Greco-Spanish Wrestling

Random Barking

The news is chock-a-block with stuff as a bad Exmass fruitcake, but it isn't even June yet. I'd prefer we not get too far ahead of ourselves.

The Greeks continue to come to a boil, which threatens stability of the Eurozone and the Euro. Depositors have transferred some of their money out of Greek banks -- not a full-fledged bank run, but a potential warm-up. Their current government is definitely Left, but whether they tell the EU ministers and the ECB to suck Adam Smith's underwear take their Austerity plans and go away is anyone's guess.

Meanwhile, Die Eisen Kanzellerin continues to say that Austerity is the only overarcing policy for the EU she will accept. She's had to claim this week that there are no contingency plans for Greece to exit the Euro and the Eurozone, but there was some minor embarrassment when it was revealed that yes, Angela, such plans have been made and are being updated. Not sure why this was such a flap; contingency planning is another form of prudence.

However[I'm sorry; have to use the phrase] the Greek Chorus of sensible financial analysts, all demanding that growth through deficit spending by individual European governments, continues to grow louder with each report showing GDP shrinking in Britain, Italy, Spain, (certainly Greece) France, and even Germany.

If The EU 'stays the course' on Austerity and refuses to pull back from Stalingrad compromise, then Germany's current government may be responsible for pushing the continent further into the current Depression off the fiscal cliff into another Recession.

Which will, of course, kick the United States economy in the balls to the curb, as we move into a Presidential election race between an empty-headed, rich Suit Talking-Head, desperate to be elected; and a Chicago political Suit whose core values seem to be not pissing off rich people, and whom is desperate to get re-elected.

The first will just fuck The People (without dinner, I add) and, when We try to get his attention later in a crowd, will push a copy of the Big Book O' Mormon at us, flash a smile and say, "Hi; great to see you", then disappear into an exclusive elites-only gathering behind a phalanx of bodyguards.

The Re-electable Other will allow The People to be gangbanged by the Tee Partei and then have all manner of ready explanations as to why he couldn't prevent this from happening. Then, he'll flash a smile and disappear into an exclusive elites-only gathering behind a phalanx of bodyguards.

It's all quite upsetting. And which of these two wins may be decided, in part, on how quickly the EU and its central bankers can run round-the-clock, pump-and-shore parties below decks on the good ship Austero.

Many observers in the U.S. believe that the EU / Eurozone stuttering into collapse, or a larger implosion of global financial markets resulting from a crisis in an individual European country on the brink, would not be good for The Re-Electable Other, and allow the Rich Suit to claim it was all Obama's fault.


Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo In Middle Of Blog Rant

Ah, but what's this? Now, Spain begins to deteriorate financially, prompting another set of depositors to transfer billions of Euros out of their banks. Ratings agencies downgrade the perceived quality of those banks, which force even more depositors to transfer funds to other banks, perceived as being safer bets.

Franco crawled from his grave, took one look at a recent (Rightist) newspaper and promptly crawled back in. Bankia, Spain's largest financial institution, announced on Thursday that it needs $19 Billion Euros in 'assistance' from -- well, somewhere -- just in order to keep from declaring bankruptcy and setting off a world-wide financial Armageddon.

It's curious, isn't it? The world's major banking and investment firms can each declare that their own individual problem is enough to ignite a global financial collapse, if they don't get a bailout. And over time another, and another, noch einmal; usw., usw.

The amount of debt created during just the last ten years -- a great deal bound up with Real Estate -- has been sitting in the middle of the global economy like a partially-defused Thousand-Pound bomb. Since 2008, the combined efforts of the world's central bankers (and friends) has managed to stop the bomb's timer (allowing those with wealth to figure out methods of saving as much as they can -- even while millions of Us become unemployed), but that's all. It gave them time, so it was said, to find a solution, to "unwind" the debt and somehow pull the fuse out of the Thousand-Pounder before it went up and brought the whole edifice down.

But, the Europeans (and the Amerikanischer Tee Partei) demanded that the only solution was Austerity -- proof that as government spending decreased and national debts were brought under control, The Magic Market Confidence Fairy would coax investments in equities, and push banks into loaning money to develop businesses and hire all those peasants unemployed people. The banks said Oh; fuck you, by the way. They wanted more free bailout money, even as they made more profits. Unemployment grew. And Austerity as a plan was proven incorrect, as it turned out.

And, while all this has been going on, investment banks have continued trading in Derivatives, or Credit-Default Swaps -- and the amounts of those which would need to be paid in the event of a financial collapse is in the hundreds of trillions. This is why the situation in Greece, and Spain (Italy and/or Portugal will be next) is worth watching.

