Sunday, March 07, 2004
Two things:
1. Stanford LOST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Like others, I don't know what to do. I'm in shock. Now, all you doubters must deal with the following: St Joe's IS number one. The only question I have as follows: What 16 seed do we get to destroy in the NCAAs?
2. I'd like someone to tell me what color Suze Orman is (you know, that personal finance guru on MSNBC). The other night, I saw her on Tavis Smiley's show and it looked to me like she has tanned herself purple. Is it make-up? Is it tanning gone awry? I just want to know why she isn't human colored. If there's a good reason, I'll feel bad, but if there isn't, how can you take money advice from a purple lady? Just curious....
1. Stanford LOST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Like others, I don't know what to do. I'm in shock. Now, all you doubters must deal with the following: St Joe's IS number one. The only question I have as follows: What 16 seed do we get to destroy in the NCAAs?
2. I'd like someone to tell me what color Suze Orman is (you know, that personal finance guru on MSNBC). The other night, I saw her on Tavis Smiley's show and it looked to me like she has tanned herself purple. Is it make-up? Is it tanning gone awry? I just want to know why she isn't human colored. If there's a good reason, I'll feel bad, but if there isn't, how can you take money advice from a purple lady? Just curious....
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
St. Joseph's (27-0, 16-0 A-10 East) became the first team to finish the regular season unblemished since Nevada Las-Vegas in 1991. Top-ranked Stanford can join the Hawks with victories this weekend at Washington State and Washington.
Monday, March 01, 2004
Haïti go boom.
Again.
And yet AGAIN US troops roam the streets of Port-au-Prince. Just like February 29 that shows up every once in a while, US Army fatigues walk the streets of the Haitian capital.
Haïti represents yet another staggering success in US foriegn policy. You'd think that instead of spending kabillions of dollars deploying troops in Haïti everytime the country goes kablouie, we'd come up with something else. But oh yeah, let's be honest, Haïti is of no economic interest to the US unless its refugees threaten Florida, Haïti is of no strategic importance unless its refugees threaten to land in Florida, we just don't care and it seems to be easier to send in the Army periodically to "keep the peace".
In the theme of taking a moment to review, let's look at some of the USA's great jobs at "nation building" aka places we've gotten involved in in one way or another. And there are several catagories here-
Post WWII.
Western Europe and Japan. Nice job. Rebuilt, affluent allies who (generally) agree with us.
South Korea. Another good job. Kept the nasty commies out. Allowed modern South Koreans to be modern and South Korean. This also represents the last time our involvement was an unmitigated success. If you don't like depressing stories, stop reading, it don't get better.
Cold War
This mainly involved propping up petty despots, nasty little men with nasty little armies that did nasty things to their economies.
Afghanistan. Soviets go, we go. We know how that one played out.
Cambodia. Two words - killing fields. Another nice job on our part. We destabilize Cambodia with the largest bombing campaign since WWII. We bombed the CRAP out of a country we weren't at war with and that our own legislature said we shouldn't involved in Cambodia. Cambodia goes to (Pol) Pot and millions die. Cambodia is still a hopeless basket case while the rest of East Asia - even Vietnam - has made at least some strides toward prosperity. Class A disgrace.
Zaïre. We should stay out of nations with tremas in their names. During the Cold War, we supported Mobutu Sese Seko (né Joseph Desiré Mobuto) as a "bulwark" against Internation Socialism. Mostly against Angola were the Cubans and the Soviets were supporting their own private nasties. If by "foil" to socialism, we meant "outright crook" then yeah, he was that. He stole billions. He allowed the country to decay. By supressing ethnicity and tribal ties, all he did was make them worse by ignoring them instead of integrating and co-opting them. So, he's eventually replaced by another thug and, commence au festival. Genocide, plague, death, chaos and a decade of unceasing civil war. Another GREAT job.
Ok, let's move onto Latin America. In the past century or so, we have invaded:
Panama (more than once).
Guatemala (more than once).
Cuba (more times that I can count).
Grenada (for some reason....)
Haïti
Honduras
Yeah, we've done good there. We're back in Haïti. All of those other countries are basket cases and Cuba is actually still under the thumb of Communism. Nice.
Post-Cold War.Bosnia. Ok, stopped the genocide. That was good. But status quo seems to be the watchword in Bosnia these days, a don't rock the boat mentality that's not good in the long run. Isn't the time to rock that mine-laden boat NOW when NATO is on the ground to take care of any problems? We started to fix this one, can we finish it?
