Presidential Library to review the works of Governor Schwarzenegger.

Ares

Take My Wives, Please

With apologies to Henny Youngman. How could I not tickle the comedy gold that is the Texas Polygamist Sect? So much to hit here, so few metaphors. Let's just start with the ladies.

They've got a whole Anne of Amish Green Gables thing going there. Its like some strange gaggle of bible-thumping Squeaky Frommes. What part of Leviticus contains the passage "Thou shalt have a bouffant hairdoo, lest ye be transmitted to the gates of hell"?

Moving right along, I love the church that looks like it belongs on a Pitch-n-Putt course between the windmill and the dinosaur.

I think that ramp you see on the right is actually where the ball comes out when you hit it in the back door of the building.

Why is it you never hear of a polygamist group where women have more than one husband? This entire state of affairs is begging to be made into a reality television show. If we can have reality shows about wife swapping and crab fishing why not this? Because if there is one kind of reality show Americans love, it's the kind where we're yelling "What the f*** is wrong with you people!" by the end of the first episode. On a more serious note, you have to give some credit to both sides on this issue. Thus far everyone is going about this methodically and peacefully, unlike another Texas polygamist that burned his people to ash 15 years ago today.

Ares

Really?

Hate to be a self-appointed hall monitor on this whole "climate change" thing, but I've got a bulletin fresh from the What The F*** Files. I'd expect this type of thing from Creative Loafing or The Sunday Paper, but this resides on AB-frickin-C's website. This particular piece is about the torch relay. Quote:

"If people are looking for another reason to be pissed at China, how about this: By the time this pyro parade is over, it will have produced about 11 million pounds of carbon emissions."

I'm a little bit at a loss over this one. The stupid is so very large and protracted it's difficult to get my arms around it. I could build an analytical rebuttal to the piece, beginning with the idea that it's not China's fault there's going to be Olympics. I could then follow on with......oh what the hell. I give up. I keep waiting form someone with some authority and authenticity to throw an absurdity flag on the play, which is my mistake. Dick Proenneke sounds smarter all the time.

Ares

Cheese

Mrs. Ares asked me today when we should receive our forthcoming check from Uncle Sugar. The question got me to thinking. The last time the economy was this grab-your-ankles bad was early in Regan's first term. For reasons that seem a bit fuzzy now, it was decided then that the world would somehow be better if everyone got a big block of cheese. I was much too young to lock in on the details, so someone older than myself please explain the thought behind the mass distribution of a dairy product. I do remember it was pretty harsh stuff, having the consistency of bathroom tile caulk that had set. This ignited an entire generation of 'government cheese' jokes. By the way, I figured out what they did with all the leftover cheese that didn't get handed out. Like some dietary Nick at Night episode, you can still encounter it if you tear open the right MREs. Millions of starving people world wide are reliving the 80's with their GI systems as we speak.

Say what you want, something has gotten better if we went from cheese to cash in a generation. Mind you, it's our cash and they're just giving it to us in IOU form, but at least we'll have more to show for it than constipation. I intend to confound the government and place it into savings. I'll call it a down payment on the Social Security I'll never get.

Ares

Elsewhere

Have you ever realized with a start that the previous 30 (or 60, or 90) days have passed you by and the details have dissolved? Just sort of an indistinct blur of work, couch, showers, and driving. This is happening with greater regularity with the progression of age.

The biggest marker I can dredge up to highlight the past month is running the now annual ING (Half) Marathon. Over all it was much, much better than last year. Cooler temperatures, more water, better course, and at 2 hours 18 minutes a much better time on my part. I finished strong, sprinting the last 300 or so yards. Aside from this it's been a slog of work and whatnot. On a brighter note, I've discovered a few good local blogs that are worth checking out.

The DeKalb Officers Blog is a little slice of Schadenfreude, courtesy of the imploding DeKalb County Police Department. Its a narrow view of the overall slow-motion self-destruction of DeKalb County.

Live Apartment Fire is a much needed critique of local media in this clown college of a media market.

And finally, Georgia On My Mind is a bit of a catchall. There's a section with Lawyers and whatnot for Athena.

That is all, go forth and think great thoughts.

Ares

Enthroned

This is just too big to not comment upon. Seems a women spent two years sitting on her boyfriend's toilet. So many things wrong here it's hard to know where to start. I'll just voice the larger issues before moving along. First, did the boyfriend not need the toilet for those 2 years? I bet all the grass in his back yard is dead. Second, and I ask the rhetorically, what's your girlfriend-on-the-toilet time threshold for wondering if there's a problem? Third, don't tell me it didn't start to smell after a while. Fourth, was he bringing her food? If so see Question #2. Fifth, how did her legs not atrophy and die? Sixth, isn't calling a woman whose only tie to you is occupying your toilet your girlfriend stretching the label a bit? I could make a day out of this but I'll stop with number 7: Isn't every dump she takes for the rest of her life going to be anticlimactic? We'll just file this one in the "Never saw that one coming" folder. Wow.

Ares

Narc'd

Whilst trapped at the Secure Undisclosed Location over the weekend I gave in and perused the Atlanta Urinal-Constipation over the web, where I came across this story. Now I’m taking the angle of the article with a grain of salt, because the AJC could screw up an obituary. But the overall premise rankles the ever-loving snot out of me. Mr. Head Fed is clucking about his success with narcotics enforcement in the metro area, saying the result has been higher prices for smack and nose candy. This means the addicts have to resort to more crime to support their habit. Head Fed says his group’s work is why crime is up in Atlanta. I’m going to ask a basic question and hell is going to freeze over while I wait for an answer: How are we better off as a city with these results? The first rule of police work, everywhere on the planet, is to protect lives and property. Both are being squandered at a higher rate as a result of the federal fixation with stamping out narcotics. Cui bono? I think we can safely say it isn’t us.

Ares