It's like being a spectator at a slow-motion automobile accident between two cars driven by rich crack addicts, playing Chicken by driving head-on at each other: They knew exactly how they got into this situation; they knew what getting addicted could do to them; but they did it anyway.

We enabled them, too. We could have demanded a little more finance regulation, listened a little less to Little Rupert's propaganda factory. We believed everything the Whorehouse and Casino of the Free Market showed us. Now, we're living through history, a thing we somehow believed we were immune from, helpless to do anything about the impending crash -- even move out of the way. Because, however it happens, we're going to get struck by debris as a result.

But, I'm only a Dog, and no one listens to me. Tonight, I'm going out with friends, a couple and their children, to (no joke) a Greek restaurant owned by two brothers. I've been going there occasionally since they opened in the early 80's, and am treated like a relation (non-Greek; but, still), which makes it easy to get a table. The food is great; it's one of a handful of places in The City where you can get Retsina and a dog bowl full of Spanakopita.

It'll be a good time. And moment to moment, that's the best we can expect. I can live with that.

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As We Speak

Annular Eclipse Of The Sun

...is happening, right now. I wasn't aware that it was even happening -- was just settling in to eat a Dog Bowl of Couscous and Garbanzo Beans, and catch up on Season 4 of The Wire, when I noticed an odd cast to the sunlight outside; a phone call from a friend about something completely unconnected to the periodic passages of Sun and Moon clued me in ("Why don't you know about this?").

Eclipses occur every 177 days, 4 hours, observable from somewhere on the Earth, and are all predicted by the slow gravitational-orbital dance of our M-Class star, Sol, and our Moon. Today's free light show has a specific name, too: SE2012May20A, and you can find out whether you missed anything, here. For this eclipse, the greatest region of Totality occurs in a band which runs just north of the San Francisco Bay area.

Years ago, I, uh, ingested psychoactive chemicals (all part of the Yout Scene in those times long ago) and climbed a small mountain in order to be the highest thing in three counties, and watch the sun go down. I have the scars on my corneas to prove it. I won't be reenacting that little slice of stupidity today.

Now, if we were in Darkest Kinjubistan, a hundred years ago, we could fool the natives into believing we were Gods by using the Eclipse as a sign of our power. Or, so Hollywood would have us believe.

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Dog Stuff Dog

Sinful Wages

I, uh, have a life with a job in it. And on occasion I had damn well better pay attention to that fact because I don't do well as a certain kind of statistic. Just sayin'.

So for a brief time, I'll be focused on other things. It doesn't mean that I don't love you all as only a Dog can -- unreservedly, with slobbering and a certain level of low-key Would You Just Let Me Out The Door, Already whining -- but I gotta do That Dog Stuff.

Back soon.

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Gone Where The Wild Things Are

Maurice Sendak, 1928 - 2012

Maurice Sendak passed away at age 83; another Mensch leaves us.

And as I've pointed out, we live in a world with a limited supply of Mensches.

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Austerity Non

Socialist Hollande Wins French Presidency

For only the second time in the history of France's Fifth Republic, a Socialist Party candidate, François Hollande, has won that nation's presidential vote.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-Right President of France, is out -- and along with him the most serious ally of Die Eisen Kanzellerin Angela Merkel's insistence on linking the salvation of the European Union with fiscal Austerity.

Sarkozy is the first major European New Austerian to be defenestrated by his country's electorate over the failure of France's economy -- and he may not be the last. Ironic, when you consider that Sarkozy and Merkel had helped to effectively force 'regime change' in Greece, Spain, (England could possibly be counted, too) Portugal, and Italy.

The New York Times reported that Austerity received additional blows in Greek and German elections as well:

Greek voters sent their own message against austerity. They handed the two main parties, both of which had pledged to follow harsh international bailout terms, significant losses as they streamed to parties on the far left and far right that have opposed budget cuts. In the process, voters cast into question the ability of any party to form a government soon, let alone continue with the austerity program.

...The French and Greek elections were closely watched in European capitals and particularly in Berlin, where Ms. Merkel has led the drive to cure the euro zone debt and banking crisis with deep budget cuts and caps on future spending...

... Ms. Merkel herself was embroiled in electoral politics on Sunday, suffering setbacks in elections in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, where her party appeared to be losing its hold on the state Parliament. With another election coming May 13 in North Rhine-Westphalia, Ms. Merkel is not viewed as having much room domestically to compromise on the critical issues of inflation and debt limits.

What Goes Around, Comes Around.