Kosovo. Ok, stopped the genocide. That was good. Got the Kosovars back home. That was good. Now we're playing keep away. Serbs over there, NATO troops in between, Kosovar Albanians over there. Albanians don't want to be part of Serbia anymore. Serbs won't let go of Kosovo. Hm. Problem. Again, isn't the time to fix this NOW while NATO is on the ground to handle all the fallout?
Where is the resolve that rebuilt Europe? Where is the will that saved Japan? Isn't it in our national interest to rebuild these countries? To create markets for our goods? To make new allies (because as long as "President" Bush is around, we need new ones as a lot of the old ones are pissed at us...) strikes me as a noble goal. More than that, we have the power to stop future nastiness. We've already committed the force and resource to Iraq, Afghanistan and Haïti. Why don't we fix these countries instead of restore a decaying status quo? Our list of failures is long enough.
Again.
And yet AGAIN US troops roam the streets of Port-au-Prince. Just like February 29 that shows up every once in a while, US Army fatigues walk the streets of the Haitian capital.
Haïti represents yet another staggering success in US foriegn policy. You'd think that instead of spending kabillions of dollars deploying troops in Haïti everytime the country goes kablouie, we'd come up with something else. But oh yeah, let's be honest, Haïti is of no economic interest to the US unless its refugees threaten Florida, Haïti is of no strategic importance unless its refugees threaten to land in Florida, we just don't care and it seems to be easier to send in the Army periodically to "keep the peace".
In the theme of taking a moment to review, let's look at some of the USA's great jobs at "nation building" aka places we've gotten involved in in one way or another. And there are several catagories here-
Post WWII.
Western Europe and Japan. Nice job. Rebuilt, affluent allies who (generally) agree with us.
South Korea. Another good job. Kept the nasty commies out. Allowed modern South Koreans to be modern and South Korean. This also represents the last time our involvement was an unmitigated success. If you don't like depressing stories, stop reading, it don't get better.
Cold War
This mainly involved propping up petty despots, nasty little men with nasty little armies that did nasty things to their economies.
Afghanistan. Soviets go, we go. We know how that one played out.
Cambodia. Two words - killing fields. Another nice job on our part. We destabilize Cambodia with the largest bombing campaign since WWII. We bombed the CRAP out of a country we weren't at war with and that our own legislature said we shouldn't involved in Cambodia. Cambodia goes to (Pol) Pot and millions die. Cambodia is still a hopeless basket case while the rest of East Asia - even Vietnam - has made at least some strides toward prosperity. Class A disgrace.
Zaïre. We should stay out of nations with tremas in their names. During the Cold War, we supported Mobutu Sese Seko (né Joseph Desiré Mobuto) as a "bulwark" against Internation Socialism. Mostly against Angola were the Cubans and the Soviets were supporting their own private nasties. If by "foil" to socialism, we meant "outright crook" then yeah, he was that. He stole billions. He allowed the country to decay. By supressing ethnicity and tribal ties, all he did was make them worse by ignoring them instead of integrating and co-opting them. So, he's eventually replaced by another thug and, commence au festival. Genocide, plague, death, chaos and a decade of unceasing civil war. Another GREAT job.
Ok, let's move onto Latin America. In the past century or so, we have invaded:
Panama (more than once).
Guatemala (more than once).
Cuba (more times that I can count).
Grenada (for some reason....)
Haïti
Honduras
Yeah, we've done good there. We're back in Haïti. All of those other countries are basket cases and Cuba is actually still under the thumb of Communism. Nice.
Post-Cold War.Bosnia. Ok, stopped the genocide. That was good. But status quo seems to be the watchword in Bosnia these days, a don't rock the boat mentality that's not good in the long run. Isn't the time to rock that mine-laden boat NOW when NATO is on the ground to take care of any problems? We started to fix this one, can we finish it?
Kosovo. Ok, stopped the genocide. That was good. Got the Kosovars back home. That was good. Now we're playing keep away. Serbs over there, NATO troops in between, Kosovar Albanians over there. Albanians don't want to be part of Serbia anymore. Serbs won't let go of Kosovo. Hm. Problem. Again, isn't the time to fix this NOW while NATO is on the ground to handle all the fallout?
Where is the resolve that rebuilt Europe? Where is the will that saved Japan? Isn't it in our national interest to rebuild these countries? To create markets for our goods? To make new allies (because as long as "President" Bush is around, we need new ones as a lot of the old ones are pissed at us...) strikes me as a noble goal. More than that, we have the power to stop future nastiness. We've already committed the force and resource to Iraq, Afghanistan and Haïti. Why don't we fix these countries instead of restore a decaying status quo? Our list of failures is long enough.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
And now a moment of levity.
Be sure to read the review of "The Core".
It's HYSTERICAL!
Oh, and link on the right to see pics of my fishies.
Be sure to read the review of "The Core".
It's HYSTERICAL!
Oh, and link on the right to see pics of my fishies.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Subway Nation.
There's an article in this week's Newsweek about the job "situation". Normal stuff. Stat heavy. Things like 2.2 job openings for every job seeker, the (rather spectacular) loss of jobs since "the President" was "elected", the depressing number of manufacturing that vaporized, etc.
Then there was a part of the article that describes a couple concludes that they should open a Subway franchise because, as they said, it's something people will always need. So, they give up their carreers and open a sandwich shop. Great. Good for them.
So, rather than using their education and their experience to start a business, to contribute to a company's growth, and to pass on their knowledge to the next generation of American workers, they're going to be creating interesting variations in the vibrant field of condiment combination and finding intersting ways to slice lettuce.
And then, when others have lost their carreers, they can teach the next generation about that special sauce of sandwich success.
I don't mean to belittle those who do work at Subway and those business owners who have shrewdly managed their franchises. But the tone and context of these individuals was that of defeat, like being a Venetian resigned that your city will no longer be a maritime powerhouse ruling most of the Adriatic, that your traditions and your heritage are no longer anything but fodder for the cruise ship set. So we Venetians may as well get used to selling copies of St. Mark's made out of Parmesan. We citizens of the Republic should get over talking business and finance and start talking about lunch during our lunches.
This could be another passing cloud of despair temporarily obscuring our bright future. Or not. In either case, this eclipse of the American economic sun gives us an oppertunity. An eclipse is the only chance that we, the earthbound, have to see the solar corona, to study an otherwise invisible phenomenon. While our economy radiates wealth, investment and growth, while we bask in the light of success, we can't see the entirety of our economy's output. Covered by the shadows of recession, perhaps we can examine the normally unseen.
It seems that we have a problem that shouldn't be a problem, namely we've been too successful. America and her economic might has, since the devastation of the Second World War, pretty much created single handedly the modern global economy. I don't mean to be discredit the staggering accomplishments of the rest of the planet, but no Marshall plan means that European and Japanese economies don't recover as quickly or maybe never to the point they're at. The USA doesn't successfully engage in the Cold War and perhaps the fall of the Iron Curtian takes longer further degrading already shambled infrastructures. Without our tech revolution, what would there be to outsource to India? And LOOK AT THE TRADE SURPLUSES! They build on us buying.
So, we invest in their economies which in turn take off allowing them to compete and undercut American markets. That makes our businesses and firms look for ways to improve their bottom lines by cutting costs - like labor. Then we make do with less. We work more.
So, it boils down to two things: Americans are expensive and Americans have become too greedy. We're expensive because we've allowed our avarice to get the better of us and our avarice grows because we're expensive.
Instead of remaking our fields and our carreers in the wake of a changing marketplace, we give up and open a Subway. Yes, we don't make televisions in the USA anymore. We make everything people watch on the televisions and on their DVD players (which we don't make, either).
This change shouldn't be a call to innovate steak sandwiches. This should be a time to look at the corona around our economy. Perhaps we don't have the tech jobs anymore. Move on. We have before and if we don't in the face of this eclipse, we risk permanent darkness.
Sandwich anyone?
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Another reason France is strange and the US media isn't very good.
A summary of the article if you don't feel like reading it or the NYTimes pulls the link:
"Yes, it is possible to marry the dearly departed in France, thanks to a law that turns the vow "till death do us part" on its head."
Got that? In France, you can marry a dead person. The article goes on to explain that the law permitting this strange permitting such nuptials dates to 1959 and was put on the books because of a disaster - a dam collapse that killed hundreds in the city of Fréjus. Those who were already engaged were allowed to procure marriage licenses so that they could be registered as widow(er)s, so that if there were kids conceived or existing they could be heirs, and so that people could salvage something from the catastrophe. Nice idea.
And it stuck around. This woman's fiancé was killed in a traffic accident, so she had the wedding - a real wedding, just sans groom (an orange chair stood in, if you're curious). This is a bit odd, but what's truly odd is the process required to get this rather exterme marriage license. This is also an example of the NYTimes' rather diappointing coverage. Let's quote, shall we?