The Big Guy Returns

Chairman Of The Board

The banner at the top shows a view towards the Bay this morning, as The Big Guy made his way carefully under the Golden Gate Bridge and began wading east through San Francisco Bay. As usual, most water traffic was halted until noon, but ferry service should resume shortly.

It's the 101st running of the Bay-To-Breakers here on May 20th, and Godzilla's participation has been a time-honored tradition since 1954.

As an avid jazz aficionado, Godzilla will be appearing at or near Yoshi's, beside the Oakland yacht harbor (there's a celebration of the music of Johnny Otis this evening), and is scheduled to address the graduating classes at UC Berkeley and Stanford while he's in the area. We're not sure how or where else he'll spend his time here, but he will be hard to miss.

The Big Guy is a UCLA graduate, and we understand Stanford has begged for mercy in advance of his appearance.

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Word

You Want To Know Why?

(Originally Posted October 29, 2011)

Via The Great Curmudgeon, very apt analysis -- and why don't we see more writing like this:

There has to be an underlying organizing principle for why they would bail out banksters, and fuck over homeowners, why they would subsidize big Pharma at the expense of their base voters. And I think I've finally gotten some of what's going on.

The president, and the Democrat's Senate leadership, reject movement liberalism. The ideology they follow is grounded in the impact of globalization on world capital and labor markets. They believe the US has to reduce labor costs to be 94 they’re the pros who have risen, through merit and diligence, to their positions.

This rings absolutely true in my own experience. The dominant theme within corporate structures has, for some time now, been about methodologies of organizing. I'm not talking about grunt-level organizing; the GANT charts and ITIL and ISO-9000 or Vann diagrams, RACIs and SIPOC... but a different trend altogether.

I'd argue, based on nothing but gut feelings and common sense, that we're entering a period where the dominant organizing principle of human culture is commerce for its own sake -- above nationalism, partisan politics or ideologies; even religious belief.

Business from a senior management or executive perspective has always been about creating structures to lead and motivate numbers of people to perform tasks which produce value. To them, this is beneficial, desirable, and (for them) the greatest high there is. They create an idea, champion it by negotiating support; build teams and processes; all to reach specific 'outcomes'.

Effectiveness as a manager is measured by how well and how quickly they can move from concept to execution, or go-live, or to market. This has been the case in business for generations.

However, technological development since the early 60's has allowed business to be conducted at light speed. It has opened up new industries (computing, software and and infrastructure, and new modes of commerce) and changes in how established business and markets are conducted.

Because the global, daily flow of money is the engine for corporate business and sovereign finances as well, some of the most profound changes have been in banking and finance. It doesn't mean just faster bank transfer times or quicker reconciliation of journal entries -- it's created entirely new, 'exotic' methods of investment (The past ten years have given us a taste of what that's like: How'd that work out for the world, by the way?).

Briefly put, I don't see the old trinity of business, government and finance as the main arbiters of human society any longer. Governments nearly everywhere have allowed globalization to develop to the point that multinationals now have organized political clout to counter policies by recalcitrant governments: The WTO. They have treaty and trade structures created for their benefit, such as NAFTA.

Consequently, national governments are superfluous to global corporate planning except as potential barriers to competition and acquisition, development, and profit. In this structure, human beings are an afterthought, except as consumers to be influenced by advertising, and 'resources' to be employed or dismissed according to the needs of the corporations.

Above all this is The Great Game of finance and the markets -- and not for individual shareholders and investors. The Great Game is for banking and investment houses, insurance companies, hedge fund and private portfolio managers; all of whom who deal with values in the billions -- and who provide financing for purely business corporations, who are first cousins: Banking and finance has been corporatized now, too.

Governments don't figure into their equations, either, except as something to influence with tiny infusions of campaign cash or free golf trips; paltry gifts for such massive return -- and that form of corruption has become institutionalized between government to a high degree. Politics is business, conducted by other means.

Human beings don't figure into the equations of finance managers, either. Like corporate business managers fascinated with business organization, financiers are lost inside a house of numbers.

Both corporate types believe in abstraction as the key to a terrible illusion controlling the world -- not some bizarre conspiracy theory, but the desire to believe in an illusion of control through labeling and definitions; through what they believe to be true about systems and people -- who exist, ultimately, to be 'motivated' and controlled to provide outcomes measured by other abstractions, like profit and return on investment.

The fundamental difference between corporate managers and, say, the #OccupyWallStreet protestors, isn't about competing systems of organization or goals, or even values. It's a difference between levels of consciousness, about how one perceives the world and approaches the mystery of what all this stuff is.

The corporate mind literally cannot conceive of, or understand, a mindset that believes in ideals which are allegedly the foundations of the human spirit. The concepts enshrined in the Constitution find lip service with corporations who want to market themselves in America.

In business, everything is negotiable, and so there are no firm principles or ideas -- except loyalty to the Brand and a willingness to execute the plans created by your senior leaders.

They might claim to understand how collective action works -- but where corporate organization has consensus-building, it's performed within a hierarchical, top-down structures, which rely on paradigms of direction coming from an acknowledged leader, success/fail or punishment/reward, instead of reaching shared goals through cooperation without penalties or blame.

It really is a collision of worlds: The value and belief structure of the corporate manager and financier, of many business school professors, do not perceive reality in the same terms as the rest of us. We all want to make sense of the world we inhabit -- but not all of us would agree that to build organizations where competition and profit are the highest expression of the human spirit, or what human culture should strive for, now, in the 21st century.

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's A Fair Cop

No One Could Have Foreseen

Little Rupert, Allegedly Off To Club Baby Seals (Photo: AP; Alteration, Mongo)

Apparently, A British Parliamentary Commission has concluded (in a 6-4 vote split between a pack of inbred Tory Toffs and Honest Labor) that Little Rupert Murdoch is an Oligarch who wanted more power and money and injections with 'extract of monkey glands'; that his son, Jimmy The Fish, in a desperate bid to obtain his father's love (and succeed him as Big Leader of News Corp, and inherit the lion's share of Daddy's estate), tried to be as ruthless and Schlau as his Ol' Digger Daddy and failed; and that Rupert's business model would have put a smile on the face of the charred corpse of Little Joey Goebbels, Rupert's role model.

Alan Cowell And John F. Burns / New York Times / LONDON — "In a damning report after months of investigation into the hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, a British parliamentary panel concluded on Tuesday that Mr. Murdoch was “not a fit person” to run a huge international company."

On the basis of the facts and evidence before the committee, we conclude that, if at all relevant times Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking, he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications...

This culture, we consider, permeated from the top throughout the organization and speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International...

We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.

The NYT noted, "In a statement from its New York headquarters, News Corporation said it was 'carefully reviewing the select committee’s report and will respond shortly' ", possibly by invading Poland, or giving Little Glenn Beck his job back -- because giving the world more lies and manipulation is a business model that has worked so well for Little Rupert. Until now, maybe.

Think of it this way: Little Rupert Murdoch is an essentially stupid man, who has pumped nothing but sewage into the eyes and ears of people around the world simply to make a profit -- in that, he's no different than a pimp who puts girls on the street he knows are HIV-positive because there's money in it for him.

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The Pope Smokes Rope

The Persistent Sound Of Memory

After the advent of Stereophonic sound for 33 1/3 LP recordings, 'Quadrophonic' sound, albums engineered for four-track playback, appeared in the early 1970's. They were a relatively short-lived phenomenon, and not that many Quadrophonic records were available relative to all the two-channel Stereo albums being marketed (It was that decade's version of Beta and VHS).

I bought Sonic Seasons, the electronic music of (then) Walter Carlos; "The Engulfed Cathedral", Isao Tomita's interpretation of Debussy piano works; and several in the Environments - A Totally New Concept In Sound series.

They were essentially field recordings -- several technicians with multiple microphones and (then studio- or motion-picture sound quality) reel-to-reel tape recorders simply went to a location, and let the tapes roll. The concept was originally created by Syntonic Research, with albums released through Atlantic Records. Syntonic / Atlantic eventually released eleven different environmental recordings, in two-channel and Quad stereo versions.

I liked the concept of putting on 'ordinary' sounds as background White Noise (Also, getting toasted while listening to them was pleasant). I bought Disc 1 ('The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore' and 'Optimum Aviary'); Disc 5 ('The Psychologically Ultimate Thunderstorm' and 'Gentle Rain In A Pine Forest'), and Disc 3 -- "Dawn In New Hope, Pennsylvania", and "Be-In In Central Park", described by a reviewer as

The sounds of a spontaneous gathering in Central Park, April 6, 1969 with strolling musicians, dancers, anti-war protesters, and fragments of conversations. This recording presents the unmistakable ambiance of a place and time in culture now gone. Though many of the Environments recordings have been imitated, this one stands alone as a totally unique recording.

The Be-In was held in what is now Strawberry Fields in New York's Central Park, on Easter weekend, April 6, 1969.

On that day, the number-one ASCAP hit song in America was Let The Sunshine In, performed by the Fifth Dimension from the musical, "Hair". The Grateful Dead and 'AUM' were playing that night at the Avalon Ballroom on Van Ness in San Francisco. British explorer Wally Herbert reached the North Pole on foot that day, having started to walk across the entire frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean -- 3,720 miles -- sixteen months before.