"Anyone wishing to marry a dead person must send a request to the president, who then forwards it to the justice minister, who sends it to the prosecutor in whose jurisdiction the surviving person lives.
"If the prosecutor determines that the couple planned to marry before the death and if the parents of the deceased approve, the prosecutor sends a recommendation back up the line. The president, if so moved, eventually signs a decree allowing the marriage."
Got that? And yes, by "president" they mean Jacques Chirac, le Président de la République Française, chief executive of the world's fifth largest economy, commander in cheif of one of the world's few nuclear arsenals, and, I would imagine a very busy individual. So, to add to all of M Chirac's state duties, we may now add marriage counsellor.
President Chirac lives in the Elysée Palace, but his type of direct appeal to the chief executive smacks of another time and another palace, one built by Loius XIV called Versailles. Under the Sun King, everyday Frenchmen could sorta wander into the palace, find the king and ask if he could help them with their taxes or get a bridge rebuilt or arrange a pardon for their son who went AWOL. They would tell the king their problems and the king would respond - regardless of the problem - je verrai (I'll see).
This is the same thing. France was and is obsessed with that kind of direct appeal to authority, not just authority but the highest authority, monarchial, kingly, absolute authority. If this sort of thing were to happen in the US, it would be handled by a local official and would probably get no higher than a mayor. But France is a completely centralized state. Everything goes through the center, through Paris. This kind of process indicates how different the French view of government is from the American one. This is the true divide between France and the US. Not the divide of foriegn policy or at the UN, but a real difference of how power is dispensed, of how people relate not only to the state but to one another.
And this is where the NYTimes failed in this story. Instead of using this event as a microcosm, as an example, it harps on how wierd this is, on the "human interest" side. Wasted print and wasted oppertunity. If we want to understand, we should try not only to comprehend our similarity but to truly understand the differences.
A summary of the article if you don't feel like reading it or the NYTimes pulls the link:
"Yes, it is possible to marry the dearly departed in France, thanks to a law that turns the vow "till death do us part" on its head."
Got that? In France, you can marry a dead person. The article goes on to explain that the law permitting this strange permitting such nuptials dates to 1959 and was put on the books because of a disaster - a dam collapse that killed hundreds in the city of Fréjus. Those who were already engaged were allowed to procure marriage licenses so that they could be registered as widow(er)s, so that if there were kids conceived or existing they could be heirs, and so that people could salvage something from the catastrophe. Nice idea.
And it stuck around. This woman's fiancé was killed in a traffic accident, so she had the wedding - a real wedding, just sans groom (an orange chair stood in, if you're curious). This is a bit odd, but what's truly odd is the process required to get this rather exterme marriage license. This is also an example of the NYTimes' rather diappointing coverage. Let's quote, shall we?
"Anyone wishing to marry a dead person must send a request to the president, who then forwards it to the justice minister, who sends it to the prosecutor in whose jurisdiction the surviving person lives.
"If the prosecutor determines that the couple planned to marry before the death and if the parents of the deceased approve, the prosecutor sends a recommendation back up the line. The president, if so moved, eventually signs a decree allowing the marriage."
Got that? And yes, by "president" they mean Jacques Chirac, le Président de la République Française, chief executive of the world's fifth largest economy, commander in cheif of one of the world's few nuclear arsenals, and, I would imagine a very busy individual. So, to add to all of M Chirac's state duties, we may now add marriage counsellor.
President Chirac lives in the Elysée Palace, but his type of direct appeal to the chief executive smacks of another time and another palace, one built by Loius XIV called Versailles. Under the Sun King, everyday Frenchmen could sorta wander into the palace, find the king and ask if he could help them with their taxes or get a bridge rebuilt or arrange a pardon for their son who went AWOL. They would tell the king their problems and the king would respond - regardless of the problem - je verrai (I'll see).
This is the same thing. France was and is obsessed with that kind of direct appeal to authority, not just authority but the highest authority, monarchial, kingly, absolute authority. If this sort of thing were to happen in the US, it would be handled by a local official and would probably get no higher than a mayor. But France is a completely centralized state. Everything goes through the center, through Paris. This kind of process indicates how different the French view of government is from the American one. This is the true divide between France and the US. Not the divide of foriegn policy or at the UN, but a real difference of how power is dispensed, of how people relate not only to the state but to one another.
And this is where the NYTimes failed in this story. Instead of using this event as a microcosm, as an example, it harps on how wierd this is, on the "human interest" side. Wasted print and wasted oppertunity. If we want to understand, we should try not only to comprehend our similarity but to truly understand the differences.