And in New York City's Central Park, the roving sound engineers of Syntronics Research, Inc. eventually picked up the sounds of a pro-marijuana rally as part of the Be-In. One of the performers was David Peel, a 'personality' on the Lower East Side, who urged the unseen crowd to chant, "I Like Mar-i-juan-a!", and to smoke dope. He was a fixture in the Hippie, and later the more political Yippie, counterculture scenes, and was friendly with John Lennon after his move to New York (so much so that the FBI once mistakenly distributed a picture of Peel, assuming that he was Lennon). Peel was also well-known at the time for a (non-Quadrophonic, one would assume) album entitled The Pope Smokes Dope.

David Peel: Singing “until the day I drop dead and go to rock ’n’ roll heaven.”

So it was with a small amount of surprise that I came across this article in the New York Times: Peel, aged 68, still kicking out the jams as a Character in The Big Apple. The photo above is exactly the Peel I remembered hearing, and hearing about.

Peel is a part of the cultural soundscape of my past. I admit that I haven't thought about him in over thirty years; but remembering the album briefly touched my memories of "a place and time in culture now gone" -- and to honor all of that, more than any other reason, is what moved me to put this up.

I do not, of course, know whether the Pope smokes dope or not. But it's an alliterative turn of phrase, que no?

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I Got Nothin' Sunday

The Usual, And A Small Furry Puppy

A Sampler of stories appearing on the Intertubes this fine morning:

• Lehman's Top 50 employees Paid nearly $700M Just Before It Collapsed

  Walter Hamilton, Andrew Tangel and Stuart Pfeifer, Los Angeles Times Exclusive: Less than a year before the 2008 collapse of Lehman Bros. plunged the global economy into a terrifying free fall, the Wall Street firm awarded nearly $700 million to 50 of its highest-paid employees, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
  
  ..."The numbers are shocking but consistent with the fact that in some ways Wall Street has been run as a casino for extracting money from the real economy and using it to pay extraordinary high levels of compensation — one might say obscenely high — to a small number of people," said Lisa Donner, executive director of the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform.

• Spain In "Crisis Of Huge Proportions" After S&P Downgrade

  (REUTERS) - Spain's sickly economy faces a "crisis of huge proportions", a minister said on Friday, as unemployment hit its highest level in almost two decades and Standard and Poor's downgraded the government's debt by two notches.
  
  Unemployment shot up to 24 percent in the first quarter, one of the worst jobless figures in the developed world. Retail sales slumped for the twenty-first consecutive month as a recession cuts into consumer spending.
  
  "The figures are terrible for everyone and terrible for the government ... Spain is in a crisis of huge proportions," Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said in a radio interview.

• Data Harvesting At Google Not A Rogue Act

  David Streitfeld, New York Times: SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.
  
  ...The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world...
  
  ...Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material.
  
  A Google spokeswoman said Saturday that the company had much stricter privacy controls than it used to, in part because of the Street View controversy. She expressed the hope that with the release of the full report, “we can now put this matter behind us.”

• White House Correspondent's Dinner 'Shameful Display Of Whoredom'

  (Hamilton Nolan, Gawker:) ...Do you know who knows that the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner is a shameful display of whoredom that makes the "average American" ... continue to disregard the findings of any ostensibly neutral journalistic outlet in favor of their own ideology of choice, because they have a fully solidified belief that the "mainstream media" is little more than a bunch of ball-lapping lapdogs to whoever's in power?
  
  Everyone. Everyone knows this. Even the members of the media who attend the White House Whores Despondence Dinner know this, deep down, whether they admit it openly or lie defensively ... and no, it does not matter, because they are professionals who would never be compromised by the fact that they just spent their favorite evening of the year joshing playfully with the powerful officials they are supposed to be afflicting and reveling in their close proximity to the celebrities that they wish they were.

• 4-Week-Old Puppy Rescued After Being Stuck In Drain Pipe

  (Daily Mail UK) Wrapped up in a towel, this four-week-old puppy was saved after more than 12 hours stuck underground in a drain pipe. Rescue workers had to dig a 16-foot hole in the ground to free the puppy, which became trapped in Detroit, Michigan.
  
  

  

  Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo At Conclusion Of Blog Rant (Photo: Daily Mail)
  
  The owner said that the Puggle-Daschund mix became stuck after crawling into the basement drain pipe and venturing more than 15 [feet]...When the puppy had not emerged from the pipe the next morning, the worried owner called in the Michigan Humane Society, plumbers and a local excavation company.
  
  A rescue party used their hands, shovels and a digger to free the little dog.

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